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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/9784-8.txt b/9784-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2b09a18 --- /dev/null +++ b/9784-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,8903 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thomas Carlyle, by John Nichol + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Thomas Carlyle + +Author: John Nichol + +Posting Date: November 15, 2011 [EBook #9784] +Release Date: January, 2006 +First Posted: October 15, 2003 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS CARLYLE *** + + + + +Produced by Jayam Subramanian, Robert Connal, and PG +Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thomas Carlyle, by John Nichol + +Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the +copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing +this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. + +This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project +Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a + + + + + + +THOMAS CARLYLE + +BY + +JOHN NICHOL, LL. D, M.A., BALLIOL, OXON + + +1904 + + + +PREFATORY NOTE + +The following record of the leading events of Carlyle's life and attempt +to estimate his genius rely on frequently renewed study of his work, on +slight personal impressions--"vidi tantum"--and on information supplied +by previous narrators. Of these the great author's chosen literary +legatee is the most eminent and, in the main, the most reliable. Every +critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligations to Mr. Froude as +every critic of Byron to Moore or of Scott to Lockhart. The works of +these masters in biography remain the ample storehouses from which every +student will continue to draw. Each has, in a sense, made his subject his +own, and each has been similarly arraigned. + +I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the +persistent, often virulent, attacks directed against a loyal friend, +betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith and the defective reticence that +often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr. +Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on _Sir Walter Scott_ +requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with +explicit authority; that the restrictions under which he was at first +entrusted with the MSS. of the _Reminiscences_ and the _Letters and +Memorials_ (annotated by Carlyle himself, as if for publication) were +withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a +practical injunction to communicate the whole. The worst that can be said +is that, in the last years of Carlyle's career, his own judgment as to +what should be made public of the details of his domestic life may have +been somewhat obscured; but, if so, it was a weakness easily hidden from +a devotee. + +My acknowledgments are due to several of the Press comments which +appeared shortly after Carlyle's death, more especially that of the _St. +James's Gazette_, giving the most philosophical brief summary of his +religious views which I have seen; and to the kindness of Dr. Eugene +Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in supplying me with valuable +hints on matters relating to German History and Literature. I have also +to thank the Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_ for permitting me to +reproduce the substance of my article in its columns of February 1881. +That article was largely based on a contribution on the same subject, in +1859, to Mackenzie's _Imperial Dictionary of Biography_. + +I may add that in the distribution of material over the comparatively +short space at my command, I have endeavoured to give prominence to facts +less generally known, and passed over slightly the details of events +previously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs. Carlyle and the +incidents of her death. To her inner history I have only referred in so +far as it had a direct bearing on her husband's life. As regards the +itinerary of Carlyle's foreign journeys, it has seemed to me that it +might be of interest to those travelling in Germany to have a short +record of the places where the author sought his "studies" for his +greatest work. + + + +CONTENTS + +CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY + +CHAPTER II 1795-1826 ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH + +CHAPTER III 1826-1834 CRAIGENPUTTOCK (from Marriage to London) + +CHAPTER IV 1834-1842 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Mrs. Welsh) + +CHAPTER V 1842-1853 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Carlyle's Mother) + +CHAPTER VI 1853-1866 THE MINOTAUR--(To death of Mrs. Carlyle) + +CHAPTER VII 1866-1881 DECADENCE + +CHAPTER VIII CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN + +CHAPTER IX CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY + +CHAPTER X ETHICS--PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE + +APPENDIX ON CARLYLE'S RELIGION + +INDEX + + + + +THOMAS CARLYLE + + + + +CHAPTER I + +INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY + +Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all +in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the +spirit of four successive generations. They are leading links in an +intellectual chain. + +DAVID HUME (1711-1776) remains the most salient type in our island of the +scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary, +which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some +points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid +temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking +Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau. + +ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796), last of great lyrists inspired by a local +genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people, +spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge +between two eras. Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was +also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the +century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master +musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good +and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or +paralysing caution. + +WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), broadest and most generous, if not loftiest of +the group--"no sounder piece of British manhood," says Carlyle himself +in his inadequate review, "was put together in that century"--the great +revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with a magic +glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was also, like Burns, the +humorist of contemporary life. Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the +manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours, +the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von +Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany. + +THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from +the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening +to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams, +some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill +twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The +reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are +everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to +extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his +thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range. + +Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain +atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant +image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the +relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite +his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle +was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of +the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with +the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could +never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, +dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. +He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, +self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost +mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one +exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with +reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself, +violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation to the great poet, +in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent +inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord +Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other +was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than +Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely +different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge +Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the +other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society. +Both had hot hearts, big brains, and an exhaustless store of winged +and fiery words; both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made +constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of Optimism; +Carlylism is the prose rather than "the male of Byronism." The contrasts +are no less obvious: the author of _Sartor Resartus_, however vaguely, +defended the System of the Universe; the author of _Cain_, with an +audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it. +In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there +is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere," +in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous +incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering +belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the +citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient +name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and, +only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained it. His +career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth, +from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown. +Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence": at his death, in a +sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deafening was the +Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every original thinker is +accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells as it runs till it ends +in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from +America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching came home to +their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland, where, for good or ill, +passions are in extremes, he was long howled down, lampooned, preached +at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a +sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion; and was, often +by the very men who had tried and condemned him for blasphemy, as +senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the +builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the +pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists +whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism. +In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate +successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers +of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass +by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder +and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village +churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets +his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so honoured. + +Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events he celebrates in +his earliest History. In its opening pages, we are made to listen to the +feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace," +where Louis XV. and the _ancien régime_ lay dying; later to the ticking +of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the +steeples that roused the singers of the _Marseillaise_ to march from +"their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last +bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian +characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a commander." +Already, over little more than the space of the author's life--for he was +a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the death of Burns, +Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four, Byron's by seven +years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse of the +"cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea. Two +whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms. +"Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old policies, +governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been +sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig, +Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was +seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory +and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires, +two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions, +revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During his life our sway in +the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Italian +without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Continent, while another +across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes +alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated +and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of the world's most +restless, if not its wisest, age. In the internal affairs of the leading +nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a +pantomime. The Art and Literature of those eighty-six years--stirred to +new thought and form at their commencement by the so-called Romantic +movement, more recently influenced by the Classic reaction, the +Pre-Raphaelite protest, the Aesthetic _mode,_--followed various, even +contradictory, standards. But, in one line of progress, there was no +shadow of turning. Over the road which Bacon laid roughly down and +Newton made safe for transit, Physical Science, during the whole period, +advanced without let and beyond the cavil of ignorance. If the dreams +of the _New Atlantis_ have not even in our days been wholly realised, +Science has been brought from heaven to earth, and the elements made +ministers of Prospero's wand. This apparent, and partially real, conquest +of matter has doubtless done much to "relieve our estate," to make life +in some directions run more smoothly, and to multiply resources to meet +the demands of rapidly-increasing multitudes: but it is in danger of +becoming a conquest of matter over us; for the agencies we have called +into almost fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's miscreated +goblin, to beat us down to the same level. Sanguine spirits who + + throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring, + With, at every mile run taster, O the wondrous, wondrous age, + +are apt to forget that the electric light can do nothing to dispel the +darkness of the mind; that there are strict limits to the power of +prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a +great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable, +accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He +swallows formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes +analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him +by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed +to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by +syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of +Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will--essential Calvinist +or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist, +practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is +consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of +the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was +among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the +link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an +expert in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously subserves +physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a +physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms +of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or +rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with +unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in +his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern +Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously +of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit +the battle-fields of Friedrich II.-- + +Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admiring.... +The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still +infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged flight through +immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of bright? You unfortunate, +you grin as an ape would at such a question: you do not know that unless +you can reach thither in some effectual most veritable sense, you are +lost, doomed to Hela's death-realm and the abyss where mere brutes are +buried. I do not want cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I want what +Novalis calls "God, Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift railways and +sacrifices to Hudson help me towards that? + +The ECONOMIC AND MECHANICAL SPIRIT of the age, faith in mere steel or +stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The others were INSINCERITY in +Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY +without Sense. In our time these two last powers have made such strides +as to threaten the Reign of Law. The Democrat without a ruler, who +protests that one man is by nature as good as another, according to +Carlyle is "shooting Niagara." In deference to the mandate of the +philanthropist the last shred of brutality, with much of decision, +has vanished from our code. Sentiment is in office and Mercy not only +tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When Sir Samuel Romilly began his +beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was at school, talkers of treason were +liable to be disembowelled before execution; now the crime of treason is +practically erased, and the free use of dynamite brings so-called reforms +"within the range of practical politics." Individualism was still a mark +of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi" +survived in Mirabeau's "never name to me that _bête_ of a word +'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador, +"I will break your empire like this vase"; in Nelson turning his blind +eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres +Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found +perhaps its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck. + +This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided +sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men +who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to +the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not +inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute +to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents +may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the +_Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :-- + +"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous +fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated, +formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful +and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy +of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen +Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress, +there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero +that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that +produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble +the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a +fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built _Sartor Resartus_ and the +Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the +earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern +thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally +accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are +denied the faculty of producing nations." + +_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary +of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied +assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that +Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted +Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism +extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three +volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of +revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an +assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly, +every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and +one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr. +Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful +and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results, +but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius, who has thrown Hoods of light on +the inter-relations of the organic world. But there are whole troops +of serfs, "addicti jururo in verba magistri," who, accepting, without +attempt or capacity to verify the conclusions of the master mind, think +to solve all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word +"Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's +divining rod, and you answer "Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart +and sick in head, I were referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to +Grimm's Law or to the Magnetic Belt. + +Let us grant that Cæsar was evolved from the currents in the air about +the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and +Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William +I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame +from the altar of the mediæval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to +masterdom in German woods, or later--not to heap up figures whose +memories still possess the world--that Columbus was a Genoan breeze, +Bacon a _réchauffé_ of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch +dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or Corsican +Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at all events, +were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied and +dominated. + +So much, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistence that great men +are creators as well as creatures of their age. Doubtless, as we advance +in history, direct personal influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In +an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education, +when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised +to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest +civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead +the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be +accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a +mere "matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence of the +matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain +that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become +civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more," +preludes, though over a long interval, the cynic comment of the second +"Locksley Hall" on the "increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier +date "Luria" had protested against the arrogance of mere majorities. + + A people is but the attempt of many + To rise to the completer life of one; + And those who live as models to the mass + Are singly of more value than they all. + +Carlyle set these notes to Tennyson and to Browning in his +_Hero-Worship_--a creed, though in thought, and more in action, older +than Buddha or than Achilles, which he first launched as a dogma on our +times, clenching it with the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau +and Napoleon, mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of +Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made remains marked on the minds of +the men of light who _lead_, and cannot be wholly effaced by the clamour +of the men of words who _orate_. If he leans unduly to the exaltation +of personal power, Carlyle is on the side of those whose defeat can be +beneficent only if it be slow. Further to account for his attitude, +we must refer to his life and to its surroundings, _i.e._ to the +circumstances amid which he was "evolved." + + + + +CHAPTER II + +ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH + +[1795-1826] + +In the introduction to one of his essays, Carlyle has warned us against +giving too much weight to genealogy: but all his biographies, from the +sketch of the Riquetti kindred to his full-length _Friedrich_, prefaced +by two volumes of ancestry, recognise, if they do not overrate, inherited +influences; and similarly his fragments of autobiography abound in +suggestive reference. His family portraits are to be accepted with the +deductions due to the family fever that was the earliest form of his +hero-worship. Carlyle, says the _Athenaeum_ critic before quoted, divides +contemporary mankind into the fools and the wise: the wise are the +Carlyles, the Welshes, the Aitkens, and Edward Irving; the fools all the +rest of unfortunate mortals: a Fuseli stroke of the critic rivalling any +of the author criticised; yet the comment has a grain of truth. + +[Footnote: Even the most adverse critics of Carlyle are often his +imitators, their hands taking a dye from what they work in.] + +The Carlyles are said to have come, from the English town somewhat +differently spelt, to Annandale, with David II.; and, according to a +legend which the great author did not disdain to accept, among them was a +certain Lord of Torthorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The +churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the graves of the +family, all with coats of arms--two griffins with adders' stings. More +definitely we find Thomas, the author's grandfather, settled in that +dullest of county villages as a carpenter. In 1745 he saw the rebel +Highlanders on their southward march: he was notable for his study of +_Anson's Voyages_ and of the _Arabian Nights_: "a fiery man, his stroke +as ready as his word; of the toughness and springiness of steel; an +honest but not an industrious man;" subsequently tenant of a small farm, +in which capacity he does not seem to have managed his affairs with +much effect; the family were subjected to severe privations, the mother +having, on occasion, to heat the meal into cakes by straw taken from the +sacks on which the children slept. In such an atmosphere there grew and +throve the five sons known as the five fighting masons--"a curious +sample of folks," said an old apprentice of one of them, "pithy, bitter +speaking bodies, and awfu' fighters." The second of the group, James, +born 1757, married--first, a full cousin, Janet Carlyle (the sole issue +of which marriage was John, who lived at Cockermouth); second, Margaret +Aitken, by whom he had four sons--THOMAS, 1795-1881; Alexander, +1797-1876; John (Dr. Carlyle, translator of Dante), 1801-1879; and James, +1805-1890; also five daughters, one of whom, Jane, became the wife of her +cousin James Aitken of Dumfries, and the mother of Mary, the niece who +tended her famous uncle so faithfully during the last years of his life. +Nowhere is Carlyle's loyalty to his race shown in a fairer light than in +the first of the papers published under the name of _Reminiscences_. +It differs from the others in being of an early date and free from all +offence. From this pathetic sketch, written when on a visit to London in +1832 he had sudden news of his father's death, we may, even in our brief +space, extract a few passages which throw light on the characters, _i.e._ +the points of contact and contrast of the writer and his theme:-- + +In several respects I consider my father as one of the most interesting +men I have known, ... of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of +any it has been my lot to converse with. None of you will ever forget +that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, +full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all +manner of potent words.... Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to +render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Emphatic I have +heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: his words +were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that +he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet in description, and +for the sake chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man of rigid, even +scrupulous veracity.... He was never visited with doubt. The old Theorem +of the Universe was sufficient for him ... he stood a true man, while +his son stands here on the verge of the new.... A virtue he had which +I should learn to imitate: he never spoke of what was disagreeable and +past. His was a healthy mind. He had the most open contempt for all +"clatter."... He was irascible, choleric, and we all dreaded his wrath, +but passion never mastered him.... Man's face he did not fear: God he +always feared. His reverence was, I think, considerably mixed with +fear--rather awe, as of unutterable depths of silence through which +flickered a trembling hope.... Let me learn of him. Let me write my books +as he built his houses, and walk as blamelessly through this shadow +world.... Though genuine and coherent, living and life-giving, he was +nevertheless but half developed. We had all to complain that we durst not +freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in: he had not the free +means to unbosom himself.... It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear +repelled us from him. To me it was especially so. Till late years I was +ever more or less awed and chilled by him. + +James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. The failings of +both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. They were at one in their +integrity, independence, fighting force at stress, and their command of +winged words; but the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a +broader spirit; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he was a +better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a grimmer Calvinist. +"Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, "is doing very well, and has given us no +more paraphrases." He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged, under +the narrowing influences of the Covenanting land; but he remained stable +and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built with his own hands. James +Carlyle hammered on at Ecclefechan, making in his best year £100, till, +after the first decade of the century, the family migrated to Mainhill, +a bleak farm two miles from Lockerbie, where he so throve by work and +thrift that he left on his death in 1832 about £1000. Strong, rough, and +eminently _straight,_ intolerant of contradiction and ready with words +like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the +Brontës on the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle of +Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological theory as strict as +her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her +favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her +heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a +fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late +in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they +talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she +was to the last proud of the genius which grew in large measure under the +unfailing sunshine of her anxious love. + +Book II. of _Sartor_ is an acknowledged fragment of autobiography, mainly +a record of the author's inner life, but with numerous references to +his environment. There is not much to identify the foster parents of +Teufelsdröckh, and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the +place of ancestry: Entepfuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, where the ducks +are paddling in the ditch that has to pass muster for a stream, to-day as +a century gone: the severe frugality which (as in the case of Wordsworth +and Carlyle himself) survived the need for it, is clearly recalled; also +the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, "In an orderly house, +where the litter of children's sports is hateful, your training is rather +to bear than to do. I was forbid much, wishes in any measure bold I had +to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of obedience inflexibly held me +down. It was not a joyful life, yet ... a wholesome one." The following +oft-quoted passage is characteristic of his early love of nature and the +humorous touches by which he was wont to relieve his fits of sentiment:-- + +On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread crumb boiled +in milk) and eat it out of doors. On the coping of the wall, which I +could reach by climbing, my porringer was placed: there many a sunset +have I, looking at the distant mountains, consumed, not without relish, +my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of world's +expectation as day died, were still a Hebrew speech for me: nevertheless +I was looking at the fair illumined letters, and had an eye for the +gilding. + +In all that relates to the writer's own education, the Dichtung of +_Sartor_ and the Wahrheit of the _Reminiscences_ are in accord. By +Carlyle's own account, an "insignificant portion" of it "depended on +schools." Like Burns, he was for some years trained in his own parish, +where home influences counted for more than the teaching of not very +competent masters. He soon read eagerly and variously. At the age of +seven he was, by an Inspector of the old order, reported to be "complete +in English." In his tenth year (1805) he was sent to the Grammar School +of Annan, the "Hinterschlag Gymnasium," where his "evil days" began. +Every oversensitive child finds the life of a public school one long +misery. Ordinary boys--those of the Scotch borderland being of the most +savage type--are more brutal than ordinary men; they hate singularity as +the world at first hates originality, and have none of the restraints +which the later semi-civilisation of life imposes. "They obey the impulse +of rude Nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any stricken hart, the +duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all +hands the strong tyrannise over the weak." Young Carlyle was mocked for +his moody ways, laughed at for his love of solitude, and called "Tom the +Tearful" because of his habit of crying. To add much to his discomfort, +he had made a rash promise to his pious mother, who seems, in contrast to +her husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles--a promise +to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well +broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he +refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew +Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty +called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by +appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge +of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began +to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright +prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend. +On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University, +despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, "Educate a +boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." "Thou hast not +done so," said old James in after years, "God be thanked for it;" and the +son pays due tribute to the tolerant patience and substantial generosity +of the father: "With a noble faith he launched me forth into a world +which he himself had never been permitted to visit." Carlyle walked +through Moffat all the way to Edinburgh with a senior student, Tom Smail +(who owes to this fact the preservation of his name), with eyes open +to every shade on the moors, as is attested in two passages of the +_Reminiscences_. The boys, as is the fashion still, clubbed together in +cheap lodgings, and Carlyle attended the curriculum from 1809 to 1814. +Comparatively little is known of his college life, which seems to +have been for the majority of Scotch students much as it is now, a +compulsorily frugal life, with too little variety, relaxation, or society +outside Class rooms; and, within them, a constant tug at Science, mental +or physical, at the gateway to dissecting souls or bodies. We infer, from +hints in later conversations and memorials, that Carlyle lived much with +his own fancies, and owed little to any system. He is clearly thinking +of his own youth in his account of Dr. Francia: "Josè must have been a +loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn reflection, probably +to crying humours, with fits of vehement ill nature--subject to the +terriblest fits of hypochondria." His explosion in _Sartor,_ "It is my +painful duty to say that out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of +all hitherto discovered Universities," is the first of a long series of +libels on things and persons he did not like. The Scotch capital was +still a literary centre of some original brilliancy, in the light of +the circle of Scott, which followed that of Burns, in the early fame of +Cockburn and of Clerk (Lord Eldin), of the _Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh +Reviews,_ and of the elder Alison. The Chairs of the University were +conspicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of ability required +from Professors, some of them--conspicuously Brown (the more original if +less "sound" successor of Dugald Stewart), Playfair, and Leslie--rising +to a higher rank. But great Educational Institutions must adapt +themselves to the training of average minds by requirements and +restrictions against which genius always rebels. Biography more than +History repeats itself, and the murmurs of Carlyle are, like those +of Milton, Gibbon, Locke, and Wordsworth, the protests or growls of +irrepressible individuality kicking against the pricks. He was never in +any sense a classic; read Greek with difficulty--Aeschylus and Sophocles +mainly in translations--and while appreciating Tacitus disparaged Horace. +For Scotch Metaphysics, or any logical system, he never cared, and in his +days there was written over the Academic entrances "No Mysticism." He +distinguished himself in Mathematics, and soon found, by his own vaunt, +the _Principia_ of Newton prostrate at his feet: he was a favourite pupil +of Leslie, who escaped the frequent penalty of befriending him, but he +took no prizes: the noise in the class room hindered his answers, and he +said later to Mr. Froude that thoughts only came to him properly when +alone. + +[Footnote: He went so far as to say in 1847 that "the man who had mastered +the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he +had done before."] + +The social leader of a select set of young men in his own rank, by choice +and necessity _integer vitae_, he divided his time between the seclusion +of study and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was perhaps +the most prolific writer of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed his course +without taking a degree, did some tutorial work, and, in the same year, +accepted the post of Mathematical Usher at Annan as successor to Irving, +who had been translated to Haddington. Still in formal pursuit of the +ministry, though beginning to fight shy of its fences, he went up twice a +year to deliver addresses at the Divinity Hall, one of which, "on the uses +of affliction," was afterwards by himself condemned as flowery; another +was a Latin thesis on the theme, "num detur religio naturalis." The +posthumous publication of some of his writings, e.g. of the fragment of +the novel _Wotton Reinfred_, reconciles us to the loss of those which have +not been recovered. + +In the vacations, spent at Mainhill, he began to study German, and +corresponded with his College friends. Many of Carlyle's early letters, +reproduced in the volumes edited by Mr. Charles E. Norton, are written in +that which, according to Voltaire, is the only unpermissible style, "the +tiresome"; and the thought, far from being precocious, is distinctly +commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell on the fall of Napoleon; +or the following to his parents: "There are few things in this world more +valuable than knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it"; or +to James Johnstone the trite quotation, "Truly pale death overturns with +impartial foot the hut of the poor man and the palace of the king." +Several are marred by the egotism which in most Scotch peasants of +aspiring talent takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves +with others; refrains of the ambition against which the writer elsewhere +inveighs as the "kettle tied to the dog's tail." In a note to Thomas +Murray he writes:-- + +Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known +has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! bestow coronets and crowns and +principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and +noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart unyielding +to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary +fame. + +That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is +ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of +Leyden :-- + + Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye, + For that was a day + When we stood in our array + Like the lion's might at bay. + +"Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell consumes +almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have not, then I +desire you read it (_sic_) and tell me what you think of _him_," etc. +Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the +lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been previously travestied +in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns. "Many of his +opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to refer all the +modifications of national character to the influence of moral causes. +Might it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those which +he denominates moral causes originate from physical circumstances?" The +whole first volume of this somewhat overexpanded collection overflows +with ebullitions of bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of +Byron's early romances seems philanthropy, e.g.-- + +How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this +world. For what are its inhabitants? Its great men and its little, its +fat ones and its lean ... pitiful automatons, despicable Yahoos, yea, +they are altogether an insufferable thing. "O for a lodge in some vast +wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where the scowl of the +purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of the coxcomb, the bray of the +ninny and the clodpole might never reach me more!" + +On the other hand, there are frequent evidences of the imperial +intrepidity, the matchless industry, and the splendid independence of +the writer. In his twenty-first year Carlyle again succeeded his Annan +predecessor (who seems to have given dissatisfaction by some vagaries of +severity) as mathematical teacher in the main school of Kirkcaldy. The +_Reminiscences_ of Irving's generous reception of his protégé present one +of the pleasantest pictures in the records of their friendship. The same +chapter is illustrated by a series of sketches of the scenery of the +east coast rarely rivalled in descriptive literature. It is elsewhere +enlivened, if also defaced, by the earliest examples of the cynical +criticisms of character that make most readers rejoice in having escaped +the author's observation. + +During the two years of his residence in Fifeshire, Carlyle encountered +his first romance, in making acquaintance with a well-born young lady, +"by far the brightest and cleverest" of Irving's pupils--Margaret +Gordon--"an acquaintance which might easily have been more" had not +relatives and circumstances intervened. Doubtless Mr. Froude is right in +asserting this lady to have been the original of _Sartor's_ "Blumine"; +and in leaving him to marry "Herr Towgood," ultimately governor of Nova +Scotia, she bequeathed, though in antithetical style, advice that attests +her discrimination of character. "Cultivate the milder dispositions of +the heart, subdue the mere extravagant visions of the brain. Genius +will render you great. May virtue render you beloved. Remove the awful +distance between you and other men by kind and gentle manners. Deal +gently with their inferiority, and be convinced that they will respect +you as much and like you more." To this advice, which he never even +tried to take, she adds, happily perhaps for herself, "I give you not my +address, because I dare not promise to see you." In 1818 Carlyle, always +intolerant of work imposed, came to the conclusion that "it were better +to perish than to continue schoolmastering," and left Kirkcaldy, with £90 +saved, for Edinburgh, where he lived over three years, taking private +pupils, and trying to enter on his real mission through the gates of +literature--gates constantly barred; for, even in those older days of +laxer competition, obstinate eccentricity unredeemed by any social +advantages led to failure and rebuff. Men with the literary form of +genius highly developed have rarely much endurance of defeat. Carlyle, +even in his best moods, resented real or fancied injuries, and at this +stage of his career complained that he got nothing but vinegar from his +fellows, comparing himself to a worm that trodden on would "turn into a +torpedo." He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, which "gnawed +like a rat" at its life-long tenement, his stomach, and by sleeplessness, +due in part to internal causes, but also to the "Bedlam" noises of men, +machines, and animals, which pestered him in town and country from first +to last. He kept hesitating about his career, tried law, mathematical +teaching, contributions to magazines and dictionaries, everything but +journalism, to which he had a rooted repugnance, and the Church, which he +had definitely abandoned. How far the change in his views may have been +due to his reading of Gibbon, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc., how far to self- +reflection, is uncertain; but he already found himself unable, in any +plain sense, to subscribe to the Westminster Confession or to any +"orthodox" Articles, and equally unable by any philosophical +reconciliation of contraries to write black with white on a ground of +neutral gray. + +[Footnote: He refers to Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ as "of all books the +most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. +His winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing, were +often admirably potent and illustrative to me."] + +Mentally and physically adrift he was midway in the valley of the shadow, +which he represents as "The Everlasting No," and beset by "temptations in +the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, "The biographies of men of +letters are the wretchedest chapters in our history, except perhaps the +Newgate Calendar," a remark that recalls the similar cry of Burns, "There +is not among the martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the +poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness +to the absence of a popularity which he yet professes to scorn.--I was +entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles; solitary eating my own heart, +misgivings as to whether there shall be presently anything else to eat, +fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles and miseries ... three +weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free of noise, +... wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual questions unanswered, +etc. + +What is this but Byron's cry, "I am not happy," which his afterwards +stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-jack? + +Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same dismal mood. +"Mainhill," says his biographer, "was never a less happy home to him than +it was this summer (1819). He could not conceal the condition of his +mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a +matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have +seemed as if possessed." + +Returning to Edinburgh in the early winter, he for a time wrote hopefully +about his studies. "The law I find to be a most complicated subject, +yet I like it pretty well. Its great charm in my eyes is that no mean +compliances are requisite for prospering in it." But this strain soon +gave way to a fresh fit of perversity, and we have a record of his +throwing up the cards in one of his most ill-natured notes. + +I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and +converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But +it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere +denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as +wages for all that bogpool of disgust. + +The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radical rising in +Glasgow against the poverty which was the natural aftermath of the great +war, oppressions, half real, half imaginary, of the military force, and +the yeomanry in particular. Carlyle's contribution to the reminiscences +of the time is doubly interesting because written (in the article on +Irving, 1836) from memory, when he had long ceased to be a Radical. A +few sentences suffice to illustrate this phase or stage of his political +progress:-- + +A time of great rages and absurd terrors and expectations, a very fierce +Radical and anti-Radical time. Edinburgh, endlessly agitated by it all +around me ... gentry people full of zeal and foolish terror and fury, and +looking _disgustingly busy and important_.... One bleared Sunday morning +I had gone out for my walk. At the Riding-house in Nicolson Street was a +kind of straggly group, with red-coats interspersed. They took their way, +not very dangerous-looking men of war; but there rose from the little +crowd the strangest shout I have heard human throats utter, not very +loud, but it said as plain as words, and with infinitely more emphasis of +sincerity, "May the devil go with you, ye peculiarly contemptible, and +dead to the distresses of your fellow-creatures!" Another morning ... I +met an advocate slightly of my acquaintance hurrying along, musket in +hand, towards the Links, there to be drilled as item of the "gentlemen" +volunteers now afoot. "You should have the like of this," said he, +cheerily patting his musket "Hm, yes; but I haven't yet quite settled on +which side"--which probably he hoped was quiz, though it really expressed +my feeling ... mutiny and revolt being a light matter to the young. + +This period is illustrated by numerous letters from Irving, who had +migrated to Glasgow as an assistant to Dr. Chalmers, abounding in sound +counsels to persevere in some profession and make the best of practical +opportunities. Carlyle's answers have in no instance been preserved, but +the sole trace of his having been influenced by his friend's advice is his +contribution (1820-1823) of sixteen articles to the _Edinburgh +Encyclopedia_ under the editorship of Sir David Brewster. The scant +remuneration obtained from these was well timed, but they contain no +original matter, and did nothing for his fame. Meanwhile it appears from +one of Irving's letters that Carlyle's thoughts had been, as later in his +early London life, turning towards emigration. He says, writes his friend, +"I have the ends of my thoughts to bring together ... my views of life to +reform, my health to recover, and then once more I shall venture my bark +on the waters of this wide realm, and if she cannot weather it I shall +steer west and try the waters of another world." + +[Footnote: The subjects of these were--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, +Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker, +Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, +Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord Chatham, William Pitt. These articles, on +the whole judiciously omitted from the author's collected works, are +characterised by marks of great industry, commonplace, and general +fairness, with a style singularly formal, like that of the less im +pressive pages of Johnson. The following, among numerous passages, are +curious as illustrating the comparative orthodoxy of the writer's early +judgments: "The brilliant hints which Montesquieu scatters round him with +a liberal hand have excited or assisted the speculations of others in +almost every department of political economy, and he is deservedly +mentioned as a principal founder of that important science." "Mirabeau +confronted him (Necker) like his evil genius; and being totally without +scruple in the employment of any expedient, was but too successful in +overthrowing all reasonable proposals, and conducting the people to that +state of anarchy out of which his own ambition was to be rewarded," etc. +Similarly the verdicts on Pitt, Chatham, Nelson, Park, Lady Montagu, etc., +are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of conscientious research, +fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as +in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend +itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to +show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be +united with a coarse and ignoble heart."] + +The resolves, sometimes the efforts, of celebrated Englishmen,--"nos manet +oceanus,"--as Cromwell, Burns, Coleridge, and Southey (allured, some +critic suggests, by the poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough, +Richard Hengist Horne, and Browning's "Waring," to elude "the fever and +the fret" of an old civilisation, and take refuge in the fancied freedom +of wild lands--when more than dreams--have been failures. + +[Footnote: Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his +New York Press and "plant him where the red deer feed, in the green +forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's banished Duke.] + +Puritan patriots, it is true, made New England, and the scions of the +Cavaliers Virginia; but no poet or imaginative writer has ever been +successfully transplanted, with the dubious exception of Heinrich Heine. +It is certain that, despite his first warm recognition coming from across +the Atlantic, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ would have found +the "States" more fruitful in food for cursing than either Edinburgh or +London. + +The spring of 1820 was marked by a memorable visit to Irving, on +Carlyle's way to spend as was his wont the summer months at home. His +few days in Glasgow are recorded in a graphic sketch of the bald-headed +merchants at the Tontine, and an account of his introduction to Dr. +Chalmers, to whom he refers always with admiration and a respect but +slightly modified. The critic's praise of British contemporaries, other +than relatives, is so rare that the following sentences are worth +transcribing:-- + +He (Chalmers) was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honesty, and +kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination.... He had a +burst of genuine fun too.... His laugh was ever a hearty, low guffaw, +and his tones in preaching would reach to the piercingly pathetic. No +preacher ever went so into one's heart. He was a man essentially of +little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. Such an intellect, +professing to be educated, and yet ... ignorant in all that lies beyond +the horizon in place or time I have almost nowhere met with--a man +capable of so much soaking indolence, lazy brooding ... as the first +stage of his life well indicated, ... yet capable of impetuous activity +and braying audacity, as his later years showed. I suppose there will +never again be such a preacher in any Christian church. "The truth of +Christianity," he said, "was all written in us already in sympathetic +ink. Bible awakens it, and you can read"--a sympathetic image but of no +great weight as an argument addressed to doubting Thomas. Chalmers, whose +originality lay rather in his quick insight and fire than in his mainly +commonplace thought, had the credit of recognising the religious side of +Carlyle's genius, when to the mass of his countrymen he was a rock of +offence. One of the great preacher's criticisms of the great writer is +notably just: "He is a lover of earnestness more than a lover of truth." + +There follows in some of the early pages of the _Reminiscences_ an +account of a long walk with Irving, who had arranged to accompany Carlyle +for the first stage, _i.e._ fifteen miles of the road, of his for the +most part pedestrian march from Glasgow to Ecclefechan, a record among +many of similar excursions over dales and hills, and "by the beached +margent," revived for us in sun and shade by a pen almost as magical as +Turner's brush. We must refer to the pages of Mr. Froude for the +picture of Drumclog moss,--"a good place for Cameronian preaching, and +dangerously difficult for Claverse _(sic)_ and horse soldiery if the +suffering remnant had a few old muskets among them,"--for the graphic +glimpse of Ailsa Craig, and the talk by the dry stone fence, in the +twilight. "It was just here, as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from +me by degrees, in the softest manner, that I did not think as he of the +Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or +should. This, if this was so, he had pre-engaged to take well of me, like +an elder brother, if I would be frank with him. And right loyally he did +so." They parted here: Carlyle trudged on to the then "utterly quiet +little inn" at Muirkirk, left next morning at 4 A.M., and reached +Dumfries, a distance of fifty-four miles, at 8 P.M., "the longest walk I +ever made." He spent the summer at Mainhill, studying modern +languages, "living riotously with Schiller and Goethe." at work on the +_Encyclopedia_ articles, and visiting his friend at Annan, when he was +offered the post of tutor to the son of a Yorkshire farmer, an offer +which Irving urged him to accept, saying, "You live too much in an ideal +world," and wisely adding, "try your hand with the respectable illiterate +men of middle life. You may be taught to forget ... the splendours and +envies ... of men of literature." + +This exhortation led to a result recorded with much humour, egotism, and +arrogance in a letter to his intimate friend Dr. John Fergusson, of Kelso +Grammar School, which, despite the mark "private and confidential," was +yet published, several years after the death of the recipient and shortly +after that of the writer, in a gossiping memoir. We are therefore at +liberty to select from the letter the following paragraphs:-- + + I delayed sending an answer till I might have it in my power + to communicate what seemed then likely to produce a + considerable change in my stile (_sic_) of life, a + proposal to become a "travelling tutor," as they call it, to + a young person in the North Riding, for whom that exercise + was recommended on account of bodily and mental weakness. + They offered me £150 per annum, and withal invited me to + come and examine things on the spot before engaging. I went + accordingly, and happy was it I went; from description I was + ready to accept the place; from inspection all Earndale + would not have hired me to accept it. This boy was a dotard, + a semi-vegetable, the elder brother, head of the family, a + two-legged animal without feathers, intellect, or virtue, + and all the connections seemed to have the power of eating + pudding but no higher power. So I left the barbarous + people....York is but a heap of bricks. Jonathan Dryasdust + (see _Ivanhoe_) is justly named. York is the Boetia of + Britain.... Upon the whole, however, I derived great + amusement from my journey, ... I conversed with all kinds of + men, from graziers up to knights of the shire, argued with + them all, and broke specimens from their souls (if any), + which I retain within the museum of my cranium. I have no + prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown + from another planet on this dark terrestrial ball, an alien, + a pilgrim ... and life is to me like a pathless, a waste, + and a howling wilderness. Do not leave your situation if + you can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a + fearful thing to be swept in by the roaring surge of life, + and then to float alone undirected on its restless, + monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet you may, or if you + must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the waves without + a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cock-boats, yet hold + fast by the Manilla ship, _and do not let go the painter_. + +Towards the close of this year Irving, alarmed by his friend's +despondency, sent him a most generous and delicately-worded invitation to +spend some months under his roof; but Carlyle declined, and in a letter +of March 1821 he writes to his brother John: "Edinburgh, with all its +drawbacks, is the only scene for me," on which follows one of his finest +descriptions, that of the view from Arthur Seat. + +According to the most probable chronology, for many of Carlyle's dates +are hard to fix, the next important event of his life, his being +introduced, on occasion of a visit to Haddington, to Miss Jane Welsh by +her old tutor, Edward Irving--an event which marks the beginning of a new +era in his career--took place towards the close of May or in the first +week of June. To June is assigned the incident, described in _Sartor_ as +the transition from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea, a sort of +revelation that came upon him as he was in Leith Walk--Rue St. Thomas de +l'Enfer in the Romance--on the way to cool his distempers by a plunge in +the sea. The passage proclaiming this has been everywhere quoted; and it +is only essential to note that it resembled the "illuminations" of St. +Paul and of Constantine merely by its being a sudden spiritual impulse. +It was in no sense a conversion to any belief in person or creed, it was +but the assertion of a strong manhood against an almost suicidal mood +of despair; a condition set forth with superabundant paraphernalia of +eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of Teufelsdröckh had +darkened into disbelief in divine or human justice, freedom, or himself. +If there be a God, He sits on the hills "since the first Sabbath," +careless of mankind. Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire +and fear"; virtue "some bubble of the blood," absence of vitality +perhaps. + +What in these days are terrors of conscience to diseases of the liver? +Not on morality but on cookery let us build our stronghold.... Thus has +the bewildered wanderer to stand, shouting question after question into +the Sibyl cave, and receiving for answer an echo. + +From this scepticism, deeper than that of _Queen Mab,_ fiercer than that +of _Candide,_ Carlyle was dramatically rescued by the sense that he was a +servant of God, even when doubting His existence. + + After all the nameless woe that inquiry had wrought me, + I nevertheless still loved truth, and would hate no jot of my + allegiance....Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me + for following her; no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubberland + were the price of apostacy. + +With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough of despond and +asserts himself: + + Denn ich bin ein Mensch gewesen + Und das heisst ein Kämpfer seyn. + +He finds in persistent action, energy, and courage a present strength, +and a lamp of at least such partial victory as he lived to achieve. + + He would not make his judgment blind; + He faced the spectres of the mind,-- + +but he never "laid them," or came near the serenity of his master, +Goethe; and his teaching, public and private, remained half a wail. He +threw the gage rather in the attitude of a man turning at bay than that of +one making a leap. + + Death? Well, Death ... let it come then, and I will + meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream + of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from + that time the temper of my misery was changed; not ... + whining sorrow ... but grim defiance. + +Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:-- + +I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce, +upon myself and all things earthly....The year is closing. This time +eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago.... + + Oh! little did my mother think, + That day she cradled me, + The lands that I should travel in, + The death I was to dee. + +My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in +a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain. +How have I deserved this? I know not. Then why don't you kill yourself, +sir? Is there not arsenic? Is there not ratsbane of various kinds? And +hemp, and steel? Most true, Sathanas...but it will be time enough to +use them when I have _lost_ the game I am but _losing_, ... and while +my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not +breaking their hearts would still remain....I want health, health, +health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious: my torments are +greater than I am able to bear. + +Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is there any excess of +Optimism; but after the Leith Walk inspiration he had resolved on "no +surrender"; and that, henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have +proof in its more regular, if not more rapid progress. His last hack +service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless we add a +translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's Geometry, begun, +according to some reports, in the Kirkcaldy period, finished in 1822, +and published in 1824. For this task, prefixed by an original _Essay on +Proportion_, much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respectable sum +of £50. Two subsequent candidatures for Chairs of Astronomy showed that +Carlyle had not lost his taste for Mathematics; but this work was his +practical farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an +author were those of an interpreter. His complete mastery of German has +been said to have endowed him with "his sword of sharpness and shoes of +swiftness"; it may be added, in some instances also, with the "fog-cap." +But in his earliest substantial volume, the _Life of Schiller_, there is +nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. This work began to +appear in the _London Magazine_ in 1823, was finished in 1824, and in +1825 published in a separate form. Approved during its progress by an +encouraging article in the _Times_, it was, in 1830, translated into +German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced the work by an +important commendatory preface, and so first brought the author's name +conspicuously before a continental public. Carlyle himself, partly +perhaps from the spirit of contradiction, was inclined to speak +slightingly of this high-toned and sympathetic biography: "It is," said +he, "in the wrong vein, laborious, partly affected, meagre, bombastic." +But these are sentences of a morbid time, when, for want of other +victims, he turned and rent himself. _Pari passu_, he was toiling at his +translation of _Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship_. This was published in +Edinburgh in 1824. Heartily commended in _Blackwood_, it was generally +recognised as one of the best English renderings of any foreign author; +and Jeffrey, in his absurd review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks +in high terms of the skill displayed by the translator. The virulent +attack of De Quincey--a writer as unreliable as brilliant--in the _London +Magazine_ does not seem to have carried much weight even then, and has +none now. The _Wanderjahre_, constituting the third volume of the English +edition, first appeared as the last of four on German Romance--a series +of admirably selected and executed translations from Musæus, Fouqué, +Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Goethe, prefaced by short biographical and +critical notices of each--published in Edinburgh in 1827. This date is +also that of the first of the more elaborate and extensive criticisms +which, appearing in the Edinburgh and Foreign reviews, established +Carlyle as the English pioneer of German literature. The result of these +works would have been enough to drive the wolf from the door and to +render their author independent of the oatmeal from home; while another +source of revenue enabled him not only to keep himself, but to settle +his brother Alick in a farm, and to support John through his University +course as a medical student. This and similar services to the family +circle were rendered with gracious disclaimers of obligation. "What any +brethren of our father's house possess, I look on as a common stock from +which all are entitled to draw." + +For this good fortune he was again indebted to his friend of friends. +Irving had begun to feel his position at Glasgow unsatisfactory, and +at the close of 1821 he was induced to accept an appointment to the +Caledonian Chapel at Hatton Garden. On migrating to London, to make a +greater, if not a safer, name in the central city, and finally, be lost +in its vortex, he had invited Carlyle to follow him, saying, "Scotland +breeds men, but England rears them." Shortly after, introduced by Mrs. +Strachey, one of his worshipping audience, to her sister Mrs. Buller, he +found the latter in trouble about the education of her sons. Charles, the +elder, was a youth of bright but restive intelligence, and it was desired +to find some transitional training for him on his way from Harrow to +Cambridge. Irving urged his being placed, in the interim, under Carlyle's +charge. The proposal, with an offer of £200 a year, was accepted, and the +brothers were soon duly installed in George Square, while their tutor +remained in Moray Place, Edinburgh. The early stages of this relationship +were eminently satisfactory; Carlyle wrote that the teaching of the +Bullers was a pleasure rather than a task; they seemed to him "quite +another set of boys than I have been used to, and treat me in another +sort of manner than tutors are used. The eldest is one of the cleverest +boys I have ever seen." There was never any jar between the teacher and +the taught. Carlyle speaks with unfailing regard of the favourite pupil, +whose brilliant University and Parliamentary career bore testimony to the +good practical guidance he had received. His premature death at the +entrance on a sphere of wider influence made a serious blank in his old +master's life. + +[Footnote: Charles Buller became Carlyle's pupil at the age of fifteen. +He died as Commissioner of the Poor in 1848 (_aet_. forty-two).] + +But as regards the relation of the employer and employed, we are wearied +by the constantly recurring record of kindness lavishly bestowed, +ungraciously received, and soon ungratefully forgotten. The elder +Bullers--the mother a former beauty and woman of some brilliancy, the +father a solid and courteous gentleman retired from the Anglo-Indian +service--came to Edinburgh in the spring of the tutorship, and +recognising Carlyle's abilities, welcomed him to the family circle, and +treated him, by his own confession, with a "degree of respect" he "did +not deserve"; adapting their arrangements, as far as possible, to his +hours and habits; consulting his convenience and humouring his whims. +Early in 1823 they went to live together at Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld, +when he continued to write letters to his kin still praising his patrons; +but the first note of discord is soon struck in satirical references to +their aristocratic friends and querulous complaints of the servants. +During the winter, for greater quiet, a room was assigned to him in +another house near Kinnaird; a consideration which met with the award: +"My bower is the most polite of bowers, refusing admittance to no wind +that blows." And about this same time he wrote, growling at his fare: "It +is clear to me that I shall never recover my health under the economy of +Mrs. Buller." + +In 1824 the family returned to London, and Carlyle followed in June by +a sailing yacht from Leith. On arrival he sent to Miss Welsh a letter, +sneering at his fellow passengers, but ending with a striking picture of +his first impressions of the capital:-- + + We were winding slowly through the forest of masts in the + Thames up to our station at Tower Wharf. The giant bustle, + the coal heavers, the bargemen, the black buildings, the ten + thousand times ten thousand sounds and movements of that + monstrous harbour formed the grandest object I had ever + witnessed. One man seems a drop in the ocean; you feel + annihilated in the immensity of that heart of all the world. + +On reaching London he first stayed for two or three weeks under Irving's +roof and was introduced to his friends. Of Mrs. Strachey and her young +cousin Kitty, who seems to have run the risk of admiring him to excess, +he always spoke well: but the Basil Montagues, to whose hospitality and +friendship he was made welcome, he has maligned in such a manner as to +justify the retaliatory pamphlet of the sharp-tongued eldest daughter +of the house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By letter and +"reminiscence" he is equally reckless in invective against almost all the +eminent men of letters with whom he then came in contact, and also, +in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, +Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in +some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being +addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of +well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain +on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he +writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in +the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature." +And a fortnight later, from Irving's house at Pentonville, he sends to +his mother an account of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him +two alternatives--to go with the family to France or to remain in the +country preparing the eldest boy for Cambridge. He declined both, and +they parted, shaking hands with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a +sentence that recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge, "that I have done +with them ... I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for £200 a +year." + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_ (1st ed. 1851), chap. viii. +p. 79.] + +There followed eight weeks of residence in or about Birmingham, with a +friend called 'Badams, who undertook to cure dyspepsia by a new method +and failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others, +as the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the toiling +squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from radical democracy to +Platonic autocracy, continued to take a deep interest; on other days +they had pleasant excursions to the green fields and old towers of +Warwickshire. On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De +Quincey's review of _Meister_, and in recounting the event credits +himself with the philosophic thought, "This man is perhaps right on some +points; if so let him be admonitory." + +But the description that follows of "the child that has been in hell," +however just, is less magnanimous. Then came a trip, in company with Mr. +Strachey and Kitty and maid, by Dover and Calais along Sterne's route to +Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis XVIII. was then +lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments are mainly acid remarks on the +Palais Royal, with the refrain, "God bless the narrow seas." But he met +Legendre and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and saw Talma act, and, what +was of more moment, had his first glimpse of the Continent and the city +of one phase of whose history he was to be the most brilliant recorder. +Back in London for the winter, where his time was divided between +Irving's house and his own neighbouring room in Southampton Street, +he was cheered by Goethe's own acknowledgment of the translation of +_Meister_, characteristically and generously cordial. + +In March 1825 Carlyle again set his face northward, and travelling by +coach through Birmingham, Manchester, Bolton, and Carlisle, established +himself, in May, at Hoddam Hill; a farm near the Solway, three miles from +Mainhill, which his father had leased for him. His brother Alexander +farmed, while Thomas toiled on at German translations and rode about on +horseback. For a space, one of the few contented periods of his life, +there is a truce to complaining. Here free from the noises which are the +pests of literary life, he was building up his character and forming the +opinions which, with few material changes, he long continued to hold. +Thus he writes from over a distance of forty years :-- + + With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam + Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now + like a not ignoble russet-coated idyll in my memory; one of + the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly + important of my life.... I found that I had conquered all my + scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with + the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch, + and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of + ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory.... Once + more, thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and + still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, + in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep road + before me, the first of the moderns. Bodily health itself + seemed improving.... Nowhere can I recollect of myself such + pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact + and Nature as in these poor Annandale localities. The sound + of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday mornings from + Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, was + strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen + hundred years. + +Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid +storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his +tyrannous love of liberty:-- + + It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of + consciousness--of inward dignity--I have gained since I came + within the walls of this poor cottage--my own four walls. + They simply admit that I am _Herr im Hause_, and act on + this conviction. There is no grumbling about my habitudes + and whims. If I choose to dine on fire and brimstone, they + will cook it for me to their best skill, thinking only that + I am an unintelligible mortal, _fâcheux_ to deal with, + but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own four walls. + +The last words form the refrain of a set of verses, the most +characteristic, as Mr. Froude justly observes, of the writer, the actual +composition of which seems, however, to belong to the next chapter of his +career, beginning-- + + Wild through the wind the huntsman calls, + As fast on willing nag I haste + Home to my own four walls. + +The feeling that inspires them is clenched in the defiance-- + + King George has palaces of pride, + And armed grooms must ward those halls; + With one stout bolt I safe abide + Within my own four walls. + + Not all his men may sever this; + It yields to friends', not monarchs' calls; + My whinstone house my castle is-- + I have my own four walls. + + When fools or knaves do make a rout, + With gigmen, dinners, balls, cabals, + I turn my back and shut them out; + These are my own four walls. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +CRAIGENPUTTOCK + +[1826-1834] + +"Ah, when she was young, she was a fleein', dancin", light-heartit thing, +Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a' at +ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher; and +he cam' aboot her. Then there was Maister ----. Then there was Maister +Carlyle himsel', and _he_ cam' to finish her off like."--HADDINGTON +NURSE. + +"My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at a +furlong's distance."--T. CARLYLE, from Craigenputtock, Oct. 1830. + +During the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the verge of a crisis +of his career, _i.e._ his making a marriage, for the chequered fortune of +which he was greatly himself to blame. + +No biography can ignore the strange conditions of a domestic life, +already made familiar in so many records that they are past evasion. +Various opinions have been held regarding the lady whom he selected to +share his lot. Any adequate estimate of this remarkable woman belongs to +an account of her own career, such as that given by Mrs. Ireland in her +judicious and interesting abridgment of the material amply supplied. Jane +Baillie Welsh (_b.1801, d. 1866_)--descended on the paternal side from +Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of John Knox; on the maternal owning to +an inheritance of gipsy blood--belonged to a family long esteemed +in the borders. Her father, a distinguished Edinburgh student, and +afterwards eminent surgeon at Haddington, noted alike for his humanity +and skill, made a small fortune, and purchased in advance from his father +his inheritance of Craigenputtock, a remnant of the once larger family +estate. He died in 1819, when his daughter was in her eighteenth year. To +her he left the now world-famous farm and the bulk of his property. Jane, +of precocious talents, seems to have been, almost from infancy, the +tyrant of the house at Haddington, where her people took a place of +precedence in the small county town. Her grandfathers, John of +Penfillan and Walter of Templand, also a Welsh, though of another--the +gipsy--stock, vied for her baby favours, while her mother's quick and +shifty tempers seem at that date to have combined in the process of +"spoiling" her. The records of the schooldays of the juvenile Jane all +point to a somewhat masculine strength of character. Through life, +it must be acknowledged, this brilliant creature was essentially "a +mockingbird," and made game of every one till she met her mate. The +little lady was learned, reading Virgil at nine, ambitious enough to +venture a tragedy at fourteen, and cynical; writing to her life-long +friend, Miss Eliza Stodart, of Haddington as a "bottomless pit of +dulness," where "all my little world lay glittering in tinsel at my +feet." She was ruthless to the suitors--as numerous, says Mr. Froude, +"as those of Penelope "--who flocked about the young beauty, wit, and +heiress. Of the discarded rivals there was only one of note--George +Rennie, long afterwards referred to by Carlyle as a "clever, decisive, +very ambitious, but quite unmelodious young fellow whom we knew here (in +Chelsea) as sculptor and M.P." She dismissed him in 1821 for some cause +of displeasure, "due to pride, reserve, and his soured temper about the +world"; but when he came to take leave, she confesses, "I scarcely heard +a word he said, my own heart beat so loud." Years after, in London, she +went by request of his wife to Rennie's death-bed. + +Meanwhile she had fallen under the spell of her tutor, Edward Irving, +and, as she, after much _finesse_ and evasion, admitted, came to love him +in earnest. Irving saw her weak points, saying she was apt to turn +her powers to "arts of cruelty which satire and scorn are," and "to +contemplate the inferiority of others rather from the point of view +of ridicule and contempt than of commiseration and relief." Later she +retaliated, "There would have been no 'tongues' had Irving married me." +But he was fettered by a previous engagement, to which, after some +struggle for release, he held, leaving in charge of his pupil, as guide, +philosopher, and friend, his old ally and successor, Thomas Carlyle. +Between this exceptional pair there began in 1821 a relationship of +constant growth in intimacy, marked by frequent visits, conversations, +confidences, and a correspondence, long, full, and varied, starting with +interchange of literary sympathies, and sliding by degrees into the +dangerous friendship called Platonic. At the outset it was plain that +Carlyle was not the St. Preux or Wolmar whose ideas of elegance Jane +Welsh--a hasty student of Rousseau--had set in unhappy contrast to the +honest young swains of Haddington. Uncouth, ungainly in manner and +attire, he first excited her ridicule even more than he attracted her +esteem, and her written descriptions of him recall that of Johnson by +Lord Chesterfield. "He scrapes the fender, ... only his tongue should be +left at liberty, his other members are most fantastically awkward"; but +the poor mocking-bird had met her fate. The correspondence falls under +two sections, the critical and the personal. The critical consists of +remarks, good, bad, and indifferent, on books and their writers. Carlyle +began his siege by talking German to her, now extolling Schiller and +Goethe to the skies, now, with a rare stretch of deference, half +conniving at her sneers. Much also passed between them about English +authors, among them comments on Byron, notably inconsistent. Of him +Carlyle writes (April 15th 1824) as "a pampered lord," who would care +nothing for the £500 a year that would make an honest man happy; but +later, on hearing of the death at Mesolonghi, more in the vein of his +master Goethe, he exclaims:-- + + Alas, poor Byron! the news of his death came upon me like + a mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful + twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. O + God! that so many souls of mud and clay should fill up + their base existence to the utmost bound; and this, the + noblest spirit in Europe, should sink before half his course + was run.... Late so full of fire and generous passion and + proud purposes, and now for ever dumb and cold.... Had he + been spared to the age of threescore and ten what might he + not have been! what might he not have been! ... I dreamed of + seeing him and knowing him; but ... we shall go to him, he + shall not return to us. + +This in answer to her account of the same intelligence: "I was told it +all alone in a room full of people. If they had said the sun or the moon +was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of +a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words 'Byron is +dead.'" Other letters of the same period, from London, are studded or +disfigured by the incisive ill-natured sarcasms above referred to, or +they relate to the work and prospects of the writer. Those that bear +on the progress of his suit mark it as the strangest and, when we look +before and after, one of the saddest courtships in literary history. As +early as 1822 Carlyle entertained the idea of making Jane Welsh his wife; +she had begun to yield to the fascinations of his speech--a fascination +akin to that of Burns--when she wrote, "I will be happier contemplating +my beau-ideal than a real, substantial, eating, drinking, sleeping, +honest husband." In 1823 they were half-declared lovers, but there were +recalcitrant fits on both sides. On occasion of a meeting at Edinburgh +there was a quarrel, followed by a note of repentance, in which she +confessed, "Nothing short of a devil could have tempted me to torment +you and myself as I did on that unblessed day." Somewhat earlier she had +written in answer to his first distinct avowal, "My friend, I love you. +But were you my brother I should love you the same. No. Your friend I +will be ... while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife never, +though you were as rich as Croesus, as honoured and renowned as you yet +shall be." To which Carlyle answered with characteristic pride, "I have +no idea of dying in the Arcadian shepherd's style for the disappointment +of hopes which I never seriously entertained, and had no right to +entertain seriously." There was indeed nothing of Corydon and Phyllis in +this struggle of two strong wills, the weaker giving way to the stronger, +the gradual but inexorable closing of an iron ring. Backed by the natural +repugnance of her mother to the match, Miss Welsh still rebelled, bracing +herself with the reflection, "Men and women may be very charming without +having any genius;" and to his renewed appeal (1825), "It lies with +you whether I shall be a right man or only a hard and bitter Stoic," +retorting, "I am not in love with you ... my affections are in a state of +perfect tranquillity." But she admitted he was her "only fellowship and +support," and confiding at length the truth about Irving, surrendered in +the words, "Decide, and woe to me if your reason be your judge and not +your love." In this duel of Puck and Theseus, the latter felt he had won +and pressed his advantage, offering to let her free and adding warnings +to the blind, "Without great sacrifices on both sides, the possibility +of our union is an empty dream." At the eleventh hour, when, in her own +words, she was "married past redemption," he wrote, "If you judge fit, I +will take you to my heart this very week. If you judge fit, I will this +very week forswear you for ever;" and replied to her request that her +widowed mother might live under their wedded roof in terms that might +have become Petruchio: "It may be stated in a word. The man should bear +rule in the house, not the woman. This is an eternal axiom, the law of +nature which no mortal departs from unpunished. . . . Will your mother +consent to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to her +daughter's husband!" + + Was ever woman in this humour woo'd, + Was ever woman in this humour won? + +Miss Welsh at length reluctantly agreed to come to start life at +Scotsbrig, where his family had migrated; but Carlyle pushed another +counter: "Your mother must not visit mine: the mere idea of such a visit +argued too plainly that you _knew nothing_ of the family circle in which +for my sake you were willing to take a place." It being agreed that Mrs. +Welsh was to leave Haddington, where the alliance was palpably unpopular, +Carlyle proposed to begin married life in his mother-in-law's vacant +house, saying in effect to his fiancée that as for intrusive visitors he +had "nerve enough" to kick her old friends out of doors. At this point, +however, her complaisance had reached its limit. The bridegroom-elect had +to soothe his sense of partial retreat by a scolding letter. As regards +difficulties of finance he pointed out that he had £200 to start with, +and that a labourer and his wife had been known to live on £14 a year. + +On the edge of the great change in her life, Jane Welsh writes, "I am +resolved in spirit, in the face of every horrible fate," and says she has +decided to put off mourning for her father, having found a second father. +Carlyle proposed that after the "dreaded ceremony" he and his bride and +his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach from Dumfries +to Edinburgh. In "the last dying speech and marrying words" she objects +to this arrangement, and after the event (October 17th 1826) they drove +in a post-chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself settled +at Templand, had furnished a house for them. Meanwhile the Carlyle family +migrated to Scotsbrig. There followed eighteen comparatively tranquil +months, an oasis in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in +some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social +gatherings--Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their +brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the +northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster, +John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey, +a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as Irving himself. +Procter had introduced Carlyle to the famous editor, who, as a Scotch +cousin of the Welshes, took from the first a keen interest in the still +struggling author, and opened to him the door of the _Edinburgh Review_. +The appearance, of the article on _Richter_, 1827, and that, in the +course of the same year, on _The State of German Literature,_ marks +the beginning of a long series of splendid historical and critical +essays--closing in 1855 with the _Prinzenraub_--which set Carlyle in the +front of the reviewers of the century. The success in the _Edinburgh_ +was an "open sesame;" and the conductors of the _Foreign_ and _Foreign +Quarterly_ Reviews, later, those of _Fraser_ and the _Westminster_, were +ready to receive whatever the new writer might choose to send. + +To the _Foreign Review_ he contributed from Comely Bank the _Life and +Writings of Werner_, a paper on _Helena_, the leading episode of the +second part of "Faust," and the first of the two great Essays on +_Goethe_, which fixed his place as the interpreter of Germany to England. +In midsummer 1827 Carlyle received a letter from Goethe cordially +acknowledging the _Life of Schiller_, and enclosing presents of books for +himself and his wife. This, followed by a later inquiry as to the +author of the article on _German Literature_, was the opening of a +correspondence of sage advice on the one side and of lively gratitude +on the other, that lasted till the death of the veteran in 1832. Goethe +assisted, or tried to assist, his admirer by giving him a testimonial in +a candidature for the Chair (vacant by the promotion of Dr. Chalmers) of +Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Jeffrey, a frequent visitor and host +of the Carlyles, still regarded as "a jewel of advocates ... the most +lovable of little men," urged and aided the canvass, but in vain. The +testimonials were too strong to be judicious, and "it was enough that" +the candidate "was described as a man of original and extraordinary gifts +to make college patrons shrink from contact with him." Another failure, +about the same date and with the same backing, was an application for a +Professorship in London University, practically under the patronage of +Brougham; yet another, of a different kind, was Carlyle's attempt +to write a novel, which having been found--better before than after +publication--to be a failure, was for the most part burnt. "He could +not," says Froude, "write a novel any more than he could write poetry. He +had no _invention._" + +[Footnote: Carlyle's verses also demonstrate that he had no metrical ear. +The only really good lines he ever wrote, save in translations where the +rhythm was set to him, are those constantly quoted about the dawn of +"another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud Hapsburg," and to +Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of Macaulay's school-boy, "Non di +non homines;" but it took much hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact, +and when persuaded he concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of +cymbals!] + +"His genius was for fact; to lay hold on truth, with all his intellect and +all his imagination. He could no more invent than he could lie." + +The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are few: a visit from +his mother; a message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter +Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in +Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new +Annual Register, designed to be a literary _résumé_ of the year, make up +the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic +life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox +honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom +saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined together and +read _Don Quixote_ in Spanish. The husband was half forgotten in the +author beginning to prophesy: he wrote alone, walked alone, thought +alone, and for the most part talked alone, _i.e._ in monologue that did +not wait or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, but +there was little companionship. Meanwhile, despite the _Review_ articles, +Carlyle's other works, especially the volumes on German romance, were not +succeeding, and the mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful +whether he could afford to live in Edinburgh; he craved after greater +quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh inheritance, fell +vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His wife yielding, though with a +natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the +Jeffreys kindly assisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of +the Hawks. + +Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British +dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy +straths of grass around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid +bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in +front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or +apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. Here Carlyle +allowed his wife to serve him through six years of household drudgery; +an offence for which he was never quite forgiven, and to estimate its +magnitude here seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother, +and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he was as unfit, +and for some of the same reasons, to make "a happy fireside clime" as was +Jonathan Swift; and less even than Byron had he a share of the mutual +forbearance which is essential to the closest of all relations. + +"Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked everything and +spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, +nor himself." With a slight change of phrase the same may be said of +Carlyle's devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain in +his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of literature as +a profession, nor are there wiser words than those in which the veteran +warns the young men, whose questions he answers with touching solicitude, +against its adoption. "It should be," he declares, "the wine not the food +of life, the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread of +action parches up nature and makes strong souls like Byron dangerous, +the weak despicable." But it was nevertheless the profession of his +deliberate choice, and he soon found himself bound to it as Ixion to his +wheel. The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was +great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out +the heart of the mystery, be it of himself, as in _Sartor_; of Germany, +as in his Goethes and Richters; the state of England, as in _Chartism_ +and _Past and Present;_ of _Cromwell_ or of _Friedrich,_ he faced all +obstacles and overthrew them. Dauntless and ruthless, he allowed nothing +to divert or to mar his designs, least of all domestic cares or even +duties. "Selfish he was,"--I again quote from his biographer,--"if it +be selfish to be ready to sacrifice every person dependent on him as +completely as he sacrificed himself." What such a man wanted was a +housekeeper and a nurse, not a wife, and when we consider that he had +chosen for the latter companionship a woman almost as ambitious as +himself, whose conversation was only less brilliant than his own, of +delicate health and dainty ways, loyal to death, but, according to Mr. +Froude, in some respects "as hard as flint," with "dangerous sparks of +fire," whose quick temper found vent in sarcasms that blistered and words +like swords, who could declare during the time of the engagement, to +which in spite of warnings manifold she clung, "I will not marry to live +on less than my natural and artificial wants"; who, ridiculing his accent +to his face and before his friends, could write, "apply your talents to +gild over the inequality of our births"; and who found herself obliged +to live sixteen miles from the nearest neighbour, to milk a cow, scour +floors and mend shoes--when we consider all this we are constrained to +admit that the 17th October 1826 was a _dies nefastus,_ nor wonder that +thirty years later Mrs. Carlyle wrote, "I married for ambition, Carlyle +has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him, and I am +miserable,"--and to a young friend, "My dear, whatever you do, never +marry a man of genius." + +Carlyle's own references to the life at Craigenputtock are marked by all +his aggravating inconsistency. "How happy we shall be in this Craig o' +Putta," he writes to his wife from Scotsbrig, April 17th 1827; and later +to Goethe:-- + + Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of + Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here + to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good results. + But I came here solely with the design to simplify my way of + life, and to secure the independence through which I could + be enabled to be true to myself. This bit of earth is our + own; here we can live, write, and think as best pleases + ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the + monarch of literature. From some of our heights I can descry, + about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola + and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I + was born, and there both father and mother still live to + love me.... The only piece of any importance that I have + written since I came here is an Essay on Burns. + +This Essay,--modified at first, then let alone, by Jeffrey,--appeared in +the _Edinburgh_ in the autumn of 1828. We turn to Carlyle's journal +and find the entry, "Finished a paper on Burns at this Devil's Den," +elsewhere referred to as a "gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he +confesses, when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I have +really had enough." + + Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Romam. + +Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and in the town for +the moor. During the first twenty years of his London life, in what he +called "the Devil's oven," he is constantly clamouring to return to the +den. His wife, more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently +disliked it; little wonder, between sluttish maid-servants and owl-like +solitude: and she expressed her dislike in the pathetic verses, "To a +Swallow Building under our Eaves," sent to Jeffrey in 1832, and ending-- + + God speed thee, pretty bird; may thy small nest + With little ones all in good time be blest; + I love thee much + For well thou managest that life of thine, + While I! Oh, ask not what I do with mine, + Would I were such! + + _The Desert._ + +The monotony of the moorland life was relieved by visits of relations and +others made and repaid, an excursion to Edinburgh, a residence in London, +and the production of work, the best of which has a chance of living with +the language. One of the most interesting of the correspondences of this +period is a series of letters, addressed to an anonymous Edinburgh friend +who seems to have had some idea of abandoning his profession of the Law +for Literature, a course against which Carlyle strenuously protests. From +these letters, which have only appeared in the columns of the _Glasgow +Herald_, we may extract a few sentences:-- + + Don't disparage the work that gains your bread. What is all + work but a drudgery? no labour for the present joyous, but + grievous. A man who has nothing to admire except himself is + in the minimum state. The question is, Does a man really + love Truth, or only the market price of it? Even literary + men should have something else to do. Katnes was a lawyer, + Roscoe a merchant, Hans Sachs a cobbler, Burns a gauger, + etc. + +The following singular passage, the style of which suggests an imitation +of Sterne, is the acme of unconscious self-satire:-- + + You are infinitely unjust to Blockheads, as they are called. + Ask yourself seriously within your own heart--what right + have you to live wisely in God's world, and they not to live + a little less wisely? Is there a man more to be condoled + with, nay, I will say to be cherished and tenderly treated, + than a man that has no brain? My Purse is empty, it can be + filled again; the Jew Rothschild could fill it; or I can + even live with it very far from full. But, gracious heavens! + What is to be done with my _empty Head_? + +Three of the visits of this period are memorable. Two from the Jeffreys +(in 1828 and 1830) leave us with the same uncomfortable impression of +kindness ungrudgingly bestowed and grudgingly received. Jeffrey had a +double interest in the household at Craigenputtock--an almost brotherly +regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by the range of a keen +though limited appreciation, in the powers of the husband, to whom he +wrote: "Take care of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so +entirely to you," and with a half truth, "You have no mission upon earth, +whatever you may fancy, half so important as to be innocently happy." And +again: "Bring your blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek +shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the "banner with a +strange device," and was either deaf or indignant. The visits passed, +with satirical references from both host and hostess; for Mrs. Carlyle, +who could herself abundantly scoff and scold, would allow the liberty to +no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary of well-doing. Previous to +his promotion as Lord Advocate and consequent transference to London, +he tried to negotiate for Carlyle's appointment as his successor in the +editorship of the _Review,_ but failed to make him accept the necessary +conditions. The paper entitled _Signs of the Times_ was the last +production that he had to revise for his eccentric friend. Those +following on Taylor's _German Literature_ and the _Characteristics_ were +brought out in 1831 under the auspices of Macvey Napier. The other visit +was from the most illustrious of Carlyle's English-speaking friends, +in many respects a fellow-worker, yet "a spirit of another sort," and +destined, though a transcendental mystic, to be the most practical of his +benefactors. Twenty-four hours of Ralph Waldo Emerson (often referred to +in the course of a long and intimate correspondence) are spoken of by +Mrs. Carlyle as a visit from the clouds, brightening the prevailing gray. +He came to the remote inland home with "the pure intellectual gleam" of +which Hawthorne speaks, and "the quiet night of clear fine talk" remained +one of the memories which led Carlyle afterwards to say, "Perhaps our +happiest days were spent at the Craig." Goethe's letters, especially +that in which he acknowledges a lock of Mrs. Carlyle's hair, "eine +unvergleichliche schwarze Haar locke," were also among the gleams of +1829. The great German died three years later, after receiving the +birthday tribute, in his 82nd year, from English friends; and it is +pleasant to remember that in this instance the disciple was to the end +loyal to his master. To this period belong many other correspondences. "I +am scribble scribbling," he says in a letter of 1832, and mere scribbling +may fill many pages with few headaches; but Carlyle wrestled as he wrote, +and not a page of those marvellous _Miscellanies_ but is red with his +life's blood. Under all his reviewing, he was set on a work whose +fortunes were to be the strangest, whose result was, in some respects, +the widest of his efforts. The plan of _Sartor Resartus_ is far from +original. Swift's _Tale of a Tub_ distinctly anticipates the Clothes +Philosophy; there are besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs, +Jean Paul Richter, and other German authors: but in our days originality +is only possible in the handling; Carlyle has made an imaginary German +professor the mere mouthpiece of his own higher aspirations and those of +the Scotland of his day, and it remains the most popular as surely as +his _Friedrich_ is the greatest of his works. The author was abundantly +conscious of the value of the book, and super-abundantly angry at the +unconsciousness of the literary patrons of the time. In 1831 he resolved +if possible to go up to London to push the prospects of this first-born +male child. The _res angusta_ stood in the way. Jeffrey, after asking his +friend "what situation he could get him that he would detest the least," +pressed on him "in the coolest, lightest manner the use of his purse." +This Carlyle, to the extent of £50 as a loan (carefully returned), was +induced ultimately to accept. It has been said that "proud men never +wholly forgive those to whom they feel themselves obliged," but their +resenting benefits is the worst feature of their pride. Carlyle made +his second visit to London to seek types for _Sartor_, in vain. Always +preaching reticence with the sound of artillery, he vents in many pages +the rage of his chagrin at the "Arimaspian" publishers, who would not +print his book, and the public which, "dosed with froth," would not +buy it. The following is little softened by the chiaroscuro of +five-and-thirty years:-- + + Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and + August 1830, _Teufelsdröckh_ was ready, and I decided + to make for London; night before going, how I remember it.... + The beggarly history of poor _Sartor_ among the + blockheadisms is not worth recording or remembering, least + of all here! In short, finding that I had got £100 (if + memory serve) for _Schiller_ six or seven years before, + and for _Sartor_, at least twice as good, I could not + only not get £200, but even get no Murray or the like to + publish it on half profits. Murray, a most stupendous + object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the evidently + strong wish to say "Yes" and "No,"--my first signal + experience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will + make it "No," then; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for + some two years from one terrified owl to another; published + at last experimentally in _Fraser_, and even then + mostly laughed at, nothing coming of the volume except what + was sent by Emerson from America. + +This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, on Jeffrey's +recommendation, to accept the book; but on finding that Carlyle had +carried the MS. to Longmans and another publisher, in hopes of a better +bargain, and that it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the +matter to his "reader," and the negotiation closed. _Sartor_ struggled +into half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already +contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published +with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a +nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to +justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in +general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense," +pronounced the _Sun_. "Stop that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of +_Fraser's_ constituents. "When is that stupid series of articles by the +crazy tailor going to end?" cried another. At this time Carlyle used +to say there were only two people who found anything in his book worth +reading--Emerson and a priest in Cork, who said to the editor that he +would take the magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of +_Sartor_. The volume was only published in 1838, by Saunders and Otley, +after the _French Revolution_ had further raised the writer's name, and +then on a guarantee from friends willing to take the risk of loss. +It does not appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some +slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in the +_Reminiscences: "I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends, +from not one of whom did I get the smallest whisper even of receipt--a +thing disappointing more or loss to human nature, and which has silently +and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book to +Edinburgh.... The plebs of literature might be divided in their verdicts +about me; though by count of heads I always suspect the guilty clear had +it; but the conscript fathers declined to vote at all." + +[Footnote: _Tempora mutantur_. A few months before Carlyle's death a cheap +edition of _Sartor_ was issued, and 30,000 copies were sold within a few +weeks.] + +In America _Sartor_ was pieced together from _Fraser_, published in +a volume introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by Emerson as "A +criticism of the spirit of the age in which we live; exhibiting in the +most just and novel light the present aspect of religion, politics, +literature, and social life." The editors add: "We believe no book has +been published for many years ... which discovers an equal mastery over +all the riches of the language. The author makes ample amends for the +occasional eccentricity of his genius not only by frequent bursts of pure +splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him." + +Americans are intolerant of honest criticism on themselves; but they are, +more than any other nation, open to appreciate vigorous expressions +of original views of life and ethics--all that we understand by +philosophy--and equally so to new forms of art. The leading critics of +the New England have often been the first and best testers of the fresh +products of the Old. A land of experiment in all directions, ranging from +Mount Lebanon to Oneida Creek, has been ready to welcome the suggestions, +physical or metaphysical, of startling enterprise. Ideas which filter +slowly through English soil and abide for generations, flash over the +electric atmosphere of the West. Hence Coleridge, Carlyle and Browning +were already accepted as prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen +were still examining their credentials. To this readiness, as of a +photographic plate, to receive, must be added the fact that the message +of _Sartor_ crossed the Atlantic when the hour to receive it had struck. +To its publication has been attributed the origin of a movement that was +almost simultaneously inaugurated by Emerson's _Harvard Discourse_. It +was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in +theory, and precedent in Art that gave birth to the Transcendentalism of +_The Dial_--a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a +place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous, +almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally +obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of +the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory +of his critic--to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable +of slightly erring men--with more than the force of a boomorang. A sheaf +of sharp sayings of the same date owe their sting to their half truth, +_e.g._ to a man who excused himself for profligate journalism on the +old plea, "I must live, sir." "No, sir, you need not live, if your body +cannot be kept together without selling your soul." Similarly he was +abusing the periodicals--"mud," "sand," and "dust magazines"--to which +he had contributed, _inter alia_, the great Essay on _Voltaire_ and the +consummate sketch of _Novalis_; with the second paper on _Richler_ to the +_Foreign Review_, the reviews of _History_ and of _Schiller_ to _Fraser_, +and that on _Goethe's Works_ to the _Foreign Quarterly_. During this +period he was introduced to Molesworth, Austin, and J.S. Mill. On his +summons, October 1st 1832, Mrs. Carlyle came up to Ampton Street, where +he then resided, to see him safe through the rest of his London time. +They lamented over the lapse of Irving, now lost in the delirium of +tongues, and made a league of friendship with Mill, whom he describes as +"a partial disciple of mine," a friendship that stood a hard test, but +was broken when the author of _Liberty_ naturally found it impossible to +remain a disciple of the writer of _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Mill, like +Napier, was at first staggered by the _Characteristics_, though he +afterwards said it was one of Carlyle's greatest works, and was +enthusiastic over the review of Boswell's _Johnson_, published in +_Fraser_ in the course of this year. Meanwhile Margaret, Carlyle's +favourite sister, had died, and his brightest, Jean, "the Craw," had +married her cousin, James Aitken. In memory of the former he wrote as a +master of threnody: to the bridegroom of the latter he addressed a letter +reminding him of the duties of a husband, "to do as he would be done by +to his wife"! In 1832 John, again by Jeffrey's aid, obtained a situation +at £300 a year as travelling physician to Lady Clare, and was enabled, +as he promptly did, to pay back his debts. Alexander seems to have been +still struggling with an imperfectly successful farm. In the same year, +when Carlyle was in London, his father died at Scotsbrig, after a +residence there of six years. His son saw him last in August 1831, when, +referring to his Craigenputtock solitude, he said: "Man, it's surely +a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of +Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak." + +The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic services, baking +bread, preserving eggs, and brightening grates till her eyes grew dim; he +to work at his _Diderot_, doing justice to a character more alien to his +own than even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, to +complete the essay; then at _Count Cagliostro_, also for _Fraser_, a link +between his last Craigenputtock and his first London toils. The period +is marked by shoals of letters, a last present from Weimar, a visit to +Edinburgh, and a candidature for a University Chair, which Carlyle +thought Jeffrey could have got for him; but the advocate did not, +probably could not, in this case satisfy his client. In excusing himself +he ventured to lecture the applicant on what he imagined to be the +impracticable temper and perverse eccentricity which had retarded and +might continue to retard his advancement. + +[Footnote: The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.] + +Carlyle, never tolerant of rebuke however just, was indignant, and though +an open quarrel was avoided by letters, on both sides, of courteous +compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and Jeffrey has a +niche in the _Reminiscences_ as a "little man who meant well but did not +see far or know much." Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the +_Diamond Necklace,_ which is a proem to the _French Revolution,_ but inly +growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any +promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his +own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr übel: all dim, misty, squally, +disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather +than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede. +He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His _Sartor_ is indeed more +contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's +_Confessions,_ or the _Sorrows of Werther,_ or the first two cantos of +_Childe Harold:_ but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay +and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in +the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through +glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At +last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for _me_," and his brave wife +approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his ships and seek his +fortune sink or swim--in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the +initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to +London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in +Chelsea near the Thames. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +CHEYNE ROW + +[1834-1842] + +The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills, +and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds, +as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea, +dotted with brown-sailed ships and holiday boats in place of the +excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle +Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a +stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square." Turning up the row, we find over No. +24, formerly No. 5, the Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house +where the Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men, +lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his headquarters, +but he was a frequent wanderer. About half the time was occupied in trips +almost yearly to Scotland, one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France, +and two to Germany; besides, in the later days, constant visits to +admiring friends, more and more drawn from the higher ranks in English +society, the members of which learnt to appreciate his genius before he +found a hearing among the mass of the people. + +The whole period falls readily under four sections, marking as many phases +of the author's outer and inner life, while the same character is +preserved throughout:-- + +I. 1834-1842--When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the late success of +Carlyle's work relieved him from a long, sometimes severe, struggle with +narrow means. It is the period of the _French Revolution, The Lectures_, +and _Hero-Worship_, and of _Chartism_, the last work with a vestige of +adherence to the Radical creed. + +II. 1842-1853--When the death of his mother loosened his ties to the +North. This decade of his literary career is mainly signalised by the +writing and publication of the _Life and Letters of Cromwell_, of +Carlyle's political works, _Past and Present_ and the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_, and of the _Life of Sterling_, works which mark his now +consummated disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration of +adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed of Christendom." + +III. 1853-1866--When the laurels of his triumphant speech as Lord Rector +at Edinburgh were suddenly withered by the death of his wife. This period +is filled with the _History of Friedrick II._, and marked by a yet more +decidedly accentuated trust in autocracy. + +IV. 1866-1881.--Fifteen years of the setting of the sun. + +The Carlyles, coming to the metropolis in a spirit of rarely realised +audacity on a reserve fund of from £200 to £300 at most, could not +propose to establish themselves in any centre of fashion. In their +circumstances their choice of abode was on the whole a fortunate one. +Chelsea, + + Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite + Beyond it, + +was, even in those days of less constant communication, within measurable +distance of the centres of London life: it had then and still preserves a +host of interesting historic and literary traditions. Among the men who in +old times lived or met together in that outlying region of London, we have +memories of Sir Thomas More and of Erasmus, of the Essayists Addison and +Steele, and of Swift. Hard by is the tomb of Bolingbroke and the Square of +Sir Hans Sloane; Smollett lived for a time in Laurence Street; nearer our +own day, Turner resided in Cheyne Walk, later George Eliot, W.B. Scott, +Dante Rossetti, Swinburne for a season, and George Meredith. When Carlyle +came to settle there, Leigh Huntin Upper Cheyne Row, an almost next-door +neighbour, was among the first of a series of visitors; always welcome, +despite his "hugger-mugger" household and his borrowing tendencies, his +"unpractical messages" and "rose-coloured reform processes," as a bright +"singing bird, musical in flowing talk," abounding in often subtle +criticisms and constant good humour. To the Chelsea home, since the Mecca +of many pilgrims, there also flocked other old Ampton Street friends, +drawn thither by genuine regard, Mrs. Carlyle, by the testimony of Miss +Cushman and all competent judges, was a "_raconteur_ unparalleled." To +quote the same authority, "that wonderful woman, able to live in the full +light of Carlyle's genius without being overwhelmed by it," had a peculiar +skill in drawing out the most brilliant conversationalist of the age. +Burns and Wilson were his Scotch predecessors in an art of which the close +of our century--when every fresh thought is treasured to be printed and +paid for--knows little but the shadow. Of Carlyle, as of Johnson, it might +have been said, "There is no use arguing with him, for if his pistol +misses fire he knocks you down with the butt": both men would have +benefited by revolt from their dictation, but the power to contradict +either was overborne by a superior power to assert. Swift's occasional +insolence, in like manner, prevailed by reason of the colossal strength +that made him a Gulliver in Lilliput. Carlyle in earlier, as in later +times, would have been the better of meeting his mate, or of being +overmatched; but there was no Wellington found for this "grand Napoleon of +the realms" of prose. His reverence for men, if not for things, grew +weaker with the strengthening of his sway, a sway due to the fact that men +of extensive learning are rarely men of incisive force, and Carlyle--in +this respect more akin to Johnson than to Swift--had the acquired material +to serve as fuel for the inborn fire. Hence the least satisfactory of his +criticisms are those passed on his peers. Injustices of conversation +should be pardoned to an impulsive nature, even those of correspondence in +the case of a man who had a mania for pouring out his moods to all and +sundry; but where Carlyle has carefully recarved false estimates in cameo, +his memory must abide the consequence. Quite late in life, referring to +the Chelsea days, he says, "The best of those who then flocked about us +was Leigh Hunt," who never seriously said him nay; "and the worst Lamb," +who was not among the worshippers. No one now doubts that Carlyle's best +adviser and most candid critic might have been John Stuart Mill, for whom +he long felt as much regard as it was possible for him to entertain +towards a proximate equal. The following is characteristic: "He had taken +a great attachment to me (which lasted about ten years and then suddenly +ended, I never knew how), an altogether clear, logical, honest, amicable, +affectionate young man, and respected as such here, though sometimes felt +to be rather colourless, even aqueous, no religion in any form traceable +in him." And similarly of his friend, Mrs. Taylor, "She was a will-o'-the- +wispish iridescence of a creature; meaning nothing bad either"; and again +of Mill himself, "His talk is sawdustish, like ale when there is no wine +to be had." Such criticisms, some ungrateful, others unjust, may be +relieved by reference to the close of two friendships to which (though +even these were clouded by a touch of personal jealousy) he was faithful +in the main; for the references of both husband and wife to Irving's +"delirations" are the tears due to the sufferings of errant minds. Their +last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days was in October 1834, when +he came on horseback to the door of their new home, and left with the +benediction to his lost Jane, "You have made a little Paradise around +you." He died in Glasgow in December of the same year, and his memory is +pathetically embalmed in Carlyle's threnody. The final phases of another +old relationship were in some degree similar. During the first years of +their settlement, Lord Jeffrey frequently called at Cheyne Row, and sent +kind letters to his cousin, received by her husband with the growl, "I am +at work stern and grim, not to be interrupted by Jeffrey's theoretic +flourish of epistolary trumpeting." Carlyle, however, paid more than one +visit to Craigcrook, seeing his host for the last time in the autumn of +1849, "worn in body and thin in mind," "grown lunar now and not solar any +more." Three months later he heard of the death of this benefactor of his +youth, and wrote the memorial which finds its place in the second volume +of the _Reminiscences_. + +[Footnote: Cf. Byron's account of the same household at Pisa. Carlyle +deals very leniently with the malignant volume on Byron which amply +justified the epigram of Moore. But he afterwards spoke more slightly of +his little satellite, attributing the faint praise, in the _Examiner_, of +the second course of lectures to Hunt's jealousy of a friend now +"beginning to be somebody."] + +The work "stern and grim" was the _French Revolution_, the production +of which is the dominant theme of the first chapter of Carlyle's London +life. Mr. Froude, in the course of an estimate of this work which leaves +little room for other criticism, dwells on the fact that it was written +for a purpose, _i.e._ to show that rulers, like those of the French +in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the pleasures and +oblivious of the duties of life, must end by being "burnt up." This, +doubtless, is one of the morals of the _French Revolution_--the other +being that anarchy ends in despotism--and unquestionably a writer who +never ceased to be a preacher must have had it in his mind. But Carlyle's +peculiarity is that he combined the functions of a prophet and of an +artist, and that while now the one, now the other, was foremost, he never +wholly forgot the one in the other. In this instance he found a theme +well fit for both, and threw his heart into it, though under much +discouragement. Despite the Essays, into each of which he had put work +enough for a volume, the Reviews were shy of him; while his _Sartor_ had, +on this side of the Atlantic, been received mainly with jeers. Carlyle, +never unconscious of his prerogative and apostolic primogeniture, felt +like an aspirant who had performed his vigils, and finding himself still +ignored, became a knight of the rueful countenance. Thoroughly equipped, +adept enough in ancient tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German +and a fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from +Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "tragically hard," +exclaiming, "I could learn to do all things I have seen done, and am +forbidden to try any of them." The efforts to keep the wolf from his own +doors were harder than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed in +London with his £200 reserve, he could easily have made way in the +usual ruts; but he would have none of them, and refused to accept the +employment which is the most open, as it is the most lucrative, to +literary aspirants. To nine out of ten the "profession of literature" +means Journalism; while Journalism often means dishonesty, always +conformity. Carlyle was, in a sense deeper than that of the sects, +essentially a nonconformist; he not only disdained to write a word he +did not believe, he would not suppress a word he did believe--a rule +of action fatal to swift success. During these years there began an +acquaintance, soon ripening into intimacy, the memories of which are +enshrined in one of the most beautiful of biographies. Carlyle's relation +to John Sterling drew out the sort of affection which best suited +him--the love of a master for a pupil, of superior for inferior, of the +benefactor for the benefited; and consequently there is no line in the +record of it that jars. Sterling once tried to benefit his friend, and +perhaps fortunately failed. He introduced Carlyle to his father, then the +chief writer in the _Times_, and the Editor invited the struggling author +to contribute to its columns, but, according to Mr. Froude, "on the +implied conditions ... when a man enlists in the army, his soul as well +as his body belong to his commanding officer." Carlyle talked, all his +life, about what his greatest disciple calls "The Lamp of Obedience"; but +he himself would obey no one, and found it hard to be civil to those who +did not see with his eyes. Ho rejected--we trust in polite terms--the +offer of "the Thunderer." "In other respects also," says our main +authority, "he was impracticable, unmalleable, and as independent and +wilful as if he were the heir to a peerage. He had created no 'public' of +his own; the public which existed could not understand his writings +and would not buy them; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more +neglected than he had been in Scotland." Welcome to a limited range of +literary society, he astonished and amused by his vehement eloquence, +but when crossed he was not only "sarcastic" but rude, and speaking of +people, as he wrote of them, with various shades of contempt, naturally +gave frequent offence. Those whose toes are trodden on, not by accident, +justifiably retaliate. "Are you looking for your t-t-turban?" Charles +Lamb is reported to have said in some entertainer's lobby after listening +for an evening to Carlyle's invectives, and the phrase may have rankled +in his mind. Living in a glass case, while throwing stones about, +super-sensitive to criticism though professing to despise critics, he +made at least as many enemies as friends, and by his own confession +became an Ishmaelite. In view of the reception of _Sartor_, we do not +wonder to find him writing in 1833-- + + It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the + craft of literature, and yet I know no fault I have + committed.... I am tempted to go to America.... I shall quit + literature, it does not invite me. Providence warns me to + have done with it. I have failed in the Divine Infernal + Universe; + +or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world +like Teufelsdröckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet +all the time, with incomparable naiveté, he was asserting:-- + + The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my + feeling of natural superiority to them.... The literary + world here is a thing which I have no other course left me + but to defy.... I can reverence no existing man. With health + and peace for one year, I could write a better book than + there has been in this country for generations. + +All through his journal and his correspondence there is a perpetual +alternation of despair and confidence, always closing with the refrain, +"Working, trying is the only remover of doubt," and wise counsels often +echoed from Goethe, "Accomplish as well as you can the task on hand, and +the next step will become clear;" on the other hand--A man must not only +be able to work but to give over working.... If a man wait till he has +entirely brushed off his imperfections, he will spin for ever on his +axis, advancing no whither.... The _French Revolution_ stands pretty +fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to +splash down what I know in large masses of colours, that it may look like +a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance. + +The progress of this work was retarded by the calamity familiar to every +reader, but it must be referred to as throwing one of the finest lights +on Carlyle's character. His closest intellectual link with J.S. Mill was +their common interest in French politics and literature; the latter, +himself meditating a history of the Revolution, not only surrendered in +favour of the man whose superior pictorial genius he recognised, but +supplied him freely with the books he had accumulated for the enterprise. +His interest in the work was unfortunately so great as to induce him to +borrow the MS. of the first volume, completed in the early spring of +1835, and his business habits so defective as to permit him to lend it +without authority; so that, as appears, it was left lying about by Mrs. +Taylor and mistaken by her servant for waste paper: certainly it was +destroyed; and Mill came to Cheyne Row to announce the fact in such a +desperate state of mind that Carlyle's first anxiety seems to have been +to console his friend. According to Mrs. Carlyle, as reported by Froude, +"the first words her husband uttered as the door closed were, 'Well, +Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him +how very serious this business is to us.'" This trait of magnanimity under +the first blow of a disaster which seemed to cancel the work of years +should be set against his nearly contemporaneous criticisms of Coleridge, +Lamb, Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Macaulay, etc. + +[Footnote: Carlyle had only been writing the volume for five months; but +he was preparing for it during much of his life at Craigenputtock.] + +Mill sent a cheque of £200 as "the slightest external compensation" for +the loss, and only, by urgent entreaty, procured the acceptance of half +the sum. Carlyle here, as in every real emergency, bracing his resolve +by courageous words, as "never tine heart or get provoked heart," set +himself to re-write the volume with an energy that recalls that of Scott +rebuilding his ruined estate; but the work was at first so "wretched" +that it had to be laid aside for a season, during which the author +wisely took a restorative bath of comparatively commonplace novels. The +re-writing of the first volume was completed in September 1835; the whole +book in January 1837. The mood in which it was written throws a light on +the excellences as on the defects of the history. The _Reminiscences_ +again record the gloom and defiance of "Thomas the Doubter" walking +through the London streets "with a feeling similar to Satan's stepping +the burning marl," and scowling at the equipages about Hyde Park Corner, +sternly thinking, "Yes, and perhaps none of you could do what I am at. I +shall finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and +withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." In an adjacent page he reports +himself as having said to his wife-- + + What they will do with this book none knows, my lass; but + they have not had for two hundred years any book that came + more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample + it under foot and hoof as they see best.... "They cannot + trample that," she would cheerily answer. + +This passage points at once to the secret of the writer's spell and to +the limits of his lasting power. His works were written seldom with +perfect fairness, never with the dry light required for a clear +presentation of the truth; they have all "an infusion from the will and +the affections"; but they were all written with a whole sincerity and +utter fervour; they rose from his hot heart, and rushed through the air +"like rockets druv' by their own burnin'." Consequently his readers +confess that he has never forgot the Horatian maxim-- + + Si vis me flere, dolendum est + Primum ipsi tibi. + +About this time Carlyle writes, "My friends think I have found the art of +living upon nothing," and there must, despite Mill's contribution, have +been "bitter thrift" in Cheyne REow during the years 1835-1837. He +struggled through the unremunerative interval of waiting for the sale +of a great work by help of fees derived from his essay on the _Diamond +Necklace_ (which, after being refused by the _Foreign Quarterly,_ +appeared in _Fraser,_ 1837), that on _Mirabeau_ in the _Westminster,_ +and in the following year, for the same periodical, the article on _Sir +Walter Scott._ To the last work, undertaken against the grain, he refers +in one of the renewed wails of the year: "O that literature had never +been devised. I am scourged back to it by the whip of necessity." The +circumstance may account for some of the manifest defects of one of the +least satisfactory of Carlyle's longer' reviews. Frequent references in +previous letters show that he never appreciated Scott, to whom he refers +as a mere Restaurateur. + +Meanwhile the appearance of the _French Revolution_ had brought the +name of its author, then in his forty-third year, for the first time +prominently before the public. It attracted the attention of Thackeray, +who wrote a generous review in the _Times,_ of Southey, Jeffrey, +Macaulay, Hallam, and Brougham, who recognised the advent of an equal, if +sometimes an adverse power in the world of letters. But, though the book +established his reputation, the sale was slow, and for some years the +only substantial profits, amounting to about £400, came from America, +through the indefatigable activity and good management of Emerson. It +is pleasant to note a passage in the interesting volumes of their +_Correspondence_ which shows that in this instance the benefited +understood his financial relation to the benefactor: "A reflection I +cannot but make is that, at bottom, this money was all yours; not a penny +of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful friend-ship.... I +could not examine it (the account) without a kind of crime." Others +who, at this period, made efforts to assist "the polar Bear" were less +fortunate. In several instances good intentions paved the palace of +Momus, and in one led a well-meaning man into a notoriously false +position. Mr. Basil Montagu being in want of a private secretary offered +the post to his former guest, as a temporary makeshift, at a salary of +£200, and so brought upon his memory a torrent of contempt. Undeterred by +this and similar warnings, the indefatigable philanthropist, Miss Harriet +Martineau, who at first conciliated the Carlyles by her affection for +"this side of the street," and was afterwards an object of their joint +ridicule, conceived the idea of organising a course of lectures to an +audience collected by canvass to hoar the strange being from the moors +talk for an hour on end about literature, morals, and history. He was +then an object of curiosity to those who knew anything about him at all, +and lecturing was at that time a lucrative and an honourable employment. +The "good Harriet," so called by Cheyne Row in its condescending mood, +aided by other kind friends of the Sterling and Mill circles--the former +including Frederick Denison Maurice--made so great a success of the +enterprise that it was thrice repeated. The _first_ course of six +lectures on "German Literature," May 1837, delivered in Willis's Rooms, +realised £135; the _second_ of twelve, on the "History of European +Literature," at 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, had a net result of +£300; the _third,_ in the same rooms, on "Revolutions," brought £200; the +_fourth,_ on "Heroes," the same. In closing this course Carlyle appeared +for the last time on a public platform until 1866, when he delivered +his Inaugural Address as Lord Rector to the students of Edinburgh. The +impression he produced on his unusually select audiences was that of a +man of genius, but roughly clad. The more superficial auditors had a +new sensation, those who came to stare remained to wonder; the more +reflective felt that they had learnt something of value. Carlyle had +no inconsiderable share of the oratorical power which he latterly so +derided; he was able to speak from a few notes; but there were comments +more or less severe on his manner and style. J. Grant, in his _Portraits +of Public Characters,_ says: "At times he distorts his features as if +suddenly seized by some paroxysm of pain ... he makes mouths; he has a +harsh accent and graceless gesticulation." Leigh Hunt, in the _Examiner,_ +remarks on the lecturer's power of extemporising; but adds that he often +touches only the mountain-tops of the subject, and that the impression +left was as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalised by +German philosophy. Bunsen, present at one of the lectures, speaks of +the striking and rugged thoughts thrown at people's heads; and Margaret +Fuller, afterwards Countess Ossoli, referred to his arrogance redeemed +by "the grandeur of a Siegfried melting down masses of iron into sunset +red." Carlyle's own comments are for the most part slighting. He refers +to his lectures as a mixture of prophecy and play-acting, and says that +when about to open his course on "Heroes" he felt like a man going to be +hanged. To Emerson, April 17th 1839, he writes :-- + + My lectures come on this day two weeks. O heaven! I cannot + "speak"; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a + spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by + want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then--! + Shall it be Switzerland? shall it be Scotland? nay, shall it + be America and Concord? + +Emerson had written about a Boston publication of the _Miscellanies_ +(first there collected), and was continually urging his friend to +emigrate and speak to more appreciative audiences in the States; but +the London lectures, which had, with the remittances from over sea, +practically saved Carlyle from ruin or from exile, had made him decide +"to turn his back to the treacherous Syren"--the temptation to sink into +oratory. Mr. Froude's explanation and defence of this decision may be +clenched by a reference to the warning his master had received. He had +announced himself as a preacher and a prophet, and been taken at his +word; but similarly had Edward Irving, who for a season of sun or glamour +gathered around him the same crowd and glitter: the end came; twilight +and clouds of night. Fashion had flocked to the sermons of the elder +Annandale youth--as to the recitatives of the younger--to see a wild man +of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on" +to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with +"unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed +his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause, +madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with +the fixed resolve, "De me fabula non narrabitur," he shut the book on +this phase of his life. + +The lectures on "Hero-Worship" (a phrase taken from Hume) were published +in 1841, and met with considerable success, the name of the writer having +then begun to run "like wildfire through London." At the close of the +previous year he had published his long pamphlet on _Chartism_, it having +proved unsuitable for its original destination as an article in the +_Quarterly_. Here first he clearly enunciates, "Might is right"--one +of the few strings on which, with all the variations of a political +Paganini, he played through life. This tract is on the border line +between the old modified Radicalism of _Sartor_ and the less modified +Conservatism of his later years. In 1840 Carlyle still speaks of himself +as a man foiled; but at the close of that year all fear of penury was +over, and in the following he was able to refuse a Chair of History at +Edinburgh, as later another at St. Andrews. Meanwhile his practical +power and genuine zeal for the diffusion of knowledge appeared in his +foundation of the London Library, which brought him into more or less +close contact with Tennyson, Milman, Forster, Helps, Spedding, Gladstone, +and other leaders of the thought and action of the time. + +There is little in Carlyle's life at any time that can be called +eventful. From first to last it was that of a retired scholar, a thinker +demanding sympathy while craving after solitude, and the frequent +inconsistency of the two requirements was the source of much of his +unhappiness. Our authorities for all that we do not see in his +published works are found in his voluminous correspondence, copious +autobiographical jottings, and the three volumes of his wife's letters +and journal dating from the commencement of the struggle for recognition +in London, and extending to the year of her death. Criticism of these +remarkable documents, the theme of so much controversy, belongs rather +to a life of Mrs. Carlyle; but a few salient facts may here be noted. It +appears on the surface that husband and wife had in common several +marked peculiarities; on the intellectual side they had not only an +extraordinary amount but the same kind of ability, superhumanly keen +insight, and wonderful power of expression, both with tongue and pen; the +same intensity of feeling, thoroughness, and courage to look the ugliest +truths full in the face; in both, these high qualities were marred by a +tendency to attribute the worst motives to almost every one. Their joint +contempt for all whom they called "fools," _i.e._ the immense majority of +mankind, was a serious drawback to the pleasure of their company. It is +indeed obvious that, whether or not it be correct to say that "his nature +was the soft one, her's the hard," Mrs. Carlyle was the severer cynic of +the two. Much of her writing confirms the impression of those who have +heard her talk that no one, not even her husband, was safe from the +shafts of her ridicule. Her pride in his genius knew no bounds, and it is +improbable that she would have tolerated from any outsider a breath of +adverse criticism; but she herself claimed many liberties she would not +grant. She was clannish as Carlyle himself, yet even her relations +are occasionally made to appear ridiculous. There was nothing in her +affections, save her memory of her own father, corresponding to his +devotion to his whole family. With equal penetration and greater scorn, +she had no share of his underlying reverence. Such limited union as was +granted to her married life had only soured the mocking-bird spirit +of the child that derided her grandfather's accent on occasion of his +bringing her back from a drive by another route to "varry the shane." + +Carlyle's constant wailings take from him any claim to such powers of +endurance as might justify his later attacks on Byron. But neither +had his wife any real reticence. Whenever there were domestic +troubles--flitting, repairing, building, etc., on every occasion of +clamour or worry, he, with scarce pardonable oblivion of physical +delicacy greater than his own, went off, generally to visit distinguished +friends, and left behind him the burden and the heat of the day. She +performed her unpleasant work and all associated duties with a practical +genius that he complimented as "triumphant." She performed them, +ungrudgingly perhaps, but never without complaint; her invariable +practice was to endure and tell. "Quelle vie," she writes in 1837 to John +Sterling, whom she seems to have really liked, "let no woman who values +peace of soul ever marry an author"; and again to the same in 1839, +"Carlyle had to sit on a jury two days, to the ruin of his whole being, +physical, moral, and intellectual," but "one gets to feel a sort of +indifference to his growling." Conspicuous exceptions, as in the case of +the Shelleys, the Dobells, and the Brownings, have been seen, within +or almost within our memories, but as a rule it is a risk for two +supersensitive and nervous people to live together: when they are +sensitive in opposite ways the alliance is fatal; fortunately the +Carlyles were, in this respect, in the main sympathetic. With most of the +household troubles which occupy so exaggerated a space in the letters and +journals of both--papering, plastering, painting, deceitful or disorderly +domestics--general readers have so little concern that they have reason +to resent the number of pages wasted in printing them; but there was one +common grievance of wider and more urgent interest, to which we must here +again finally refer, premising that it affected not one period but the +whole of their lives, _i.e._ their constant, only half-effectual struggle +with the modern Hydra-headed Monster, the reckless and needless Noises +produced or permitted, sometimes increased rather than suppressed, by +modern civilisation. Mrs. Carlyle suffered almost as much as her husband +from these murderers of sleep and assassins of repose; on her mainly fell +the task of contending with the cochin-chinas, whose senseless shrieks +went "through her like a sword," of abating a "Der Freischütz of cats," +or a pandemonium of barrel organs, of suppressing macaws for which +Carryle "could neither think nor live"; now mitigating the scales on a +piano, now conjuring away, by threat or bribe, from their neighbours +a shoal of "demon fowls"; lastly of superintending the troops of +bricklayers, joiners, iron-hammerers employed with partial success to +convert the top story of 5 Cheyne Row into a sound-proof room. Her +hard-won victories in this field must have agreeably added to the sense +of personality to which she resolutely clung. Her assertion, "Instead +of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle +round every individuality," is the essence of much of her mate's +philosophy; but, in the following to Sterling, she somewhat bitterly +protests against her own absorption: "In spite of the honestest efforts +to annihilate my I---ity or merge it in what the world doubtless +considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting, and, +alas, self-seeking me." + +The ever-restive consciousness of being submerged is one of the dominant +notes of her journal, the other is the sense of being even within the +circle unrecognised. "C. is a domestic wandering Jew.... When he is at +work I hardly ever see his face from breakfast to dinner."... "Poor +little wretch that I am, ... I feel as if I were already half-buried ... +in some intermediate state between the living and the dead.... Oh, so +lonely." These are among the _suspiria de profundis_ of a life which her +husband compared to "a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother, +whom he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming:--"Solitude, +indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad like Bedlam; absence +of delirium is possible only for me in solitude"; a sentiment almost +literally acted on. In his offering of penitential cypress, referring to +his wife's delight in the ultimate success of his work, he says, "She +flickered round me like a perpetual radiance." But during their joint +lives their numerous visits and journeys were made at separate times or +apart. They crossed continually on the roads up and down, but when +absent wrote to one another often the most affectionate letters. Their +attraction increased, contrary to Newton's law, in the _direct_ ratio of +the square of the distance, and when it was stretched beyond the stars +the long-latent love of the survivor became a worship. + +Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his +bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration +for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him +unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic +differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have +practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in +comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond +was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first +great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many +callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne +Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, +in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant +friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) +had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with +so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in +her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was +accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to +having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed +on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to +interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her +mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too +characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. +Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger +than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of +candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with +an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother +resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which +prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will +that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round +which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has +recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many +graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane +down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They +parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, +perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but +bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet +waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 +news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried +north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; +when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her +mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle +came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that +the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as +executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, +devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of +pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in +the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading +them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of +the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, +with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again +revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said +of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the +Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place +opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness +of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. +Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath +that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry +scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies +completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the +Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. + +The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife +more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once +Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been +glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the +restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was +constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land +to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed +better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdröckh wanderings +abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A +letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- + +Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his +bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration +for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him +unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic +differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have +practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in +comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond +was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first +great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many +callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne +Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, +in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant +friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) +had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with +so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in +her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was +accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to +having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed +on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to +interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her +mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too +characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. +Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger +than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of +candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with +an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother +resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which +prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will +that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round +which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has +recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many +graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane +down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They +parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, +perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but +bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet +waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 +news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried +north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; +when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her +mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle +came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that +the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as +executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, +devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of +pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in +the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading +them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of +the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, +with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again +revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said +of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the +Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place +opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness +of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. +Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath +that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry +scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies +completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the +Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. + +The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife +more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once +Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been +glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the +restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was +constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land +to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed +better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdröckh wanderings +abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A +letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- + + This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont: and as for + my particular case uses me not worse but better than of old. + Nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for + me.... The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge + roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of + nerves as mine. + + The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the + streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to + be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressingly + as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be _buried_ at + least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub ... + if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I + will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge. + +The competence had come, the death of Mrs. Welsh leaving to his wife and +himself practically from £200 to £300 a year: why not finally return to +the home of their early restful secluded life, "in reductâ, valle," with +no noise around it but the trickle of rills and the nibbling of sheep? +Craigenputtock was now their own, and within its "four walls" they would +begin a calmer life. Fortunately Mrs. Carlyle, whose shrewd practical +instinct was never at fault, saw through the fallacy, and set herself +resolutely against the scheme. Scotland had lost much of its charm for +her--a year later she refused an invitation from Mrs. Aitken, saying, "I +could do nothing at Scotsbrig or Dumfries but cry from morning to night." +She herself had enough of the Hill of the Hawks, and she know that within +a year Carlyle would again be calling it the Devil's Den and lamenting +Cheyne Row. He gave way with the protest, "I cannot deliberately mean +anything that is harmful to you," and certainly it was well for him. + +There is no record of an original writer or artist coming from the +north of our island to make his mark in the south, succeeding, and then +retracing his steps. Had Carlyle done so, he would probably have passed +from the growing recognition of a society he was beginning to find on the +whole congenial, to the solitude of intellectual ostracism. Scotland may +be breezy, but it is not conspicuously free. Erratic opinions when duly +veiled are generally allowed; but this concession is of little worth. On +the tolerance of those who have no strong belief in anything, Carlyle, +thinking possibly of rose-water Hunt and the litterateurs of his tribe, +expressed himself with incisive and memorable truth: "It is but doubt +and indifference. _Touch the thing they do believe and value, their own +self-conceit: they are rattlesnakes then_." + +[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] + +Tolerance for the frank expression of views which clash with the sincere +or professed faith of the majority is rare everywhere; in Scotland +rarest. English Churchmen, high and broad, were content to condone the +grim Calvinism still infiltrating Carlyle's thoughts, and to smile, at +worst, at his idolatry of the iconoclast who said, "the idolater shall +die the death." But the reproach of "Pantheism" was for long fatal to his +reception across the Tweed. + +Towards the close of this period he acknowledged that London was "among +improper places" the best for "writing books," after all the one use of +living "for him;" its inhabitants "greatly the best" he "had ever walked +with," and its aristocracy--the Marshalls, Stanleys, Hollands, Russells, +Ashburtons, Lansdownes, who held by him through life--its "choicest +specimens." Other friendships equally valued he made among the leading +authors of the age. Tennyson sought his company, and Connop Thirlwall. +Arnold of Rugby wrote in commendation of the _French Revolution_ and +hailed _Chartism._ Thackeray admired him and reviewed him well. In +Macaulay, condemned to limbo under the suspicion of having reviewed him +ill, he found, when the suspicion was proved unjust, a promise of +better things. As early as 1839 Sterling had written an article in the +_Westminster,_ which gave him intense pleasure; for while contemning +praise in almost the same words as Byron did, he loved it equally well. +In 1840 he had crossed the Rubicon that lies between aspiration and +attainment. The populace might be blind or dumb, the "rattlesnakes"--the +"irresponsible indolent reviewers," who from behind a hedge pelt every +wrestler till they found societies for the victor--might still obscurely +hiss; but Carlyle was at length safe by the verdict of the "Conscript +Fathers." + +[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] + + + + +CHAPTER V + +CHEYNE ROW + +[1842-1853] + +The bold venture of coming to London with a lean purse, few friends, +and little fame had succeeded: but it had been a terrible risk, and the +struggle had left scars behind it. To this period of his life we may +apply Carlyle's words,--made use of by himself at a later date,--"The +battle was over and we were sore wounded." It is as a maimed knight +of modern chivalry, who sounded the _réveil_ for an onslaught on the +citadels of sham, rather than as a prophet of the future that his name is +likely to endure in the history of English thought. He has also a place +with Scott amongst the recreators of bygone ages, but he regarded their +annals less as pictures than as lesson-books. His aim was that expressed +by Tennyson to "steal fire from fountains of the past," but his design +was to admonish rather than "to glorify the present." This is the avowed +object of the second of his distinctly political works, which following +on the track of the first, _Charlism_, and written in a similar spirit, +takes higher artistic rank. _Past and Present_, suggested by a visit to +the poorhouse of St. Ives and by reading the chronicle of _Jocelin de +Brakelond_, was undertaken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a +greater work,--the duty he felt laid upon him to say some thing that +should bear directly on the welfare of the people, especially of the poor +around him. It was an impulse similar to that which inspired _Oliver +Twist_, but Carlyle's remedies were widely different from those of +Dickens. Not merely more kindness and sympathy, but paternal government, +supplying work to the idle inmates of the workhouse, and insisting, by +force if need be, on it being done, was his panacea. It had been Abbot +Samson's way in his strong government of the Monastery of St. Edmunds, +and he resolved, half in parable, half in plain sermon, to recommend it +to the Ministers Peel and Russell. + +In this mood, the book was written off in the first seven weeks of +1843, a _tour de force_ comparable to Johnson's writing of _Rasselas_. +Published in April, it at once made a mark by the opposition as well as +by the approval it excited. Criticism of the work--of its excellences, +which are acknowledged, and its defects as manifold--belongs to a review +of the author's political philosophy: it is enough here to note that it +was remarkable in three ways. _First_, the object of its main attack, +_laissez faire_, being a definite one, it was capable of having and had +some practical effect. Mr. Froude exaggerates when he says that Carlyle +killed the pseudo-science of orthodox political economy; for the +fundamental truths in the works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, and Mill +cannot be killed: but he pointed out that, like Aristotle's leaden rule, +the laws of supply and demand must be made to bend; as Mathematics made +mechanical must allow for friction, so must Economics leave us a little +room for charity. There is ground to believe that the famous Factory Acts +owed some of their suggestions to _Past and Present_. Carlyle always +speaks respectfully of the future Lord Shaftesbury. "I heard Milnes +saying," notes the Lady Sneerwell of real life, "at the Shuttleworths +that Lord Ashley was the greatest man alive: he was the only man that +Carlyle praised in his book. I daresay he knew I was overhearing him." +But, while supplying arguments and a stimulus to philanthropists, his +protests against philanthropy as an adequate solution of the problem of +human misery became more pronounced. About the date of the conception of +this book we find in the Journal:-- + + Again and again of late I ask myself in whispers, is it the + duty of a citizen to paint mere heroisms? ... Live to make + others happy! Yes, surely, at all times, so far as you can. + But at bottom that is not the aim of my life ... it is mere + hypocrisy to call it such, as is continually done + nowadays.... Avoid cant. Do not think that your life means + a mere searching in gutters for fallen figures to wipe and + set up. + +_Past and Present_, in the _second_ place, is notable as the only +considerable consecutive book--unless we also except the _Life of +Sterling_,--which the author wrote without the accompaniment of +wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts. _Thirdly_, though marking a stage +in his mental progress, the fusion of the refrains of _Chartism_ and +_Hero-Worship_, and his first clear breach with Mazzini and with Mill, +the book was written as an interlude, when he was in severe travail with +his greatest contribution to English history. The last rebuff which +Carlyle encountered came, by curious accident, from the _Westminster_, to +which Mill had engaged him to contribute an article on "Oliver Cromwell." +While this was in preparation, Mill had to leave the country on account +of his health, and gave the review in charge to an Aberdonian called +Robertson, who wrote to stop the progress of the essay with the message +that _he_ had decided to undertake the subject himself. Carlyle was +angry; but, instead of sullenly throwing the MS. aside, he set about +constructing on its basis a History of the Civil War. + +Numerous visits and tours during the following three years, though +bringing him into contact with new and interesting personalities, were +mainly determined by the resolve to make himself acquainted with the +localities of the war; and his knowledge of them has contributed to give +colour and reality to the finest battle-pieces in modern English prose. +In 1842 with Dr. Arnold he drove from Rugby fifteen miles to Naseby, and +the same year, after a brief yachting trip to Belgium--in the notes on +which the old Flemish towns stand out as clearly as in Longfellow's +verse--he made his pilgrimage to St. Ives and Ely Cathedral, where Oliver +two centuries before had called out to the recalcitrant Anglican in the +pulpit, "Cease your fooling and come down." In July 1843 Carlyle made a +trip to South Wales; to visit first a worthy devotee called Redwood, and +then Bishop Thirlwall near Carmarthen. "A right solid simple-hearted +robust man, very strangely swathed," is the visitor's meagre estimate of +one of our most classic historians. + +On his way back he carefully reconnoitred the field of Worcester. Passing +his wife at Liverpool, where she was a guest of her uncle, and leaving +her to return to London and brush up Cheyne Row, he walked over Snowdon +from Llanheris to Beddgelert with his brother John. He next proceeded +to Scotsbrig, then north to Edinburgh, and then to Dunbar, which he +contrived to visit on the 3rd of September, an anniversary revived in his +pictured page with a glow and force to match which we have to revert +to Bacon's account of the sea-fight of the _Revenge_. From Dunbar he +returned to Edinburgh, spent some time with his always admired and +admiring friend Erskine of Linlathen, a Scotch broad churchman of the +type of F.D. Maurice and Macleod Campbell, and then went home to set in +earnest to the actual writing of his work. He had decided to abandon +the design of a History, and to make his book a Biography of Cromwell, +interlacing with it the main features and events of the Commonwealth. The +difficulties even of this reduced plan were still immense, and his groans +at every stage in its progress were "louder and more loud," _e.g._ "My +progress in _Cromwell_ is frightful." "A thousand times I regretted that +this task was ever taken up." "The most impossible book of all I ever +before tried," and at the close, "_Cromwell_ I must have written in 1844, +but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to +me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling, +and misery I used to count it had cost me." The book issued in 1845 soon +went through three editions, and brought the author to the front as the +most original historian of his time. Macaulay was his rival, but in +different paths of the same field. About this time Mr. Froude became his +pupil, and has left an interesting account (iii. 290-300) of his master's +influence over the Oxford of those days, which would be only spoilt +by selections. Oxford, like Athens, ever longing after something new, +patronised the Chelsea prophet, and then calmed down to her wonted +cynicism. But Froude and Ruskin were, as far as compatible with the +strong personality of each, always loyal; and the capacity inborn in +both, the power to breathe life into dry records and dead stones, had at +least an added impulse from their master. + +The year 1844 is marked by the publication in the _Foreign Quarterly_ of +the essay on _Dr. Francia,_ and by the death of John Sterling,--loved +with the love of David for Jonathan--outside his own family losses, the +greatest wrench in Carlyle's life. Sterling's published writings are as +inadequate to his reputation as the fragmentary remains of Arthur Hallam; +but in friendships, especially unequal friendships, personal fascination +counts for more than half, and all are agreed as to the charm in both +instances of the inspiring companionships. Archdeacon Hare having given a +somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergyman, Carlyle three +years later, in 1851, published his own impressions of his friend as +a thinker, sane philanthropist, and devotee of truth, in a work that, +written in a three months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though +faltering, as prose after verse, with _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, and +Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_. + +These years are marked by a series of acts of unobtrusive benevolence, +the memory of which has been in some cases accidentally rescued from the +oblivion to which the benefactor was willing to have them consigned. +Carlyle never boasted of doing a kindness. He was, like Wordsworth, +frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as generous in giving as he +was ungenerous in judging. His assistance to Thomas Cooper, author of the +_Purgatory of Suicides_, his time spent in answering letters of "anxious +enquirers,"--letters that nine out of ten busy men would have flung into +the waste-paper basket,--his interest in such works as Samuel Bamford's +_Life of a Radical_, and admirable advice to the writer; his instructions +to a young student on the choice of books, and well-timed warning to +another against the profession of literature, are sun-rifts in the storm, +that show "a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The same +epoch, however,--that of the start of the great writer's almost +uninterrupted triumph--brings us in face of an episode singularly delicate +and difficult to deal with, but impossible to evade. + +[Footnote: These letters to Bamford, showing a keen interest in the +working men of whom his correspondent had written, point to the ideal of a +sort of Tory Democracy. Carlyle writes: "We want more knowledge about the +Lancashire operatives; their miseries and gains, virtues and vices. Winnow +what you have to say, and give us wheat free from chaff. Then the rich +captains of workers will he willing to listen to you. Brevity and +sincerity will succeed. Be brief and select, omit much, give each subject +its proper proportionate space; and be exact without caring to round off +the edges of what you have to say." Later, he declines Bamford's offer of +verses, saying "verse is a bugbear to booksellers at present. These are +prosaic, earnest, practical, not singing times."] + +Carlyle, now generally recognised in London as having one of the most +powerful intellects and by far the greatest command of language among his +contemporaries, was beginning to suffer some of the penalties of renown +in being beset by bores and travestied by imitators; but he was also +enjoying its rewards. Eminent men of all shades of opinion made his +acquaintance; he was a frequent guest of the genial Maecenas, an admirer +of genius though no mere worshipper of success, R. Monckton Milnes; +meeting Hallam, Bunsen, Pusey, etc., at his house in London, and +afterwards visiting him at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. The future Lord +Houghton was, among distinguished men of letters and society, the one of +whom he spoke with the most unvarying regard. Carlyle corresponded with +Peel, whom he set almost on a par with Wellington as worthy of +perfect trust, and talked familiarly with Bishop Wilberforce, whom he +miraculously credits with holding at heart views much like his own. At +a somewhat later date, in the circle of his friends, bound to him by +various degrees of intimacy, History was represented by Thirlwall, Grote, +and Froude; Poetry by Browning, Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Clough; +Social Romance by Kingsley; Biography by James Spedding and John Forster; +and Criticism by John Ruskin. His link to the last named was, however, +their common distrust of political economy, as shown in _Unto This Last_, +rather than any deep artistic sympathy. In Macaulay, a conversationalist +more rapid than himself, Carlyle found a rival rather than a companion; +but his prejudiced view of physical science was forgotten in his personal +affection for Tyndall and in their congenial politics. His society was +from the publication of _Cromwell_ till near his death increasingly +sought after by the aristocracy, several members of which invited him to +their country seats, and bestowed on him all acceptable favours. In this +class he came to find other qualities than those referred to in the +_Sartor_ inscription, and other aims than that of "preserving their +game,"--the ambition to hold the helm of the State in stormy weather, and +to play their part among the captains of industry. In the _Reminiscences_ +the aristocracy are deliberately voted to be "for continual grace of +bearing and of acting, steadfast honour, light address, and cheery +stoicism, actually yet the best of English classes." There can be no +doubt that his intercourse with this class, as with men of affairs and +letters, some of whom were his proximate equals, was a fortunate sequel +to the duck-pond of Ecclefechan and the lonely rambles on the Border +moors. + + Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, + Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt. + +The life of a great capital may be the crown of education, but there is +a danger in homage that comes late and then without reserve. Give me +neither poverty nor riches, applies to praise as well as to wealth; and +the sudden transition from comparative neglect to + + honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, + +is a moral trial passing the strength of all but a few of the "irritable +race" of writers. The deference paid to Carlyle made him yet more +intolerant of contradiction, and fostered his selfishness, in one +instance with the disastrous result of clouding a whole decade of his +domestic life. In February 1839 he speaks of dining--"an eight-o'clock +dinner which ruined me for a week"--with "a certain Baring," at whose +table in Bath House he again met Bunsen, and was introduced to Lord +Mahon. This was the beginning of what, after the death of Sterling, +grew into the most intimate friendship of his life. Baring, son of Lord +Ashburton of the American treaty so named, and successor to the title on +his father's death in 1848, was a man of sterling worth and sound sense, +who entered into many of the views of his guest. His wife was by general +consent the most brilliant woman of rank in London, whose grace, wit, +refinement, and decision of character had made her the acknowledged +leader of society. Lady Harriet, by the exercise of some overpowering +though purely intellectual spell, made the proudest of men, the modern +Diogenes, our later Swift, so much her slave that for twelve years, +whenever he could steal a day from his work, he ran at her beck from town +to country, from castle to cot; from Addiscombe, her husband's villa in +Surrey, to the Grange, her father-in-law's seat in Hampshire; from Loch +Luichart and Glen Finnan, where they had Highland shootings, to the +Palais Eoyal. Mr. Froude's comment in his introduction to the Journal +is substantially as follows: Lady Harriet Baring or Ashburton was the +centre of a planetary system in which every distinguished public man of +genuine worth then revolved. Carlyle was naturally the chief among them, +and he was perhaps at one time ambitious of himself taking some part in +public affairs, and saw the advantage of this stepping-stone to enable +him to do something more for the world, as Byron said, than write books +for it. But the idea of entering Parliament, which seems to have once +suggested itself to him in 1849, was too vague and transient to have ever +influenced his conduct. It is more correct to say that he was flattered +by a sympathy not too thorough to be tame, pleased by adulation never +gross, charmed by the same graces that charmed the rest, and finally +fascinated by a sort of hypnotism. The irritation which this strange +alliance produced in the mind of the mistress of Cheyne Row is no matter +of surprise. Pride and affection together had made her bear with all her +husband's humours, and share with him all the toils of the struggle +from obscurity. He had emerged, and she was still half content to be +systematically set aside for his books, the inanimate rivals on which he +was building a fame she had some claim to share. But her fiery spirit was +not yet tamed into submitting to be sacrificed to an animate rival, or +passively permitting the usurpation of companionship grudged to herself +by another woman, whom she could not enjoy the luxury of despising. Lady +Harriet's superiority in _finesse_ and geniality, as well as advantages +of station, only aggravated the injury; and this with a singular want of +tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting +the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, +were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between +the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently +unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental +neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's +"Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen goddess," while Mrs. +Carlyle, with reference to her favourite dog "Nero," was in her turn +nicknamed "Agrippina." + +In midsummer of 1846, after an enforced sojourn at Addiscombe in worse +than her usual health, she returned to Chelsea with "her mind all churned +to froth," and opened it to her husband with such plainness that "there +was a violent scene": she left the house in a mood like that of the first +Mrs. Milton, and took refuge with her friends the Paulets at Seaforth +near Liverpool, uncertain whether or not she would return. There were +only two persons from whom it seemed natural for her at such a crisis +to ask advice; one was Geraldine Jewsbury, a young Manchester lady, +authoress of a well-known novel, _The Half-Sisters_, from the beginning +of their acquaintance in 1841 till the close in 1866 her most intimate +associate and chosen confidant, who, we are told, "knew all" her secrets. + +[Footnote: Carlyle often speaks, sometimes slightingly, of Miss Jewsbury, +as a sensational novelist and admirer of George Sand, but he appreciated +her genuine worth.] + +The other was the inspired Italian, pure patriot and Stoic moralist Joseph +Mazzini. To him she wrote twice--once apparently before leaving London, +and again from Seaforth. His letters in reply, tenderly sympathetic and +yet rigidly insistent on the duty of forbearance and endurance, availed to +avert the threatened catastrophe; but there are sentences which show how +bitter the complaints must have been. + + It is only you who can teach yourself that, whatever the + _present_ may be, you must front it with dignity.... I + could only point out to you the fulfilment of duties which + can make life--not happy--what can? but earnest, sacred, and + resigned.... I am carrying a burden even heavier than you, + and have undergone even bitterer deceptions. Your life + proves an empty thing, you say. Empty! Do not blaspheme. + Have you never done good? Have you never loved? ... Pain and + joy, deception and fulfilled hopes are just the rain and the + sunshine that must meet the traveller on his way. Bless the + Almighty if He has thought proper to send the latter to + you.... Wrap your cloak round you against the first, but do + not think a single moment that the one or the other have + anything to do with the _end_ of the journey. + +Carlyle's first letter after the rupture is a mixture of reproach +and affection. "We never parted before in such a manner; and all for +literally nothing.... Adieu, dearest, for that is, and, if madness +prevail not, may for ever be your authentic title." Another, enclosing +the birthday present which he had never omitted since her mother's death, +softened his wife's resentment, and the storm blew over for a time. +But while the cause remained there was in the house at best a surface +tranquillity, at worst an under tone of misery which (October 1855 to May +1856) finds voice in the famous Diary, not merely covered with "black +spider webs," but steeped in gall, the publication of which has made so +much debate. It is like a page from _Othello_ reversed. A few sentences +condense the refrain of the lament. "Charles Buller said of the Duchess +de Praslin, 'What could a poor fellow do with a wife that kept a journal +but murder her?'" "That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand +miles Mr. C. has walked between here and there?" "Being an only child, I +never wished to sew men's trousers--no, never!" + + I gin to think I've sold myself + For very little cas." + +"To-day I called on my lady: she was perfectly civil, for a wonder." + +"Edward Irving! The past is past and gone is gone-- + + O waly, waly, love is bonnie, + A little while when it is new;" + +quotations which, laid alongside the records of the writer's visit to the +people at Haddington, "who seem all to grow so good and kind as they grow +old," and to the graves in the churchyard there, are infinitely pathetic. +The letters that follow are in the same strain, _e.g._ to Carlyle when +visiting his sister at the Gill, "I never forget kindness, nor, alas, +unkindness either": to Luichart, "I don't believe thee, wishing yourself +at home.... You don't, as weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself +for the pleasure of others"; to Mrs. Russell at Thornhill, "My London +doctor's prescription is that I should be kept always happy and +tranquil(!!!)." + +In the summer of 1856 Lady Ashburton gave a real ground for offence in +allowing both the Carlyles, on their way north with her, to take a seat +in an ordinary railway carriage, beside her maid, while she herself +travelled in a special saloon. Partly, perhaps in consequence, Mrs. +Carlyle soon went to visit her cousins in Fifeshire, and afterwards +refused to accompany her ladyship on the way back. This resulted in +another quarrel with her husband, who had issued the command from +Luichart--but it was their last on the subject, for Gloriana died on the +4th of the following May, 1857, at Paris: "The most queen-like woman I +had ever known or seen, by nature and by culture _facile princeps_ she, I +think, of all great ladies I have ever seen." This brought to a close an +episode in which there were faults on both sides, gravely punished: the +incidents of its course and the manner in which they were received show, +among other things, that railing at the name of "Happiness" does little +or nothing to reconcile people to the want of the reality. In 1858 Lord +Ashburton married again--a Miss Stuart Mackenzie, who became the attached +friend of the Carlyles, and remained on terms of unruffled intimacy with +both till the end: she survived her husband, who died in 1864, leaving a +legacy of £2000 to the household at Cheyne Row. _Sic transiit._ + +From this date we must turn back over nearly twenty years to retrace the +main steps of the great author's career. Much of the interval was devoted +to innumerable visits, in acceptance of endless hospitalities, or in +paying his annual devotions to Annandale,--calls on his time which kept +him rushing from place to place like a comet. Two facts are notable about +those expeditions: they rarely seemed to give him much pleasure, even at +Scotsbrig he complained of sleepless nights and farm noises; and he was +hardly ever accompanied by his wife. She too was constantly running north +to her own kindred in Liverpool or Scotland, but their paths did not run +parallel, they almost always intersected, so that when the one was on the +way north the other was homeward bound, to look out alone on "a horizon +of zero." Only a few of these visits are worth recording as of general +interest. Most of them were paid, a few received. In the autumn of 1846, +Margaret Fuller, sent from Emerson, called at Cheyne Row, and recorded +her impression of the master as "in a very sweet humour, full of wit and +pathos, without being overbearing," adding that she was "carried away by +the rich flow of his discourse"; and that "the hearty noble earnestness +of his personal bearing brought back the charm of his writing before she +wearied of it." A later visitor, Miss Martineau, his old helper in days +of struggle, was now thus esteemed: "Broken into utter wearisomeness, +a mind reduced to these three elements--imbecility, dogmatism, and +unlimited hope. I never in my life was more heartily bored with any +creature!" In 1847 there followed the last English glimpse of Jeffrey and +the last of Dr. Chalmers, who was full of enthusiasm about _Cromwell_; +then a visit to the Brights, John and Jacob, at Rochdale: with the former +he had "a paltry speaking match" on topics described as "shallow, totally +worthless to me," the latter he liked, recognising in him a culture and +delicacy rare with so much strength of will and independence of thought. +Later came a second visit from Emerson, then on a lecturing tour to +England, gathering impressions revived in his _English Traits_. "His +doctrines are too airy and thin," wrote Carlyle, "for the solid practical +heads of the Lancashire region. We had immense talkings with him here, +but found that he did not give us much to chew the cud upon. He is a +pure-minded man, but I think his talent is not quite so high as I had +anticipated." They had an interesting walk to Stonehenge together, +and Carlyle attended one of his friend's lectures, but with modified +approval, finding this serene "spiritual son" of his own rather "gone +into philanthropy and moonshine." Emerson's notes of this date, on the +other hand, mark his emancipation from mere discipleship. "Carlyle had +all the kleinstãdtlicher traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and +reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a +vast continent.... In him, as in Byron, one is more struck with the +rhetoric than with the matter.... There is more character than intellect +in every sentence, therein strangely resembling Samuel Johnson." The same +year Carlyle perpetrated one of his worst criticisms, that on Keats:-- + + The kind of man he was gets ever more horrible to me. Force + of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other + force.... Such a structure of soul, it would once have been + very evident, was a chosen "Vessel of Hell"; + +and in the next an ungenerously contemptuous reference to Macaulay's +_History_:-- + + The most popular ever written. Fourth edition already, + within perhaps four months. Book to which four hundred + editions could not add any value, there being no depth of + sense in it at all, and a very great quantity of rhetorical + wind. + +Landor, on the other hand, whom he visited later at Bath, he appreciated, +being "much taken with the gigantesque, explosive but essentially +chivalrous and almost heroic old man." He was now at ease about the sale +of his books, having, _inter alia_, received £600 for a new edition of +the _French Revolution_ and the _Miscellanies_. His journal is full of +plans for a new work on Democracy, Organisation of Labour, and Education, +and his letters of the period to Thomas Erskine and others are largely +devoted to politics. + +[Footnote: This is one of the few instances in which further knowledge led +to a change for the better in Carlyle's judgment. In a letter to Emerson, +1840, he speaks disparagingly of Landor as "a wild man, whom no extent of +culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be +weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about +anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind +shows him this side or the other of the object: and _sides_ of an object +are all that he sees." _De te faliula._ Emerson answers defending Landor, +and indicating points of likeness between him and Carlyle.] + +In 1846 he spent the first week of September in Ireland, crossing from +Ardrossan to Belfast, and then driving to Drogheda, and by rail to +Dublin, where in Conciliation Hall he saw O'Connell for the first time +since a casual glimpse at a radical meeting arranged by Charles Buller--a +meeting to which he had gone out of curiosity in 1834. O'Connell was +always an object of Carlyle's detestation, and on this occasion he does +not mince his words. + + Chief quack of the then world ... first time I had ever + heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney + ... the big beggar-man who had £15,000 a year, and, _proh + pudor!_ the favour of English ministers instead of the + pillory. + +At Dundrum he met by invitation Carleton the novelist, with Mitchell and +Gavan Duffy, the Young Ireland leaders whom he seems personally to have +liked, but he told Mitchell that he would probably be hanged, and said +during a drive about some flourishing and fertile fields of the Pale, "Ah! +Duffy, there you see the hoof of the bloody Saxon." + +[Footnote: Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the "Conversations and Correspondence," +now being published in the _Contemporary Review_, naturally emphasises +Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several expressions of +sympathy with the "Tenant Agitations"; but his demur to the _Reminiscences +of My Irish Journey_ being accepted as an accurate account of the writer's +real sentiments is of little avail in face of the letters to Emerson, more +strongly accentuating the same views, _e.g._ "Bothered almost to madness +with Irish balderdash.... '_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars,' I +sometimes advised, 'and sell them in Brazil as niggers!'--perhaps +Parliament on sweet constraint will allow you to advance them to be +niggers!"] + +He returned from Kingston to Liverpool on the 10th, and so closed his +short and unsatisfactory trip. Three years later, July to August 6th, +1849, he paid a longer and final visit to the "ragged commonweal" or +"common woe," as Raleigh called it, landing at Dublin, and after some days +there passing on to Kildare, Kilkenny, Lismore, Waterford, beautiful +Killarney and its beggar hordes, and then to Limerick, Clare, Castlebar, +where he met W.E. Forster, whose acquaintance he had made two years +earlier at Matlock. At Gweedore in Donegal he stayed with Lord George +Hill, whom he respected, though persuaded that he was on the wrong road to +Reform by Philanthropy in a country where it had never worked; and then on +to half Scotch Derry. There, August 6th, he made an emphatic after- +breakfast speech to a half-sympathetic audience; the gist of it being that +the remedy for Ireland was not "emancipation" or "liberty," but to "cease +following the devil, as it had been doing for two centuries." The same +afternoon he escaped on board a Glasgow steamer, and landed safe at 2 A.M. +on the morning of the 7th. The notes of the tour, set down on his return +to Chelsea and republished in 1882, have only the literary merit of the +vigorous descriptive touches inseparable from the author's lightest +writing; otherwise they are mere rough-and-tumble jottings, with no +consecutive meaning, of a rapid hawk's-eye view of the four provinces. + +But Carlyle never ceased to maintain the thesis they set forth, that +Ireland is, for the most part, a country of semi-savages, whose +staple trade is begging, whose practice is to lie, unfit not only +for self-government but for what is commonly called constitutional +government, whose ragged people must be coerced, by the methods of +Raleigh, of Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and +respect for law. At Westport, where "human swinery has reached its acme," +he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred +hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, +while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be +a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of +the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his +neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers +generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country +when he formulated his idea of the Home Rule that seemed to him most for +their good. + + Kildare Railway: big blockhead sitting with his dirty feet + on seat opposite, not stirring them for one who wanted to + sit there. "One thing we're all agreed on," said he; "we're + very ill governed: Whig, Tory, Radical, Repealer, all all + admit we're very ill-governed!" I thought to myself, "Yes, + indeed; you govern yourself! He that would govern you well + would probably surprise you much, my friend--laying a hearty + horse-whip over that back of yours." + +And a little later at Castlebar he declares, "Society here would have to +eat itself and end by cannibalism in a week, if it were not held up by +the rest of our Empire standing afoot." These passages are written in +the spirit which inspired his paper on "The Nigger Question" and the +aggressive series of assaults to which it belongs, on what he regarded as +the most prominent quackeries, shams, and pretence philanthropies of the +day. His own account of the reception of this work is characteristic:-- + + In 1849, after an interval of deep gloom and bottomless + dubitation, came _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, which + unpleasantly astonished everybody, set the world upon the + strangest suppositions--"Carlyle got deep into whisky," said + some,--ruined my reputation according to the friendliest + voices, and in effect divided me altogether from the mob of + "Progress-of-the-species" and other vulgar; but were a great + relief to my own conscience as a faithful citizen, and have + been ever since. + +These pamphlets alienated Mazzini and Mill, and provoked the assault +of the newspapers; which, by the author's confession, did something to +arrest and restrict the sale. + +Nor was this indignation wholly unnatural. Once in his life, on occasion +of his being called to serve at a jury trial, Carlyle, with remarkable +adroitness, coaxed a recalcitrant juryman into acquiescence with the +majority; but coaxing as a rule was not his way. When he found himself in +front of what he deemed to be a falsehood his wont was to fly in its face +and tear it to pieces. His satire was not like that of Horace, who taught +his readers _ridendo dicere verum_, it was rather that of the elder +Lucilius or the later Juvenal; not that of Chaucer, who wrote-- + + That patience is a virtue high is plain, + Because it conquers, as the clerks explain, + Things that rude valour never could attain, + +but that of _The Lye_, attributed to Raleigh, or Swift's _Gulliver_ or +the letters of Junius. The method of direct denunciation has advantages: +it cannot be mistaken, nor, if strong enough, ignored; but it must lay +its account with consequences, and Carlyle in this instance found them +so serious that he was threatened at the height of his fame with +dethronement. Men said he had lost his head, gone back to the everlasting +"No," and mistaken swearing all round for political philosophy. The +ultimate value attached to the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ must depend to a +large extent on the view of the critic. It is now, however, generally +admitted on the one hand that they served in some degree to counteract +the rashness of Philanthropy; on the other, that their effect was marred +by more than the writer's usual faults of exaggeration. It is needless to +refer the temper they display to the troubles then gathering about his +domestic life. A better explanation is to be found in the public events +of the time. + +The two years previous to their appearance were the Revolution years, +during which the European world seemed to be turned upside down. The +French had thrown out their _bourgeois_ king, Louis Philippe--"the +old scoundrel," as Carlyle called him,--and established their second +Republic. Italy, Hungary, and half Germany were in revolt against the old +authorities; the Irish joined in the chorus, and the Chartist monster +petition was being carted to Parliament. Upheaval was the order of the +day, kings became exiles and exiles kings, dynasties and creeds were +being subverted, and empires seemed rocking as on the surface of an +earthquake. They were years of great aspirations, with beliefs in all +manner of swift regeneration-- + + Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, + +all varieties of doctrinaire idealisms. Mazzini failed at Rome, Kossuth +at Pesth; the riots of Berlin resulted in the restoration of the old +dull bureaucratic regime; Smith O'Brien's bluster exploded in a cabbage +garden; the Railway Bubble burst in the fall of the bloated king Hudson, +and the Chartism of the time evaporated in smoke. The old sham gods, with +Buonaparte of the stuffed eagle in front, came back; because, concluded +Carlyle, there was no man in the front of the new movement strong enough +to guide it; because its figure-heads were futile sentimentalists, +insurgents who could not win. The reaction produced by their failure had +somewhat the same effect on his mind that the older French Revolution had +on that of Burke: he was driven back to a greater degree than Mr. Froude +allows on practical conservatism and on the negations of which +the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ are the expression. To this series of +_pronunciamentos_ of political scepticism he meant to add another, of +which he often talks under the name of "Exodus from Houndsditch," boldly +stating and setting forth the grounds of his now complete divergence from +all forms of what either in England or Europe generally could be called +the Orthodox faith in Religion. He was, we are told, withheld from this +by the feeling that the teaching even of the priests he saw and derided +in Belgium or in Galway was better than the atheistic materialism which +he associated with the dominion of mere physical science. He may have +felt he had nothing definite enough to be understood by the people to +substitute for what he proposed to destroy; and he may have had a thought +of the reception of such a work at Scotsbrig. Much of the _Life of +Sterling_, however, is somewhat less directly occupied with the same +question, and though gentler in tone it excited almost as much clamour as +the _Pamphlets_, especially in the north. The book, says Carlyle himself, +was "utterly revolting to the religious people in particular (to my +surprise rather than otherwise). 'Doesn't believe in us either!' Not he +for certain; can't, if you will know." During the same year his almost +morbid dislike of materialism found vent in denunciations of the "Crystal +Palace" Exhibition of Industry; though for its main promoter, Prince +Albert, he subsequently entertained and expressed a sincere respect. + +In the summer of 1851 the Carlyles went together to Malvern, where they +met Tennyson (whose good nature had been proof against some slighting +remarks on his verses), Sydney Dobell, then in the fame of his +"Roman," and other celebrities. They tried the "Water Cure," under the +superintendence of Dr. Gully, who received and treated them as guests; +but they derived little good from the process. "I found," says Carlyle, +"water taken as medicine to be the most destructive drug I had ever +tried." Proceeding northward, he spent three weeks with his mother, then +in her eighty-fourth year and at last growing feeble; a quiet time only +disturbed by indignation at "one ass whom I heard the bray of in some +Glasgow newspaper," comparing "our grand hater of shams" to Father +Gavazzi. His stay was shortened by a summons to spend a few days with the +Ashburtons at Paris on their return from Switzerland. Though bound by +a promise to respond to the call, Carlyle did not much relish it. +Travelling abroad was always a burden to him, and it was aggravated in +this case by his very limited command of the language for conversational +purposes. Fortunately, on reaching London he found that the poet Browning, +whose acquaintance he had made ten years before, was, with his wife, about +to start for the same destination, and he prevailed upon them, though +somewhat reluctant, to take charge of him. + +[Footnote: Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life of Robert Browning_.] + +The companionship was therefore not accidental, and it was of great +service. "Carlyle," according to Mrs. Browning's biographer, "would have +been miserable without Browning," who made all the arrangements for the +party, passed luggage through the customs, saw to passports, fought the +battles of all the stations, and afterwards acted as guide through the +streets of the great city. By a curious irony, two verse-makers and +admirers of George Sand made it possible for the would-be man of action to +find his way. The poetess, recalling the trip afterwards, wrote that she +liked the prophet more than she expected, finding his "bitterness only +melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." Browning himself continued through +life to regard Carlyle with "affectionate reverence." "He never ceased," +says Mrs. Orr, "to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his +wife, or to believe that, in the matter of their domestic unhappiness, she +was the more responsible of the two.... He always thought her a hard +unlovable woman, and I believe little liking was lost between them ... Yet +Carlyle never rendered him that service--easy as it appears--which one man +of letters most justly values from another, that of proclaiming the +admiration which he privately professed for his work." The party started, +September 24th, and reached Dieppe by Newhaven, after a rough passage, the +effects of which on some fellow-travellers more unfortunate than himself +Carlyle describes in a series of recently-discovered jottings [Footnote: +Partially reproduced, _Pall Mall Gazette,_ April 9th 1890, with +illustrative connecting comments.] made on his return, October 2nd, to +Chelsea. On September 25th they reached Paris. Carlyle joined the +Ashburtons at Meurice's Hotel; there dined, went in the evening to the +Théâtre Français, cursed the play, and commented unpleasantly on General +Changarnier sitting in the stalls. + +During the next few days he met many of the celebrities of the time, and +caricatured, after his fashion, their personal appearance, talk, and +manner. These criticisms are for the most part of little value. The +writer had in some of his essays shown almost as much capacity of +understanding the great Frenchmen of the last century as was compatible +with his Puritan vein; but as regards French literature since the +Revolution he was either ignorant or alien. What light could be thrown on +that interesting era by a man who could only say of the authors of _La +Comédie Humaine_ and _Consuelo_ that they were ministers in a Phallus +worship? Carlyle seems to have seen most of Thiers, whom he treats with +good-natured condescension, but little insight: "round fat body, tapering +like a ninepin into small fat feet, placidly sharp fat face, puckered +eyeward ... a frank, sociable kind of creature, who has absolutely +no malignity towards any one, and is not the least troubled with +self-seekings." Thiers talked with contempt of Michelet; and Carlyle, +unconscious of the numerous affinities between that historian of genius +and himself, half assented. Prosper Mérimée, on the other hand, +incensed him by some freaks of criticism, whether in badinage or in +earnest--probably the former. "Jean Paul," he said, getting on the theme +of German literature, "was a hollow fool of the first magnitude," and +Goethe was "insignificant, unintelligible, a paltry kind of Scribe +manqué." "I could stand no more of it, but lighted a cigar, and adjourned +to the street. 'You impertinent blasphemous blockhead!' this was sticking +in my throat: better to retire without bringing it out." + +[Footnote: The two men were mutually antagonistic; Mérimée tried to read +the _French Revolution_, but flung the book aside in weariness or in +disdain.] + +Of Guizot he writes, "Tartuffe, gaunt, hollow, resting on the everlasting +'No' with a haggard consciousness that it ought to be the everlasting +'Yea.'" "To me an extremely detestable kind of man." Carlyle missed +General Cavaignac, "of all Frenchmen the one" he "cared to see." In the +streets of Paris he found no one who could properly be called a gentleman. +"The truly ingenious and strong men of France are here (_i.e_. among the +industrial classes) making money, while the politician, literary, etc. +etc. class is mere play-actorism." His summary before leaving at the close +of a week, rather misspent, is: "Articulate-speaking France was altogether +without beauty or meaning to me in my then diseased mood; but I saw traces +of the inarticulate ... much worthier." + +Back in London, he sent Mrs. Carlyle to the Grange (distinguishing +himself, in an interval of study at home, by washing the back area flags +with his own hands), and there joined her till the close of the year. +During the early part of the next he was absorbed in reading and planning +work. Then came an unusually tranquil visit to Thomas Erskine of +Linlathen, during which he had only to complain that the servants were +often obliged to run out of the room to hide their laughter at his +humorous bursts. At the close of August 1852 he embarked on board a Leith +steamer bound for Rotterdam, on his first trip to Germany. Home once +more, in October, he found chaos come, and seas of paint overwhelming +everything; "went to the Grange, and back in time to witness from Bath +House the funeral, November 18th, of the great Duke," remarking, "The +one true man of official men in England, or that I know of in Europe, +concludes his long course.... Tennyson's verses are naught. Silence alone +is respectable on such an occasion." In March, again at the Grange, he +met the Italian minister Azeglio, and when this statesman disparaged +Mazzini--a thing only permitted by Carlyle to himself--he retorted with +the remark, "Monsieur, vous ne le connaissez pas du tout, du tout." At +Chelsea, on his return, the fowl tragic-comedy reached a crisis, "the +unprotected male" declaring that he would shoot them or poison them. "A +man is not a Chatham nor a Wallenstein; but a man has work too, which the +Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two and sixpence +worth of bantams.... They must either withdraw or die." Ultimately his +mother-wife came to the rescue of her "babe of genius"; the cocks +were bought off, and in the long-talked-of sound-proof room the last +considerable work of his life, though painfully, proceeded. Meanwhile +"brother John" had married, and Mrs. Carlyle went to visit the couple at +Moffat. While there bad tidings came from Scotsbrig, and she dutifully +hurried off to nurse her mother-in-law through an attack from which the +strong old woman temporarily rallied. But the final stroke could not be +long delayed. When Carlyle was paying his winter visit to the Grange in +December news came that his mother was worse, and her recovery +despaired of; and, by consent of his hostess, he hurried off to +Scotsbrig,--"mournful leave given me by the Lady A., mournful +encouragement to be speedy, not dilatory,"--and arrived in time to hear +her last words. "Here is Tom come to bid you good-night, mother," said +John. "As I turned to go, she said, 'I'm muckle obleeged to you.'" She +spoke no more, but passed from sleep after sleep of coma to that of +death, on Sunday, Christmas Day, 1853. "We can only have one mother," +exclaimed Byron on a like event--the solemn close of many storms. But +between Margaret Carlyle and the son of whom she was so proud there had +never been a shadow. "If," writes Mr. Froude, "she gloried in his fame +and greatness, he gloried more in being her son, and while she lived she, +and she only, stood between him and the loneliness of which he so often +and so passionately complained." + +Of all Carlyle's letters none are more tenderly beautiful than those +which he sent to Scotsbrig. The last, written on his fifty-eighth +birthday, December 4th, which she probably never read, is one of the +finest. The close of their wayfaring together left him solitary; his +"soul all hung with black," and, for months to come, everything around +was overshadowed by the thought of his bereavement. In his journal of +February 28th 1854, he tells us that he had on the Sunday before seen a +vision of Mainhill in old days, with mother, father, and the rest getting +dressed for the meeting-house. "They are gone now, vanished all; their +poor bits of thrifty clothes, ... their pious struggling efforts; their +little life, it is all away. It has all melted into the still sea, it +was rounded with a sloop." The entry ends, as fitting, with a prayer: "O +pious mother! kind, good, brave, and truthful soul as I have ever found, +and more than I have elsewhere found in this world. Your poor Tom, long +out of his schooldays now, has fallen very lonely, very lame and broken +in this pilgrimage of his; and you cannot help him or cheer him ... any +more. From your grave in Ecclefechan kirkyard yonder you bid him trust in +God; and that also he will try if he can understand and do." + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE MINOTAUR + +[1853-1866] + +Carlyle was now engaged on a work which required, received, and well nigh +exhausted all his strength, resulting in the greatest though the least +generally read of all his books. _Cromwell_ achieved, he had thrown +himself for a season into contemporary politics, condescending even, +contrary to his rule, to make casual contributions to the Press; but his +temper was too hot for success in that arena, and his letters of the time +are full of the feeling that the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ had set the world +against him. Among his generous replies to young men asking advice, none +is more suggestive than that in which he writes from Chelsea (March 9th +1850):-- + + If my books teach you anything, don't mind in the least + whether other people believe it or not; but lay it to + heart ... as a real message left with you, which you must + set about fulfilling, whatever others do.... And be not + surprised that "people have no sympathy with you." That is + an accompaniment that will attend you all your days if you + mean to live an earnest life. + +But he himself, though "ever a fighter," felt that, even for him, it was +not good to be alone. He decided there "was no use railing in vain like +Timon"; he would go back again from the present to the past, from the +latter days of discord to seek countenance in some great figure of +history, under whose ægis he might shelter the advocacy of his views. +Looking about for a theme, several crossed his mind. He thought of +Ireland, but that was too burning a subject; of William the Conqueror, of +Simon de Montfort, the Norsemen, the Cid; but these may have seemed to +him too remote. Why, ask patriotic Scotsmen, did he not take up his and +their favourite Knox? But Knox's life had been fairly handled by M'Crie, +and Carlyle would have found it hard to adjust his treatment of that +essentially national "hero" to the "Exodus from Houndsditch." "Luther" +might have been an apter theme; but there too it would have been a strain +to steer clear of theological controversy, of which he had had enough. +Napoleon was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste. Looking over +Europe in more recent times, he concluded that the Prussian monarchy had +been the main centre of modern stability, and that it had been made so by +its virtual creator, Friedrich II., called the Great. Once entertained, +the subject seized him as with the eye of Coleridge's mariner, and, in +spite of manifold efforts to get free, compelled him, so that he could +"not choose but" write on it. Again and again, as the magnitude of the +task became manifest, we find him doubting, hesitating, recalcitrating, +and yet captive. He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own Memoirs +and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains through which he had to dig. +"Prussian Friedrich and the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust +lay crushing me with the continual question, Dare I try it? Dare I not?" +At length, gathering himself together for the effort, he resolved, as +before in the case of Cromwell, to visit the scenes of which he was to +write. Hence the excursion to Germany of 1852, during which, with the +kindly-offered guidance of Mr. Neuberg, an accomplished German admirer of +some fortune resident in London, he made his first direct acquaintance +with the country of whose literature he had long been himself the English +interpreter. The outlines of the trip may be shortly condensed from the +letters written during its progress to his wife and mother. He reached +Rotterdam on September 1st; then after a night made sleepless by "noisy +nocturnal travellers and the most industrious cocks and clamorous bells" +he had ever heard, he sailed up the river to Bonn, where he consulted +books, saw "Father Arndt," and encountered some types of the German +professoriate, "miserable creatures lost in statistics." There he met +Neuberg, and they went together to Rolandseck, to the village of Hunef +among the Sieben-Gebirge, and then on to Coblenz. After a detour to Ems, +which Carlyle, comminating the gaming-tables, compared to Matlock, and +making a pilgrimage to Nassau as the birthplace of William the Silent, +they rejoined the Rhine and sailed admiringly up the finest reach of the +river. From Mainz the philosopher and his guide went on to Frankfort, +paid their respects to Goethe's statue and the garret where _Werther_ was +written, the Judengasse, "grimmest section of the Middle Ages," and the +Römer--election hall of the old Kaisers; then to Homburg, where they saw +an old Russian countess playing "gowpanfuls of gold pieces every +stake," and left after no long stay, Carlyle, in a letter to Scotsbrig, +pronouncing the fashionable Badeort to be the "rallying-place of such a +set of empty blackguards as are not to be found elsewhere in the world." +We find him next at Marburg, where he visited the castle of Philip of +Hesse. Passing through Cassel, he went to Eisenach, and visited the +neighbouring Wartburg, where he kissed the old oaken table, on which the +Bible was made an open book for the German race, and noted the hole in +the plaster where the inkstand had been thrown at the devil and his +noises; an incident to which eloquent reference is made in the lectures +on "Heroes." Hence they drove to Gotha, and lodged in Napoleon's room +after Leipzig. Then by Erfurt, with more Luther memories, they took rail +to Weimar, explored the houses of Goethe and of Schiller, and dined by +invitation with the Augustenburgs; the Grand Duchess, with sons and +daughters, conversing in a Babylonish dialect, a melange of French, +English, and German. The next stage seems to have been Leipzig, then in +a bustle with the Fair. "However," says Carlyle, "we got a book or two, +drank a glass of wine in Auerbach's keller, and at last got off safe to +the comparative quiet of Dresden." He ignores the picture galleries; and +makes a bare reference to the palaces from which they steamed up the Elbe +to the heart of Saxon Switzerland. There he surveyed Lobositz, first +battle-field of the Seven Years' War, and rested at the romantic mountain +watering-place of Töplitz. "He seems," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, "to be getting +very successfully through his travels, thanks to the patience and +helpfulness of Neuberg. He makes in every letter frightful _misereres_ +over his sleeping accommodations; but he cannot conceal that he is really +pretty well." The writer's own _misereres_ are as doleful and nearly +as frequent; but she was really in much worse health. From Töplitz the +companions proceeded in weary stellwagens to Zittau in Lusatia, and so on +to + + Herrnhut, the primitive city of the Moravian brethren: a + place not bigger than Annan, but beautiful, pure, and quiet + beyond any town on the earth, I daresay; and, indeed, more + like a saintly dream of ideal Calvinism made real than a town + of stone and lime. + +Onward by "dreary moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred +"the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his +worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of +the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we have, October +1st:-- + + I am dead stupid; my heart nearly choked out of me, and my + head churned to pieces.... Berlin is loud almost as London, + but in no other way great ... about the size of Liverpool, + and more like Glasgow. + +They spent a week there (sight-seeing being made easier by an +introduction from Lady Ashburton to the Ambassador), discovering at +length an excellent portrait of Fritz, meeting Tieck, Cornelius, Rauch, +Preuss, etc., and then got quickly back to London by way of Hanover, +Cologne, and Ostend. Carlyle's travels are always interesting, and would +be more so without the tiresome, because ever the same, complaints. Six +years later (1858) he made his second expedition to Germany, in the +company of two friends, a Mr. Foxton--who is made a butt--and the +faithful Neuberg. Of this journey, undertaken with a more exclusively +business purpose, and accomplished with greater dispatch, there are fewer +notes, the substance of which may be here anticipated. He sailed (August +21st) from Leith to Hamburg, admiring the lower Elbe, and then went out +of his way to accept a pressing invitation from the Baron Usedom and his +wife to the Isle of Rügen, sometimes called the German Isle of Wight. He +went there by Stralsund, liked his hosts and their pleasant place, where +for cocks crowing he had doves cooing; but in Putbus, the Richmond of the +island, he had to encounter brood sows as well as cochin-chinas. From +Rügen he went quickly south by Stettin to Berlin, then to Cüstrin to +survey the field of Zorndorf, with what memorable result readers of +_Friedrich_ know. His next halt was at Liegnitz, headquarters for +exploring the grounds of "Leuthen, the grandest of all the battles," +and Molwitz--first of Fritz's fights--of which we hear so much in the +_Reminiscences_. His course lay on to Breslau, "a queer old city as ever +you heard of, high as Edinburgh or more so," and, by Landshut, through +the picturesque villages of the Riesen-Gebirge into Bohemia. There he +first put up at Pardubitz in a vile, big inn, for bed a "trough eighteen +inches too short, a mattress forced into it which cocked up at both +ends"--such as most travellers in remoter Germany at that period have +experienced. Carlyle was unfavourably impressed by the Bohemians; and +"not one in a hundred of them could understand a word of German. They +are liars, thieves, slatterns, a kind of miserable, subter-Irish +people,--Irish with the addition of ill-nature." He and his friends +visited the fields of Chotusitz and Kolin, where they found the "Golden +Sun," from which "the last of the Kings" had surveyed the ground, "sunk +to be the dirtiest house probably in Europe." Thence he made for Prague, +whose picturesque grandeur he could not help extolling. "Here," he +writes, enclosing the flower to his wife, "is an authentic wild pink +plucked from the battle-field. Give it to some young lady who practises +'the Battle of Prague' on her piano to your satisfaction." On September +15th he dates from Dresden, whence he spent a laborious day over Torgau. +Thereafter they sped on, with the usual tribulations, by Hochkirk, +Leipzig, Weissenfels, and Rossbach. Hurrying homeward, they were obliged +to decline another invitation from the Duchess at Weimar; and, making +for Guntershausen, performed the fatiguing journey from there to +Aix-la-Chapelle in one day, _i.e._ travelling often in slow trains from 4 +A.M. to 7 P.M., a foolish feat even for the eupeptic. Carlyle visited the +cathedral, but has left a very poor account of the impression produced +on him by the simple slab sufficiently inscribed, "Carolo Magno." "Next +morning stand upon the lid of Charlemagne, abominable monks roaring +out their idolatrous grand music within sight." By Ostend and Dover he +reached home on the 22nd. A Yankee scamper trip, one might say, but for +the result testifying to the enormous energy of the traveller. "He speaks +lightly," says Mr. Froude, "of having seen Kolin, Torgau, etc. etc. No +one would guess from reading these short notices that he had mastered the +details of every field he visited; not a turn of the ground, not a brook, +not a wood ... had escaped him.... There are no mistakes. Military +students in Germany are set to learn Frederick's battles in Carlyle's +account of them." + +During the interval between those tours there are few events of interest +in Carlyle's outer, or phases of his inner life which have not been +already noted. The year 1854 found the country ablaze with the excitement +of the Crimean War, with which he had as little sympathy as had Cobden +or Bright or the members of Sturge's deputation. He had no share in the +popular enthusiasm for what he regarded as a mere newspaper folly. All +his political leaning was on the side of Russia, which, from a safe +distance, having no direct acquaintance with the country, he always +admired as a seat of strong government, the representative of wise +control over barbarous races. Among the worst of these he reckoned the +Turk, "a lazy, ugly, sensual, dark fanatic, whom we have now had for 400 +years. I would not buy the continuance of him in Europe at the rate of +sixpence a century." Carlyle had no more faith in the "Balance of power" +than had Byron, who scoffed at it from another, the Republican, side as +"balancing straws on kings' noses instead of wringing them off," _e.g._-- + + As to Russian increase of strength, he writes, I would wait + till Russia meddled with me before I drew sword to stop his + increase of strength. It is the idle population of editors, + etc., that has done all this in England. One perceives + clearly that ministers go forward in it against their will. + +Even our heroisms at Alma--"a terrible, almost horrible, +operation"--Balaclava, and Inkermann, failed to raise a glow in his mind, +though he admitted the force of Tennyson's ringing lines. The alliance +with the "scandalous copper captain," elected by the French, as the Jews +chose Barabbas,--an alliance at which many patriots winced--was to him +only an added disgrace. Carlyle's comment on the subsequent visit to +Osborne of Victor Hugo's "brigand," and his reception within the pale of +legitimate sovereignty was, "Louis Bonaparte has not been shot hitherto. +That is the best that can be said." Sedan brought most men round to his +mind about Napoleon III.: but his approval of the policy of the Czars +remains open to the criticism of M. Lanin. In reference to the next great +struggle of the age, Carlyle was in full sympathy with the mass of his +countrymen. He was as much enraged by the Sepoy rebellion as were those +who blew the ringleaders from the muzzles of guns. "Tongue cannot speak," +he exclaims, in the spirit of Noel Paton's picture, before it was amended +or spoilt, "the horrors that were done on the English by these mutinous +hyaenas. Allow hyaenas to mutiny and strange things will follow." He +never seems to have revolved the question as to the share of his admired +Muscovy in instigating the revolt. For the barbarism of the north he had +ready apologies, for the savagery of the south mere execration; and he +writes of the Hindoos as he did, both before and afterwards, of the +negroes in Jamaica. + +Three sympathetic obituary notices of the period expressed his softer +side. In April 1854, John Wilson and Lord Cockburn died at Edinburgh. His +estimate of the former is notable as that generally entertained, now that +the race of those who came under the personal spell of Christopher North +has passed:-- + + We lived apart as in different centuries; though to say the + truth I always loved Wilson, he had much nobleness of heart, + and many traits of noble genius, but the central tie-beam + seemed always wanting; very long ago I perceived in him the + most irreconcilable contradictions--Toryism with + Sansculottism, Methodism of a sort with total incredulity, + etc.... Wilson seemed to me always by far the most gifted + of our literary men, either then or still: and yet + intrinsically he has written nothing that can endure. + +Cockburn is referred to in contrast as "perhaps the last genuinely +national type of rustic Scotch sense, sincerity, and humour--a wholesome +product of Scotch dialect, with plenty of good logic in it." Later, +Douglas Jerrold is described as "last of the London wits, I hope the +last." Carlyle's letters during this period are of minor interest: many +refer to visits paid to distinguished friends and humble relatives, with +the usual complaints about health, servants, and noises. At Farlingay, +where he spent some time with Edward FitzGerald, translator of _Omar +Khayyam_, the lowing of cows took the place of cocks crowing. Here and +there occurs a, criticism or a speculation. That on his dreams is, in the +days of "insomnia," perhaps worth noting (F. iv. 154, 155); _inter alia_ +he says:--"I have an impression that one always dreams, but that only in +cases where the nerves are disturbed by bad health, which produces light +imperfect sleep, do they start into such relief as to force themselves on +our waking consciousness." Among posthumously printed documents of Cheyne +Row, to this date belongs the humorous appeal of Mrs. Carlyle for a +larger allowance of house money, entitled "Budget of a Femme Incomprise." +The arguments and statement of accounts, worthy of a bank auditor, were +so irresistible that Carlyle had no resource but to grant the request, +_i.e._ practically to raise the amount to £230, instead of £200 per +annum. It has been calculated that his reliable income even at this time +did not exceed £400, but the rent of the house was kept very low, £30: +he and his wife lived frugally, so that despite the expenses of the +noise-proof room and his German tour he could afford in 1857 to put a +stop to her travelling in second-class railway carriages; in 1860, when +the success of the first instalment of his great work made an end of +financial fears, to keep two servants; and in 1863 to give Mrs. Carlyle +a brougham. Few men have left on the whole so unimpeachable a record in +money matters. + +In November 1854 there occurred an incident hitherto unrecorded in any +biography. The Lord Rectorship of the University of Glasgow having fallen +vacant, the "Conservative Club" of the year had put forward Mr. Disraeli +as successor to the honorary office. A small body of Mr. Carlyle's +admirers among the senior students on the other side nominated him, +partly as a tribute of respect and gratitude, partly in opposition to +a statesman whom they then distrusted. The nomination was, after much +debate, adopted by the so-called "Liberal Association" of that day; +and, with a curious irony, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ and +_Friedrich II._ was pitted, as a Radical, against the future promoter of +the Franchise of 1867 as a Tory. It soon appeared that his supporters +had underestimated the extent to which Mr. Carlyle had offended Scotch +theological prejudice and outraged the current Philanthropy. His name +received some sixty adherents, and had ultimately to be withdrawn. The +nomination was received by the Press, and other exponents of popular +opinion, with denunciations that came loudest and longest from the +leaders of orthodox Dissent, then arrogating to themselves the profession +of Liberalism and the initiation of Reform. Among the current expressions +in reference to his social and religious creeds were the following:-- + + Carlyle's philanthropy is not that of Howard, his cure for + national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving + wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be + described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong." + He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down + into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is + a sham.... Elect him and you bid God-speed to Pantheism and + spiritualism. + + [Footnote: Mr. Wylie states that "twice before his election by his + own University he (Carlyle) had been invited to allow himself to + be nominated for the office of Lord Rector, once by students in + the University of Glasgow and once by those of Aberdeen: but both + of these invitations he had declined." This as regards Glasgow is + incorrect.] + + Mr. Carlyle neither possesses the talent nor the distinction, nor + does he occupy the position which entitle a man to such an honour + as the Rectorial Chair. The _Scotch Guardian_ writes: But for the + folly exhibited in bringing forward Mr. Disraeli, scarcely any + party within the College or out of it would have ventured to + nominate a still more obnoxious personage. This is the first + instance we have been able to discover in which the suffrages of + the youth of the University have been sought for a candidate who + denied in his writings that the revealed Word of God is "the way, + the truth, the life." It is impossible to separate Mr. Carlyle + from that obtrusive feature of his works in which the solemn + verities of our holy religion are sneered at as wornout + "biblicalities," "unbelievabilities," and religious profession is + denounced as "dead putrescent cant." The reader of the _Life of + Sterling_ is not left to doubt for a moment the author's malignant + hostility to the religion of the Bible. In that work, saving faith + is described as "stealing into heaven by the modern method of + sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on earth," that is + to say, by believing in the doctrines of the Gospels. How, after + this, could the Principal and Professors of the University, the + guardians of the faiths and morals of its inexperienced youth, + accompany to the Common Hall, and allow to address the students a + man who has degraded his powers to the life-labour of sapping and + mining the foundations of the truth, and opened the fire of his + fiendish raillery against the citadel of our best aspirations and + dearest hopes? + +In the result, two men of genius--however diverse--were discarded, and +a Scotch nobleman of conspicuous talent, always an active, if not +intrusive, champion of orthodoxy, was returned by an "overwhelming +majority." In answer to intelligence transmitted to Mr. Carlyle of these +events, the president of the Association of his supporters--who had +nothing on which to congratulate themselves save that only the benches +of the rooms in which they held their meetings had been riotously +broken,--received the following previously unpublished letter:-- + + Chelsea, _16th December_ 1854. + + DEAR SIR--I have received your Pamphlet; and return many + thanks for all your kindness to me. I am sorry to learn, as + I do for the first time from this narrative, what angry + nonsense some of my countrymen see good to write of me. Not + being much a reader of Newspapers, I had hardly heard of the + Election till after it was finished; and I did not know that + anything of this melancholy element of Heterodoxy, + "Pantheism," etc. etc., had been introduced into the matter. + It is an evil, after its sort, this of being hated and + denounced by fools and ignorant persons; but it cannot be + mended for the present, and so must be left standing there. + + That another wiser class think differently, nay, that they + alone have any real knowledge of the question, or any real + right to vote upon it, is surely an abundant compensation. + If that be so, then all is still right; and probably there + is no harm done at all!--To you, and the other young + gentlemen who have gone with you on this occasion, I can + only say that I feel you have loyally meant to do me a great + honour and kindness; that I am deeply sensible of your + genial recognition, of your noble enthusiasm (which reminds + me of my own young years); and that in fine there is no loss + or gain of an Election which can in the least alter these + valuable facts, or which is not wholly insignificant to me, + in comparison with them. "Elections" are not a thing + transacted by the gods, in general; and I have known very + unbeautiful creatures "elected" to be kings, chief-priests, + railway kings, etc., by the "most sweet voices," and the + spiritual virtue that inspires these, in our time! + + Leaving all that, I will beg you all to retain your + honourable good feelings towards me; and to think that if + anything I have done or written can help any one of you in + the noble problem of living like a wise man in these evil + and foolish times, it will be more valuable to me than never + so many Elections or Non-elections. With many good wishes + and regards I heartily thank you all, and remain--Yours very + sincerely, + + T. CARLYLE. + +[Footnote: For the elucidation of some points of contact between Carlyle +and Lord Beaconsfield, _vide_ Mr. Froude's _Life_ of the latter.] + +Carlyle's letters to strangers are always valuable, for they are terse +and reticent. In writing to weavers, like Bamford; to men in trouble, as +Cooper; to students, statesmen, or earnest inquirers of whatever degree, +a genuine sympathy for them takes the place of the sympathy for himself, +often too prominent in the copious effusions to his intimates. The letter +above quoted is of special interest, as belonging to a time from which +comparatively few survive; when he was fairly under weigh with a task +which seemed to grow in magnitude under his gaze. The _Life of Friedrich_ +could not be a succession of dramatic scenes, like the _French +Revolution_, nor a biography like _Cromwell_, illustrated by the +surrounding events of thirty years. Carlyle found, to his dismay, that he +had involved himself in writing the History of Germany, and in a measure +of Europe, during the eighteenth century, a period perhaps the most +tangled and difficult to deal with of any in the world's annals. He was +like a man who, with intent to dig up a pine, found himself tugging at +the roots of an Igdrasil that twined themselves under a whole Hercynian +forest. His constant cries of positive pain in the progress of the work +are distressing, as his indomitable determination to wrestle with and +prevail over it is inspiring. There is no imaginable image that he does +not press into his service in rattling the chains of his voluntary +servitude. Above all, he groans over the unwieldy mass of his +authorities--"anti-solar systems of chaff." + + "I read old German books dull as stupidity itself--nay + superannuated stupidity--gain with labour the dreariest + glimpses of unimportant extinct human beings ... but when I + begin operating: _how_ to reduce that widespread black + desert of Brandenburg sand to a small human garden! ... I have + no capacity of grasping the big chaos that lies around me, + and reducing it to order. Order! Reducing! It is like + compelling the grave to give up its dead!" + +Elsewhere he compares his travail with the monster of his own creation +to "Balder's ride to the death kingdoms, through frozen rain, sound of +subterranean torrents, leaden-coloured air"; and in the retrospect of +the _Reminiscences_ touchingly refers to his thirteen years of rarely +relieved isolation. "A desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my whole +strength devoted to it ... withdrawn from all the world." He received few +visitors and had few correspondents, but kept his life vigorous by riding +on his horse Fritz (the gift of the Marshalls), "during that book, some +30,000 miles, much of it, all the winter part of it, under cloud of +night, sun just setting when I mounted. All the rest of the day I sat, +silent, aloft, insisting upon work, and such work, _invitissimâ Minervâ_, +for that matter." Mrs. Carlyle had her usual share of the sufferings +involved in "the awful _Friedrich_." "That tremendous book," she writes, +"made prolonged and entire devastation of any satisfactory semblance of +home life or home happiness." But when at last, by help of Neuberg and of +Mr. Larkin, who made the maps of the whole book, the first two volumes +were in type (they appeared in autumn 1858), his wife hailed them in a +letter sent from Edinburgh to Chelsea: "Oh, my dear, what a magnificent +book this is going to be, the best of all your books, forcible, clear, and +sparkling as the _French Revolution_; compact and finished as _Cromwell_. +Yes, you shall see that it will be the best of all your books, and small +thanks to it, it has taken a doing." On which the author naively purrs: +"It would be worth while to write books, if mankind would read them as +you." Later he speaks of his wife's recognition and that of Emerson--who +wrote enthusiastically of the art of the work, though much of it was +across his grain--as "the only bit of human criticism in which he could +discern lineaments of the thing." But the book was a swift success, two +editions of 2000 and another of 1000 copies being sold in a comparatively +brief space. Carlyle's references to this--after his return from another +visit to the north and the second trip to Germany--seen somewhat +ungracious:-- + + Book ... much babbled over in newspapers ... no better to me + than the barking of dogs ... officious people put reviews + into my hands, and in an idle hour I glanced partly into + these; but it would have been better not, so sordidly ignorant + and impertinent were they, though generally laudatory. + +[Footnote: Carlyle himself writes: "I felt well enough how it was crushing +down her existence, as it was crushing down my own; and the thought that +she had not been at the choosing of it, and yet must suffer so for it, was +occasionally bitter to me. But the practical conclusion always was, Get +done with it, get done with it! For the saving of us both that is the one +outlook. And sure enough, I did stand by that dismal task with all my time +and all my means; day and night wrestling with it, as with the ugliest +dragon, which blotted out the daylight and the rest of the world to me +till I should get it slain."] + +But these notices recall the fact familiar to every writer, that while +the assailants of a book sometimes read it, favourable reviewers hardly +ever do; these latter save their time by payment of generally superficial +praise, and a few random quotations. + +Carlyle scarcely enjoyed his brief respite on being discharged of the +first instalment of his book: the remainder lay upon him like a menacing +nightmare; he never ceased to feel that the work must be completed ere he +could be free, and that to accomplish this he must be alone. Never absent +from his wife without regrets, lamentations, contrite messages, and +childlike entreaties for her to "come and protect him," when she came +it was to find that they were better apart; for his temper was never +softened by success. "Living beside him," she writes in 1858, is "the +life of a weathercock in high wind." During a brief residence together +in a hired house near Aberdour in Fifeshire, she compares herself to a +keeper in a madhouse; and writes later from Sunny bank to her husband, +"If you could fancy me in some part of the house out of sight, my absence +would make little difference to you, considering how little I do see of +you, and how preoccupied you are when I do see you." Carlyle answers in +his touching strain, "We have had a sore life pilgrimage together, much +bad road. Oh, forgive me!" and sends her beautiful descriptions; but her +disposition, not wholly forgiving, received them somewhat sceptically. +"Byron," said Lady Byron, "can write anything, but he does not feel it"; +and Mrs. Carlyle on one occasion told her "harsh spouse" that his fine +passages were very well written for the sake of future biographers: +a charge he almost indignantly repudiates. He was then, August 1860, +staying at Thurso Castle, the guest of Sir George Sinclair; a visit that +terminated in an unfortunate careless mistake about a sudden change of +plans, resulting in his wife, then with the Stanleys at Alderley, +being driven back to Chelsea and deprived of her promised pleasure and +requisite rest with her friends in the north. + +The frequency of such incidents,--each apart capable of being palliated +by the same fallacy of division that has attempted in vain to justify the +domestic career of Henry VIII.,--points to the conclusion of Miss Gully +that Carlyle, though often nervous on the subject, acted to his wife as +if he were "totally inconsiderate of her health," so much so that she +received medical advice not to be much at home when he was in the stress +of writing. In January 1858 he writes to his brother John an anxious +letter in reference to a pain about a hand-breadth below the heart, of +which she had begun to complain, the premonitory symptom of the disease +which ultimately proved fatal; but he was not sufficiently impressed +to give due heed to the warning; nor was it possible, with his +long-engrained habits, to remove the Marah spring that lay under all the +wearisome bickerings, repentances, and renewals of offence. The "very +little herring" who declined to be made a part of Lady Ashburton's +luggage now suffered more than ever from her inanimate rival. The +highly-endowed wife of one of the most eminent philanthropists of +America, whose life was devoted to the awakening of defective intellects, +thirty-five years ago murmured, "If I were only an idiot!" Similarly Mrs. +Carlyle might have remonstrated, "Why was I not born a book!" Her letters +and journal teem to tiresomeness with the refrain, "I feel myself +extremely neglected for unborn generations." Her once considerable +ambitions had been submerged, and her own vivid personality overshadowed +by a man she was afraid to meet at breakfast, and glad to avoid at +dinner. A woman of immense talent and a spark of genius linked to a man +of vast genius and imperious will, she had no choice but to adopt his +judgments, intensify his dislikes, and give a sharper edge to his sneers. + +Mr. Froude, who for many years lived too near the sun to see the sun, +and inconsistently defends many of the inconsistencies he has himself +inherited from his master, yet admits that Carlyle treated the Broad +Church party in the English Church with some injustice. His recorded +estimates of the leading theologians of the age, and personal relation to +them, are hopelessly bewildering. His lifelong friendship for Erskine of +Linlathen is intelligible, though he did not extend the same charity to +what he regarded as the muddle-headedness of Maurice (Erskine's spiritual +son), and keenly ridiculed the reconciliation pamphlet entitled +"Subscription no Bondage." The Essayists and Reviewers, "Septem contra +Christum," "should," he said, "be shot for deserting their posts"; even +Dean Stanley, their _amicus curioe,_ whom he liked, came in for a share +of his sarcasm; "there he goes," he said to Froude, "boring holes in the +bottom of the Church of England." Of Colenso, who was doing as much as +any one for the "Exodus from Houndsditch," he spoke with open contempt, +saying, "he mistakes for fame an extended pillory that he is standing +on"; and was echoed by his wife, "Colenso isn't worth talking about for +five minutes, except for the absurdity of a man making arithmetical +onslaughts on the Pentateuch with a bishop's little black silk apron on." +This is not the place to discuss the controversy involved; but we +are bound to note the fact that Carlyle was, by an inverted Scotch +intolerance, led to revile men rowing in the same boat as himself, but +with a different stroke. To another broad Churchman, Charles Kingsley, +partly from sympathy with this writer's imaginative power, he was more +considerate; and one of the still deeply religious freethinkers of the +time was among his closest friends. The death of Arthur Clough in 1861 +left another blank in Carlyle's life: we have had in this century to +lament the comparatively early loss of few men of finer genius. Clough +had not, perhaps, the practical force of Sterling, but his work is of a +higher order than any of the fragments of the earlier favourite. Among +High Churchmen Carlyle commended Dr. Pusey as "solid and judicious," and +fraternised with the Bishop of Oxford; but he called Keble "an ape," +and said of Cardinal Newman that he had "no more brains than an +ordinary-sized rabbit." + +These years are otherwise marked by his most glaring political blunder. +The Civil War, then raging in America, brought, with its close, the +abolition of Slavery throughout the States, a consummation for which he +cared little, for he had never professed to regard the negroes as fit for +freedom; but this result, though inevitable, was incidental. As is known +to every one who has the remotest knowledge of Transatlantic history, +the war was in great measure a struggle for the preservation of National +Unity: but it was essentially more; it was the vindication of Law and +Order against the lawless and disorderly violence of those who, when +defeated at the polling-booth, flew to the bowie knife; an assertion of +Right as Might for which Carlyle cared everything: yet all he had to +say of it was his "Ilias Americana in nuce," published in _Macmillan's +Magazine_, August 1863. + + _Peter of the North_ (to Paul of the South): "Paul, you + unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for + life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going + straight to Hell, you----" + + _Paul_: "Good words, Peter. The risk is my own. I am + willing to take the risk. Hire you your servants by the + month or the day, and get straight to Heaven; leave me to my + own method." + + _Peter_: "No, I won't. I will beat your brains out + first!" [And is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet + manage it.] + +This, except the _Prinzenraub_, a dramatic presentation of a dramatic +incident in old German history, was his only side publication during the +writing of _Friedrich_. + +After the war ended and Emerson's letters of remonstrance had proved +prophetic, Carlyle is said to have confessed to Mr. Moncure Conway as +well as to Mr. Froude that he "had not seen to the bottom of the matter." +But his republication of this nadir of his nonsense was an offence, +emphasising the fact that, however inspiring, he is not always a safe +guide, even to those content to abide by his own criterion of success. + +There remains of this period the record of a triumph and of a tragedy. +After seven years more of rarely intermitted toil, broken only by a few +visits, trips to the sea-shore, etc., and the distress of the terrible +accident to his wife,--her fall on a curbstone and dislocation of a +limb,--which has been often sufficiently detailed, he had finished his +last great work. The third volume of _Friedrich_ was published in May +1862, the fourth appeared in February 1864, the fifth and sixth in March +1865. Carlyle had at last slain his Minotaur, and stood before the +world as a victorious Theseus, everywhere courted and acclaimed, his +hard-earned rest only disturbed by a shower of honours. His position +as the foremost prose writer of his day was as firmly established in +Germany, where his book was at once translated and read by all readers of +history, as in England. Scotland, now fully awake to her reflected fame, +made haste to make amends. Even the leaders of the sects, bond and +"free," who had denounced him, were now eager to proclaim that he had +been intrinsically all along, though sometimes in disguise, a champion of +their faith. No men knew better how to patronise, or even seem to lead, +what they had failed to quell. The Universities made haste with their +burnt-offerings. In 1856 a body of Edinburgh students had prematurely +repeated the attempt of their forerunners in Glasgow to confer on him +their Lord Rectorship, and failed. In 1865 he was elected, in opposition +again to Mr. Disraeli, to succeed Mr. Gladstone, the genius of elections +being in a jesting mood. He was prevailed on to accept the honour, and, +later, consented to deliver in the spring of 1866 the customary Inaugural +Address. Mrs. Carlyle's anxiety on this occasion as to his success and +his health is a tribute to her constant and intense fidelity. He went +north to his Installation, under the kind care of encouraging friends, +imprimis of Professor Tyndall, one of his truest; they stopped on the road +at Fryston, with Lord Houghton, and there met Professor Huxley, who +accompanied them to Edinburgh. Carlyle, having resolved to speak and not +merely to read what he had to say, was oppressed with nervousness; and of +the event itself he writes: "My speech was delivered in a mood of defiant +despair, and under the pressure of nightmare. Some feeling that I was not +speaking lies alone sustained me. The applause, etc., I took for empty +noise, which it really was not altogether." The address, nominally on the +"Reading of Books," really a rapid autobiography of his own intellectual +career, with references to history, literature, religion, and the conduct +of life, was, as Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs. Carlyle,--save for some +difficulty the speaker had in making himself audible--"a perfect triumph." +His reception by one of the most enthusiastic audiences ever similarly +assembled marked the climax of a steadily-increasing fame. It may be +compared to the late welcome given to Wordsworth in the Oxford Theatre. +After four days spent with Erskine and his own brother James in Edinburgh, +he went for a week's quiet to Scotsbrig, and was kept there, lingering +longer than he had intended, by a sprained ankle, "blessed in the country +stillness, the purity of sky and earth, and the absence of all babble." On +April 20th he wrote his last letter to his wife, a letter which she never +read. On the evening of Saturday the 21st, when staying on the way south +at his sister's house at Dumfries, he received a telegram informing him +that the close companionship of forty years--companionship of struggle and +victory, of sad and sweet so strangely blent--was for ever at an end. Mrs. +Carlyle had been found dead in her carriage when driving round Hyde Park +on the afternoon of that day, her death (from heart-disease) being +accelerated by an accident to a favourite little dog. Carlyle felt as "one +who hath been stunned," hardly able to realise his loss. "They took me out +next day ... to wander in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and +anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation, 'My poor little +woman,' but no full gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come." On +the following Monday he set off with his brother for London. "Never for a +thousand years shall I forget that arrival hero of ours, my first +unwelcomed by her. She lay in her coffin, lovely in death. Pale death Hid +things not mine or ours had possession of our poor darling." On Wednesday +they returned, and on Thursday the 26th she was buried in the nave of the +old Abbey Kirk at Haddington, in the grave of her father The now desolate +old man, who had walked with her over many a stony road, paid the first of +his many regretful tributes in the epitaph inscribed over her tomb: in +which follows, after the name and date of birth:-- + +IN HER BRIGHT EXISTENCE SHE HAD MORE SORROWS THAN ARE COMMON, BUT ALSO +A SOFT INVINCIBILITY, A CAPACITY OF DISCERNMENT, AND A NOBLE LOYALTY OF +HEART WHICH ARE RARE. FOR 40 YEARS SHE WAS THE TRUE AND LOVING HELP-MATE +OF HER HUSBAND, AND BY ACT AND WORD UNWEARIEDLY FORWARDED HIM AS NONE +ELSE COULD IN ALL OF WORTHY THAT HE DID OR ATTEMPTED. SHE DIED AT +LONDON, 21ST APRIL 1866, SUDDENLY SNATCHED FROM HIM, AND THE LIGHT OF HIS +LIFE AS IF GONE OUT. + +[Footnote: For the most interesting, loyally sympathetic, and +characteristic account of Carlyle's journey north on this occasion, and of +the incidents which followed, we may refer to _New fragments_, by John +Tyndall, just published.] + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +DECADENCE + +[1866-1881] + +After this shock of bereavement Carlyle's days went by "on broken wing," +never brightening, slowly saddening to the close; but lit up at intervals +by flashes of the indomitable energy that, starting from no vantage, +had conquered a world of thought, and established in it, if not a new +dynasty, at least an intellectual throne. Expressions of sympathy came +to him from all directions, from the Queen herself downwards, and he +received them with the grateful acknowledgment that he had, after all, +been loved by his contemporaries. When the question arose as to his +future life, it seemed a natural arrangement that he and his brother +John, then a childless widower who had retired from his profession with a +competence, should take up house together. The experiment was made, but, +to the discredit of neither, it proved a failure. They were in some +respects too much alike. John would not surrender himself wholly to the +will or whims even of one whom he revered, and the attempt was by mutual +consent abandoned; but their affectionate correspondence lasted through +the period of their joint lives. Carlyle, being left to himself in his +"gaunt and lonesome home," after a short visit to Miss Bromley, an +intimate friend of his wife, at her residence in Kent, accepted the +invitation of the second Lady Ashburton to spend the winter in her house +at Mentone. There he arrived on Christmas Eve 1866, under the kind convoy +of Professor Tyndall, and remained breathing the balmy air and gazing on +the violet sea till March of the following year. During the interval he +occupied himself in writing his _Reminiscences,_ drawing pen-and-ink +pictures of the country, steeped in beauty fit to soothe any sorrow save +such as his, and taking notes of some of the passers-by. Of the greatest +celebrity then encountered, Mr. Gladstone, he writes in his journal, in a +tone intensified as time went on: "Talk copious, ingenious,... a man +of ardent faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons +shape.... Man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed +by the Prince, or many Princes, of the Air." Back in Chelsea, he was +harassed by heaps of letters, most of which, we are told, he answered, +and spent a large portion of his time and means in charities. + +Amid Carlyle's irreconcilable inconsistencies of theory, and sometimes +of conduct, he was through life consistent in practical benevolence. The +interest in the welfare of the working classes that in part inspired his +_Sartor, Chartism,_ and _Past and Present_ never failed him. He was +among the foremost in all national movements to relieve and solace their +estate. He was, further, with an amiable disregard of his own maxims, +over lenient towards the waifs and strays of humanity, in some instances +careless to inquire too closely into the causes of their misfortune or +the degree of their demerits. In his latter days this disposition grew +upon him: the gray of his own evening skies made him fuller of compassion +to all who lived in the shade. Sad himself, he mourned with those who +mourned; afflicted, he held out hands to all in affliction. Consequently +"the poor were always with him," writing, entreating, and personally +soliciting all sorts of alms, from advice and help to ready money. His +biographer informs us that he rarely gave an absolute refusal to any +of these various classes of beggars. He answered a letter which is a +manifest parody of his own surface misanthropy; he gave a guinea to a +ticket-of-leave-convict, pretending to be a decayed tradesman; and a +shilling to a blind man, whose dog took him over the crossing to a gin +shop. Froude remonstrated; "Poor fellow," was the answer, "I daresay he +is cold and thirsty." The memory of Wordsworth is less warmly cherished +among the dales of Westmoreland than that of Carlyle in the lanes of +Chelsea, where "his one expensive luxury was charity." + +His attitude on political questions, in which for ten years he still took +a more or less prominent part, represents him on his sterner side. The +first of these was the controversy about Governor Eyre, who, having +suppressed the Jamaica rebellion by the violent and, as alleged, cruel +use of martial law, and hung a quadroon preacher called Gordon--the man +whether honest or not being an undoubted incendiary--without any law at +all, was by the force of popular indignation dismissed in disgrace, and +then arraigned for mis-government and illegality. In the movement, which +resulted in the governor's recall and impeachment, there was doubtless +the usual amount of exaggeration--represented by the violent language +of one of Carlyle's minor biographers: "There were more innocent people +slain than at Jeffreys' Bloody Assize"; "The massacre of Glencoe was +nothing to it"; "Members of Christian Churches were flogged," etc. +etc.--but among its leaders there were so many men of mark and celebrity, +men like John S. Mill, T. Hughes, John Bright, Fawcett, Cairnes, Goldwin +Smith, Herbert Spencer, and Frederick Harrison, that it could not be set +aside as a mere unreasoning clamour. It was a hard test of Carlyle's +theory of strong government; and he stood to his colours. Years before, +on John Sterling suggesting that the negroes themselves should be +consulted as to making a permanent engagement with their masters, he had +said, "I never thought the rights of the negroes worth much discussing +in any form. Quashee will get himself made a slave again, and with +beneficent whip will be compelled to work." On this occasion he regarded +the black rebellion in the same light as the Sepoy revolt. He organised +and took the chair of a "Defence Committee," joined or backed by Ruskin, +Henry Kingsley, Tyndall, Sir R. Murchison, Sir T. Gladstone, and others. +"I never," says Mr. Froude, "knew Carlyle more anxious about anything." +He drew up a petition to Government and exerted himself heart and soul +for the "brave, gentle, chivalrous, and clear man," who when the ship was +on fire "had been called to account for having flung a bucket or two of +water into the hold beyond what was necessary." He had damaged some of +the cargo perhaps, but he had saved the ship, and deserved to be made +"dictator of Jamaica for the next twenty-five years," to govern after +the model of Dr. Francia in Paraguay. The committee failed to get +Eyre reinstalled or his pension restored; but the impeachment was +unsuccessful. + +The next great event was the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, by the +Tories, educated by Mr. Disraeli to this method of "dishing the Whigs," +by outbidding them in the scramble for votes. This instigated the famous +tract called _Shooting Niagara_, written in the spirit of the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_--Carlyle's final and unqualified denunciation of this +concession to Democracy and all its works. But the upper classes in +England seemed indifferent to the warning. "Niagara, or what you like," +the author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, "we will +at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when Church and State have +gone." A _mot_ emphatically of the decadence. + +Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions being a means of +bringing the Irish question within the range of practical politics. + + I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of + those Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house + had decided to expel and extirpate the human inhabitants, + which latter seemed to have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor + arsenic, and are trying to prevail by the method of love. + +Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland for text and Cromwell's +storm of Drogheda for example, or Otto von Bismarck, would have been, in +his view, in place at Dublin Castle. + +In the next great event of the century, the close of the greatest +European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which pleased Cato pleased +also the gods. Carlyle, especially in his later days, had a deepening +confidence in the Teutonic, a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He +regarded the contest between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, and +wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with exultation. When +a feeling spread in this country, naming itself sympathy for the +fallen,--really half that, the other half, as in the American war, being +jealousy of the victor,--and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a +decisive letter to the _Times_, November 11th 1870, tracing the sources +of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV., and ridiculing the +prevailing sentiment about the recaptured provinces of Lothringen and +Elsass. With a possible reference to Victor Hugo and his clients, he +remarks-- + + They believe that they are the "Christ of Nations."... I + wish they would inquire whether there might not be a + Cartouche of nations. Cartouche had many gallant + qualities--had many fine ladies begging locks of his hair + while the indispensable gibbet was preparing. Better he + should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, who has + him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part + of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and + try to become again a Chevalier Bayard. All Europe does + _not_ come to the rescue in gratitude for the heavenly + illumination it is getting from France: nor could all Europe + if it did prevent that awful Chancellor from having his own + way. Metz and the boundary fence, I reckon, will be + dreadfully hard to get out of that Chancellor's hands + again.... Considerable misconception as to Herr von Bismarck + is still prevalent in England. He, as I read him, is not a + person of Napoleonic ideas, but of ideas quite superior to + Napoleonic.... That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid + Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become + Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, + gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive + France, seems to me the hopefulest fact that has occurred in + my time. + +Carlyle seldom wrote with more force, or with more justice. Only, to be +complete, his paper should have ended with a warning. He has done more +than any other writer to perpetuate in England the memories of the great +thinkers and actors--Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Körner, Stein, Goethe,--who +taught their countrymen how to endure defeat and retrieve adversity. Who +will celebrate their yet undefined successors, who will train Germany +gracefully to bear the burden of prosperity? Two years later Carlyle +wrote or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to shake, his +historical sketch of the _Early Kings of Norway_, showing no diminution +of power either of thought or expression, his estimates of the three +Hakons and of the three Olafs being especially notable; and a paper +on _The Portraits of John Knox_, the prevailing dull gray of which is +relieved by a radiant vision of Mary Stuart. + +He was incited to another public protest, when, in May 1877, towards the +close of the Russo-Turkish war, he had got, or imagined himself to have +got, reliable information that Lord Beaconsfield, then Prime Minister, +having sent our fleet to the Dardanelles, was planning to seize Gallipoli +and throw England into the struggle. Carlyle never seems to have +contemplated the possibility of a Sclavo-Gallic alliance against the +forces of civilised order in Europe, and he chose to think of the Czars +as the representatives of an enlightened autocracy. We are here mainly +interested in the letter he wrote to the _Times_, as "his last public act +in this world,"--the phrase of Mr. Froude, who does not give the letter, +and unaccountably says it "was brief, not more than three or four lines." +It is as follows:-- + + Sir--A rumour everywhere prevails that our miraculous + Premier, in spite of the Queen's Proclamation of Neutrality, + intends, under cover of care for "British interests," to + send the English fleet to the Baltic, or do some other feat + which shall compel Russia to declare war against England. + Latterly the rumour has shifted from the Baltic and become + still more sinister, on the eastern side of the scene, where + a feat is contemplated that will force, not Russia only, + but all Europe, to declare war against us. This latter I + have come to know as an indisputable fact; in our present + affairs and outlooks surely a grave one. + + As to "British interests" there is none visible or + conceivable to me, except taking strict charge of our route + to India by Suez and Egypt, and for the rest, resolutely + steering altogether clear of any copartnery with the Turk in + regard to this or any other "British interest" whatever. It + should be felt by England as a real ignominy to be connected + with such a Turk at all. Nay, if we still had, as we ought + to have, a wish to save him from perdition and annihilation + in God's world, the one future for him that has any hope in + it is even now that of being conquered by the Russians, and + gradually schooled and drilled into peaceable attempt at + learning to be himself governed. The newspaper outcry + against Russia is no more respectable to me than the howling + of Bedlam, proceeding as it does from the deepest ignorance, + egoism, and paltry national jealousy. + + These things I write, not on hearsay, but on accurate + knowledge, and to all friends of their country will + recommend immediate attention to them while there is yet + time, lest in a few weeks the maddest and most criminal + thing that a British government could do, should be done + and all Europe kindle into flames of war.--I am, etc. + + T. CARLYLE. + 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, + _May 4th._ + +Meanwhile honours without stint were being rendered to the great author +and venerable sage. In 1868 he had by request a personal interview with +the Queen, and has left, in a letter, a graphic account of the interview +at the Deanery of Westminster. Great artists as Millais, Watts, and +Boehm vied with one another, in painting or sculpture, to preserve his +lineaments; prominent reviews to record their impression of his work, +and disciples to show their gratitude. One of these, Professor Masson +of Edinburgh, in memory of Carlyle's own tribute to Goethe, started a +subscription for a medal, presented on his eightieth birthday; but he +valued more a communication of the same date from Prince Bismarck. Count +Bernstoff from Berlin wrote him (1871) a semi-official letter of thanks +for the services he had conferred on Germany, and in 1874 he was +prevailed on to accept the Prussian "Ordre pour le mérite." In the same +year Mr. Disraeli proposed, in courteous oblivion of bygone hostilities, +to confer on him a pension and the "Order of the Grand Cross of Bath," an +emolument and distinction which Carlyle, with equal courtesy, declined. +To the Countess of Derby, whom he believed to be the originator of the +scheme, he (December 30th) expressed his sense of the generosity of the +Premier's letter: "It reveals to me, after all the hard things I have +said of him, a now and unexpected stratum of genial dignity and manliness +of character." To his brother John he wrote: "I do, however, truly admire +the magnanimity of Dizzy in regard to me. He is the only man I almost +never spoke of without contempt ... and yet see here he comes with a +pan of hot coals for my guilty head." That he was by no means gagged by +personal feeling or seduced in matters of policy is evident from the +above-quoted letter to the _Times_; but he liked Disraeli better than +he did his great rival; the one may have bewildered his followers, the +other, according to his critic's view, deceived himself--the lie, in +Platonic phrase, had got into the soul, till, to borrow an epigram, "he +made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice." "Carlyle," says +Mr. Froude, "did not regard Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who, +knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into +specious sentiments, but as the representative of the numerous cants of +the age ... differing from others in that the cant seemed true to him. +He in fact believed him to be one of those fatal figures created by +England's evil genius to work irreparable mischief." It must be admitted +that Carlyle's censures are so broadcast as to lose half their sting. +In uncontroversial writing, it is enough to note that his methods of +reforming the world and Mr. Gladstone's were as far as the poles asunder; +and the admirers of the latter may console themselves with the reflection +that the censor was, at the same time, talking with equal disdain of the +scientific discoverers of the age--conspicuously of Mr. Darwin, whom he +describes as "evolving man's soul from frog spawn," adding, "I have +no patience with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other +criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose _Adam Bede_ he pronounced +"simply dull," display a curious limitation or obtuseness of mind. + +One of the pleasantest features of his declining years is the ardour of +his attachment to the few staunch friends who helped to cheer and console +them. He had a sincere regard for Fitzjames Stephen, "an honest man with +heavy strokes"; for Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he said in effect, "Your +duty one day will be to take away that bauble and close the doors of +the House of Discord"; for Tyndall always; for Lecky, despite their +differences; for Moncure Conway, athwart the question of "nigger" +philanthropies; for Kingsley and Tennyson and Browning, the last of whom +was a frequent visitor till near the end. Froude he had bound to his soul +by hoops of steel; and a more faithful disciple and apostle, in intention +always, in practice in the main (despite the most perplexing errors of +judgment), no professed prophet ever had. But Carlyle's highest praise +is reserved for Ruskin, whom he regarded as no mere art critic, but as a +moral power worthy to receive and carry onward his own "cross of fire." +The relationship between the two great writers is unchequered by any +shade of patronage on the one hand, of jealousy or adulation on the +other. The elder recognised in the younger an intellect as keen, a spirit +as fearless as his own, who in the Eyre controversy had "plunged his +rapier to the hilt in the entrails of the Blatant Beast," _i.e._ Popular +Opinion. He admired all Ruskin's books; the _Stones of Venice,_ the most +solid structure of the group, he named "Sermons in Stones"; he resented +an attack on _Sesame and Lilies_ as if the book had been his own; and +passages of the _Queen of the Air_ went into his heart "like arrows." The +_Order of the Rose_ has attempted a practical embodiment of the review +contemplated by Carlyle, as a counteractive to the money making practice +and expediency-worships of the day. + +Meanwhile he had been putting his financial affairs in order. In 1867, +on return from Mentone, he had recorded his bequest of the revenues of +Graigenputtock for the endowment of three John Welsh bursaries in the +University of Edinburgh. In 1873 he made his will, leaving John Forster +and Froude his literary executors: a legacy of trust which, on the death +of the former, fell to the latter, to whose discretion, by various later +bequests, less and less limited, there was confided the choice--at +last almost made a duty--of editing and publishing the manuscripts and +journals of himself and his wife. + +Early in his seventy-third year (December 1867) Carlyle quotes, "Youth is +a garland of roses," adding, "I did not find it such. 'Age is a crown of +thorns.' Neither is this altogether true for me. If sadness and sorrow +tend to loosen us from life, they make the place of rest more desirable." +The talk of Socrates in the _Republic_, and the fine phrases in Cicero's +_De Senectute_, hardly touch on the great grief, apart from physical +infirmities, of old age--its increasing solitariness. After sixty, a man +may make disciples and converts, but few new friends, while the old ones +die daily; the "familiar faces" vanish in the night to which there is no +morning, and leave nothing in their stead. + +During these years Carlyle's former intimates were falling round him like +the leaves from an autumn tree, and the kind care of the few survivors, +the solicitous attention of his niece, nurse, and amanuensis, Mary +Aitken, yet left him desolate. Clough had died, and Thomas Erskine, and +John Forster, and Wilberforce, with whom he thought he agreed, and Mill, +his old champion and ally, with whom he so disagreed that he +almost maligned his memory--calling one of the most interesting of +autobiographies "the life of a logic-chopping machine." In March 1876 he +attended the funeral of Lady Augusta Stanley; in the following month his +brother Aleck died in Canada; and in 1878 his brother John at Dumfries. +He seemed destined to be left alone; his physical powers were waning. As +early as 1868 he and his last horse had their last ride together; later, +his right hand failed, and he had to write by dictation. In the gathering +gloom he began to look on death as a release from the shreds of life, and +to envy the old Roman mode of shuffling off the coil. His thoughts turned +more and more to Hamlet's question of the possible dreams hereafter, and +his longing for his lost Jeannie made him beat at the iron gates of the +"Undiscovered Country" with a yearning cry; but he could get no answer +from reason, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, least +of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven "by way of mesmeric and +spiritualistic trances." His question and answer are always-- + + Strength quite a stranger to me.... Life is verily a + weariness on those terms. Oftenest I feel willing to go, were + my time come. Sweet to rejoin, were it only in eternal sleep, + those that are away. That ... is now and then the whisper + of my worn-out heart, and a kind of solace to me. "But why + annihilation or eternal sleep?" I ask too. They and I are + alike in the will of the Highest. + +"When," says Mr. Froude, "he spoke of the future and its uncertainties, +he fell back invariably on the last words of his favourite hymn-- + + Wir heissen euch hoffen." + +His favourite quotations in those days were Macbeth's "To-morrow and +to-morrow and to-morrow"; Burns's line, "Had we never lo'ed sae +kindly,"--thinking of the tomb which he was wont to kiss in the gloamin' +in Haddington Church,--the lines from "The Tempest" ending, "our little +life is rounded with a sleep," and the dirge in "Cymbeline." He lived on +during the last years, save for his quiet walks with his biographer about +the banks of the Thames, like a ghost among ghosts, his physical life +slowly ebbing till, on February 4th 1881, it ebbed away. His remains +were, by his own desire, conveyed to Ecclefechan and laid under the +snow-clad soil of the rural churchyard, beside the dust of his kin. He +had objected to be buried, should the request be made (as it was by Dean +Stanley), in Westminster Abbey:[greek: andron gar epiphanon pasa gae +taphos.] + +Of no man whose life has been so laid bare to us is it more difficult to +estimate the character than that of Thomas Carlyle; regarding no one of +equal eminence, with the possible exception of Byron, has opinion been +so divided. After his death there was a carnival of applause from his +countrymen in all parts of the globe, from Canton to San Francisco. Their +hot zeal, only equalled by that of their revelries over the memory of +Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer +than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one +perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist": +"Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, +will be heard no more": the _Scotsman_ newspaper writes of him as +"probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the volcanic +glare of his _French Revolution_ all Epics, ancient and modern, grow pale +and shadowy,... his like is not now left in the world." More recently a +stalwart Aberdonian, on helping to put a bust into a monument, exclaims +in a strain of genuine ardour, "I knew Carlyle, and I aver to you that +his heart was as large and generous as his brain was powerful; that +he was essentially a most lovable man, and that there were depths of +tenderness, kindliness, benevolence, and most delicate courtesy in him, +with all his seeming ruggedness and sternness, such as I have found +throughout my life rarely in any human being." + +On the other side, a little later, after the publication of the +_Reminiscences_, _Blackwood_ denounced the "old man eloquent" as "a +blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were the only person who knew good +from bad. ... Every one and every thing dealt with in his _History_ is +treated in the tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The _World_ +remarks that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthumous +depreciation for a factitious fame; "but the game of venomous +recrimination was begun by himself.... There is little that is +extraordinary, still less that is heroic in his character. He had no +magnanimity about him ... he was full of littleness and weakness, of +shallow dogmatism and of blustering conceit." The _Quarterly_, +after alluding to Carlyle's style "as the eccentric expression of +eccentricity," denounces his choice of "heroes" as reckless of morality. +According to the same authority, he "was not a deep thinker, but he was a +great word-painter ... he has the inspiration as well as the contortions +of the Sibyl, the strength as well as the nodosities of the oak. ... In +the _French Revolution_ he rarely condescends to plain narrative ... it +resembles a drama at the Porte St. Martin, in so many acts and tableaux. +... The raisers of busts and statues in his honour are winging and +pointing new arrows aimed at the reputation of their most distinguished +contemporaries, and doing their best to perpetuate a baneful influence." +_Fraser_, no longer edited by Mr. Froude, swells the chorus of dissent: +"Money, for which he cared little, only came in quantity after the death +of his wife, when everything became indifferent to an old and life-weary +man. Who would be great at such a price? Who would buy so much misery +with so much labour? Most men like their work. In his Carlyle seems to +have found the curse imposed upon Adam.... He cultivated contempt of the +kindly race of men." + +Ample texts for these and similar censures are to be found in the pages +of Mr. Froude, and he has been accused by Carlyle's devotees of having +supplied this material of malice prepense. No accusation was over more +ridiculously unjust. To the mind of every impartial reader, Froude +appears as one of the loyallest if one of the most infatuated of friends. +Living towards the close in almost daily communion with his master, and +in inevitable contact with his numerous frailties, he seems to have +revered him with a love that passeth understanding, and attributed to him +in good faith, as Dryden did in jest to the objects of his mock heroics, +every mental as well as every moral power, _e.g.,_ "Had Carlyle turned +his mind to it he would have been a great philologer." "A great +diplomatist was lost in Carlyle." "He would have done better as a man of +action than a man of words." By kicking the other diplomatists into the +sea, as he threatened to do with the urchins of Kirkcaldy! Froude's +panegyrics are in style and tone worthy of that put into the mouth of +Pericles by Thucydides, with which the modern biographer closes his +only too faithful record. But his claims for his hero--amounting to the +assertions that he was never seriously wrong; that he was as good as he +was great; that "in the weightier matters of the law his life had been +without speck or flaw"; that "such faults as he had were but as the +vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the +man"; that he never, in their intercourse, uttered a "trivial word, nor +one which he had better have left unuttered"--these claims will never be +honoured, for they are refuted in every third page after that on which +they appear:--_e.g._ in the Biography, vol. iv. p. 258, we are told that +Carlyle's "knowledge was not in points or lines but complete and solid": +facing the remark we read, "He liked _ill_ men like Humboldt, Laplace, +or the author of the _Vestiges_. He refused Darwin's transmutation of +species as unproved: he fought against it, though I could see he dreaded +that it might turn out true." The statement that "he always spoke +respectfully of Macaulay" is soon followed by criticisms that make us +exclaim, "Save us from such respect." The extraordinary assertion that +Carlyle was "always just in speaking of living men" is safeguarded by the +quotation of large utterances of injustice and contempt for Coleridge, +Byron, Shelley, Keats, Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and +disparaging patronage of Scott, of Jeffrey, of Mazzini, and of Mill. The +dog-like fidelity of Boswell and Eckermann was fitting to their attitude +and capacity; but the spectacle of one great writer surrendering himself +to another is a new testimony to the glamour of conversational genius. + +[Footnote: This patronage of men, some quite, others nearly on his own +level, whom he delights in calling "small," "thin," and "poor," as if he +were the only big, fat, and rich, is more offensive than spurts of merely +dyspeptic abuse. As regards the libels on Lamb, Dr. Ireland has +endeavoured to establish that they were written in ignorance of the noble +tragedy of "Elia's" life; but this contention cannot be made good as +regards the later attacks.] + +Carlyle was a great man, but a great man spoiled, that is, largely +soured. He was never a Timon; but, while at best a Stoic, he was at worst +a Cynic, emulous though disdainful, trying all men by his own standard, +and intolerant of a rival on the throne. To this result there contributed +the bleak though bracing environment of his early years, amid kindred +more noted for strength than for amenity, whom he loved, trusted, and +revered, but from whose grim creed, formally at least, he had to +tear himself with violent wrenches apart; his purgatory among the +border-ruffians of Annan school; his teaching drudgeries; his hermit +college days; ten years' struggle for a meagre competence; a lifelong +groaning under the Nessus shirt of the irritable yet stubborn +constitution to which genius is often heir; and above all his unusually +late recognition. There is a good deal of natural bitterness in reference +to the long refusal by the publishers of his first original work--an +idyll like Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_, and our finest prose poem in +philosophy. "Popularity," says Emerson, "is for dolls"; but it remains +to find the preacher, prophet, or poet wholly impervious to unjust +criticism. Neglect which crushes dwarfs only exasperates giants, but to +the latter also there is great harm done. Opposition affected Carlyle as +it affected Milton, it made him defiant, at times even fierce, to those +beyond his own inner circle. When he triumphed, he accepted his success +without a boast, but not without reproaches for the past. He was crowned; +but his coronation came too late, and the death of his wife paralysed his +later years. + +Let those who from the Clyde to the Isis, from the Dee to the Straits, +make it their pastime to sneer at living worth, compare Ben Jonson's +lines, + + Your praise and dispraise are to me alike, + One does not stroke me, nor the other strike, + +with Samuel Johnson's, "It has been delayed till most of those whom I +wished to please are sunk into the grave, and success and failure are +empty sounds," and then take to heart the following:-- + + The "recent return of popularity greater than ever," which + I hear of, seems due alone to that late Edinburgh affair; + especially to the Edinburgh "Address," and affords new proof + of the singularly dark and feeble condition of "public + judgment" at this time. No idea, or shadow of an idea, is in + that Address but what had been set forth by me tens of times + before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism + receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to + buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done + with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me + £10,000 a year and bray unanimously their hosannahs + heaven-high for the rest of my life, who now would there be + to get the smallest joy or profit from it? To me I feel as + if it would be a silent sorrow rather, and would bring me + painful retrospections, nothing else. + +We require no open-sesame, no clumsy confidence from attaches flaunting +their intimacy, to assure us that there were "depths of tenderness" in +Carlyle. His susceptibility to the softer influences of nature, of family +life, of his few chosen friends, is apparent in almost every page of his +biography, above all in the _Reminiscences_, those supreme records of +regret, remorse, and the inspiration of bereavement. There is no surge of +sorrow in our literature like that which is perpetually tossed up in +the second chapter of the second volume, with the never-to-be-forgotten +refrain-- + + Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait + not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, + think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death + sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of + the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and + beautiful, when it is too late! + +Were we asked to bring together the three most pathetic sentences in our +tongue since Lear asked the question, "And have his daughters brought him +to this pass?" we should select Swift's comment on the lock of Stella, +"Only a woman's hair"; the cry of Tennyson's Rizpah, "The bones had moved +in my side"; and Carlyle's wail, "Oh that I had you yet but for five +minutes beside me, to tell you all!" But in answer we hear only the +flapping of the folds of Isis, "strepitumque Acherontis avari." + + All of sunshine that remained in my life went out in that + sudden moment. All of strength too often seems to have + gone.... Were it permitted, I would pray, but to whom? I can + well understand the invocation of saints. One's prayer now + has to be voiceless, done with the heart still, but also + with the hands still more.... Her birthday. She not here--I + cannot keep it for her now, and send a gift to poor old + Betty, who next to myself remembers her in life-long love + and sacred sorrow. This is all I can do.... Time was to + bring relief, said everybody; but Time has not to any + extent, nor, in truth, did I much wish him + + Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua, + Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae. + +Carlyle's pathos, far from being confined to his own calamity, was ready +to awake at every touch. "I was walking with him," writes Froude, "one +Sunday afternoon in Battersea Park. In the open circle among the trees +was a blind man and his daughter, she singing hymns, he accompanying her +on some instrument. We stood listening. She sang Faber's 'Pilgrims of the +Night.' The words were trivial, but the air, though simple, had something +weird and unearthly about it. 'Take me away,' he said, after a few +minutes, 'I shall cry if I stay longer.'" + +The melancholy, "often as of deep misery frozen torpid," that runs +through his writing, that makes him forecast death in life and paint the +springs of nature in winter hue, the "hoarse sea," the "bleared skies," +the sunsets "beautiful and brief and wae," compels our compassion in a +manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne, and De Quincey, +and other colour dramatists, because we feel it is as genuine as the +melancholy of Burns. Both had the relief of humour, but Burns only of the +two was capable of gaiety. "Look up there," said Leigh Hunt, pointing to +the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony that sings with infinite +voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man." "Eh, it's a sair +sicht," was the reply. + +We have referred to a few out of a hundred instances of Carlyle's +practical benevolence. To all deserving persons in misfortune he was a +good Samaritan, and like all benefactors the dupe of some undeserving. +Charity may be, like maternal affection, a form of self-indulgence, but +it is so only to kind-hearted men. In all that relates to money Carlyle's +career is exemplary. He had too much common sense to affect to despise +it, and was restive when he was underpaid; he knew that the labourer was +worthy of his hire. But, after hacking for Brewster he cannot be said to +have ever worked for wages, his concern was rather with the quality of +his work, and, regardless of results, he always did his best. A more +unworldly man never lived; from his first savings he paid ample tributes +to filial piety and fraternal kindness, and to the end of his life +retained the simple habits in which he had been trained. He hated waste +of all kinds, save in words, and carried his home frugalities even to +excess. In writing to James Aitken, engaged to his sister, "the Craw," he +says, "remember in marriage you have undertaken to do to others as you +would wish they should do to you." But this rede he did not reck. + +"Carlyle," writes Longfellow, "was one of those men who sacrificed their +happiness to their work"; the misfortune is that the sacrifice did not +stop with himself. He seemed made to live with no one but himself. +Alternately courteous and cross-grained, all his dramatic power went into +his creations; he could not put himself into the place of those near him. +Essentially perhaps the bravest man of his age, he would not move an inch +for threat or flattery; centered in rectitude, conscience never made +him a coward. He bore great calamities with the serenity of a Marcus +Aurelius: his reception of the loss of his first volume of the _French +Revolution_ was worthy of Sidney or of Newton: his letters, when the +successive deaths of almost all that were dearest left him desolate, are +among the noblest, the most resigned, the most pathetic in biography. +Yet, says Mr. Froude, in a judgment which every careful reader must +endorse: "Of all men I have ever seen Carlyle was the least patient of +the common woes of humanity." "A positive Christian," says Mrs. Carlyle, +"in bearing others' pain, he was a roaring Thor when himself pricked by +a pin," and his biographer corroborates this: "If matters went well with +himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any +one else; and, on the other hand, if he were uncomfortable he required +all the world to be uncomfortable along with him." He did his work with +more than the tenacity of a Prescott or a Fawcett, but no man ever made +more noise over it than this apostle of silence. "Sins of passion he +could forgive, but those of insincerity never." Carlyle has no tinge of +insincerity; his writing, his conversation, his life, are absolutely, +dangerously, transparent. His utter genuineness was in the long run one +of the sources of his success. He always, if we allow for a habit of +rhetorical exaggeration, felt what he made others feel. + +Sullen moods, and "words at random sent," those judging him from a +distance can easily condone; the errors of a hot head are pardonable to +one who, in his calmer hours, was ready to confess them. "Your temptation +and mine," he writes to his brother Alexander, "is a tendency to +imperiousness and indignant self-help; and, if no wise theoretical, +yet, practical forgetfulness and tyrannical contempt of other men." His +nicknaming mania was the inheritance of a family failing, always fostered +by the mocking-bird at his side. Humour, doubtless, ought to discount +many of his criticisms. Dean Stanley, in his funeral sermon, charitably +says, that in pronouncing the population of England to be "thirty +millions, mostly fools," Carlyle merely meant that "few are chosen and +strait is the gate," generously adding--"There was that in him, in spite +of his contemptuous descriptions of the people, which endeared him to +those who knew him best. The idols of their market-place he trampled +under foot, but their joys and sorrows, their cares and hopes, were to +him revered things." Another critic pleads for his discontent that it had +in it a noble side, like that of Faust, and that his harsh judgments of +eminent men were based on the belief that they had allowed meaner to +triumph over higher impulses, or influences of society to injure their +moral fibre. This plea, however, fails to cover the whole case. Carlyle's +ignorance in treating men who moved in spheres apart from his own, as the +leaders of science, definite theological enlightenment, or even poetry +and arts, was an intellectual rather than a moral flaw; but in the +implied assertion, "what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to +regret the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous powers, +which, beginning with his student days, possessed him to the last. The +fame of Newton, Leibnitz, Gibbon, whose works he came to regard as the +spoon-meat of his "rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his +or of any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot career, as a +"rose-water imbecility," or maligned Mill's intrepid thought as that of a +mere machine, he was astray on more delicate ground, and alienated some +of his truest friends. Among the many curses of our nineteenth-century +literature denounced by its leading Censor, the worst, the want of +loyalty among literary men, he fails to denounce because he largely +shares in it. "No sadder proof," he declares, "can be given by a man of +his own littleness than disbelief in great men," and no one has done more +to retrieve from misconception the memories of heroes of the past; +but rarely does either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a good word for any +considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, +more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from _Sartor,_ of which +he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his +self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his +enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger +Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson +would he grant the privilege to hold his own. _Per contra,_ he +overestimated those who were content to be his echoes. + +Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he used +and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who had preceded him in +his lines of historical investigation, as if they had been poachers on +his premises, _e.g._ Heath, the royalist writer of the Commonwealth +time, is "carrion Heath": Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is "my +reverend imbecile friend": his predecessors in _Friedrich,_ as Schlosser, +Preuss, Ranke, Förster, Vehse, are "dark chaotic dullards whose books +are mere blotches of printed stupor, tumbled mountains of marine stores +"--criticism valueless even when it raises the laughter due to a +pantomime. Carlyle assailed three sets of people:-- + +1. Real humbugs, or those who had behaved, or whom he believed to have +behaved, badly to him. + +2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could not understand--as +Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and the leaders of Physics and +Metaphysics. + +3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him an unrestricted +homage or an implicit following, as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc. + +The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his strictures been +always just,--so winged with humorous epigram,--they would have blasted a +score of reputations: as it is they have only served to mar his own. He +was a typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the *_oistros_ +of their ambitious competition and restless push, wanting in repose, +never like + + a gentleman at wise + With moral breadth of tomperament, + +too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call this man as +good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast +between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is +possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others +of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when +he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a +rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if +not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard at +Ecclefechan. + +Truth, in the sense of saying what he thought, was one of his ruling +passions. To one of his brothers on the birth of a daughter, he writes, +"Train her to this, as the cornerstone of all morality, to stand by the +truth, to abhor a lie as she does hell-fire." The "gates of hell" is the +phrase of Achilles; but Carlyle has no real point of contact with the +Greek love of abstract truth. He objects that "Socrates is terribly at +ease in Zion": he liked no one to be at ease anywhere. He is angry with +Walter Scott because he hunted with his friends over the breezy heath +instead of mooning alone over twilight moors. Read Scott's _Memoirs_ in +the morning, the _Reminiscences_ at night, and dispute if you like about +the greater genius, but never about the healthier, better, and larger +man. + +Hebraism, says Matthew Arnold, is the spirit which obeys the mandate, +"walk by your light"; Hellenism the spirit which remembers the other, +"have a care your light be not darkness." The former prefers doing to +thinking, the latter is bent on finding the truth it loves. Carlyle is +a Hebraist unrelieved and unretrieved by the Hellene. A man of +inconsistencies, egotisms, Alpine grandeurs and crevasses, let us take +from him what the gods or protoplasms have allowed. His way of life, +duly admired for its stern temperance, its rigidity of noble aim--eighty +years spent in contempt of favour, plaudit, or reward,--left him austere +to frailty other than his own, and wrapt him in the repellent isolation +which is the wrong side of uncompromising dignity. He was too great to +be, in the common sense, conceited. All his consciousness of power left +him with the feeling of Newton, "I am a child gathering shells on the +shore": but what sense he had of fallibility arose from his glimpse of +the infinite sea, never from any suspicion that, in any circumstances, he +might be wrong and another mortal right: Shelley's lines on Byron-- + + The sense that he was greater than his kind + Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind + By gazing on its own exceeding light. + +fit him, like Ruskin's verdict, "What can you say of Carlyle but that he +was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning?" which withers while +it immortalises. + +[Footnote: In the _Times_ of February 7th 1881, there appeared an +interesting account of Carlyle's daily routine. "No book hack could have +surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and late +in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties. +At ten o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he +took up his pen and laboured hard until three o'clock. Nothing, not even +the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then +came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends.... In the evening he +read and prepared for the work of the morrow."] + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN + +Carlyle was so essentially a Preacher that the choice of a profession +made for him by his parents was in some measure justified; but he was +also a keen Critic, unamenable to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of +the revolutionary spirit of the age, even while protesting against its +extremes: above all, he was a literary Artist. Various opinions will +continue to be held as to the value of his sermons; the excellence of his +best workmanship is universally acknowledged. He was endowed with few of +the qualities which secure a quick success--fluency, finish of style, +the art of giving graceful utterance to current thought; he had in +full measure the stronger if slower powers--sound knowledge, infinite +industry, and the sympathetic insight of penetrative imagination--that +ultimately hold the fastnesses of fame. His habit of startling his +hearers, which for a time restricted, at a later date widened their +circle. There is much, sometimes even tiresome, repetition in Carlyle's +work; the range of his ideas is limited, he plays on a few strings, with +wonderfully versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually +confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But, +after the perfunctory work for Brewster he wrote nothing wholly +commonplace; occasionally paradoxical to the verge of absurdity, he is +never dull. + +Setting aside his TRANSLATIONS, always in prose,--often in +verse,--masterpieces of their kind, he made his first mark in CRITICISM, +which may be regarded as a higher kind of translation: the great value of +his work in this direction is due to his so regarding it. Most criticism +has for its aim to show off the critic; good criticism interprets the +author. Fifty years ago, in allusion to methods of reviewing, not even +now wholly obsolete, Carlyle wrote:-- + + The first and most convenient is for the reviewer to perch + himself resolutely, as it were, on the shoulder of his + author, and therefrom to show as if he commanded him and + looked down upon him by natural superiority of stature. + Whatsoever the great man says or does the little man shall + treat with an air of knowingness and light condescending + mockery, professing with much covert sarcasm that this or + that is beyond _his_ comprehension, and cunningly + asking his readers if _they_ comprehend it. + +There is here perhaps some "covert sarcasm" directed against +contemporaries who forgot that their mission was to pronounce on the +merits of the books reviewed, and not to patronise their authors; it may +be set beside the objection to Jeffrey's fashion of saying, "I like this; +I do not like that," without giving the reason why. But in this instance +the writer did reck his own rede. The temptation of a smart critic is to +seek or select legitimate or illegitimate objects of attack; and that +Carlyle was well armed with the shafts of ridicule is apparent in his +essays as in his histories; superabundantly so in his letters and +conversation. His examination of the _German Playwrights_, of _Taylor's +German Literature_, and his inimitable sketch of Herr Döring, the hapless +biographer of Richter, are as amusing as is Macaulay's _coup de grâce_ to +Robert Montgomery. But the graver critic would have us take to heart +these sentences of his essay on Voltaire:-- + + Far be it from us to say that solemnity is an essential of + greatness; that no great man can have other than a rigid + vinegar aspect of countenance, never to be thawed or warmed + by billows of mirth. There are things in this world to be + laughed at as well as things to be admired. Nevertheless, + contempt is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one if + we habitually live in it. The faculty of love, of admiration, + is to be regarded as a sign and the measure of high souls; + unwisely directed, it leads to many evils; but without it, + there cannot be any good. Ridicule, on the other hand, is + the smallest of all faculties that other men are at pains to + repay with any esteem.... Its nourishment and essence is + denial, which hovers only on the surface, while knowledge + dwells far below,... it cherishes nothing but our vanity, + which may in general be left safely enough to shift for + itself. + +[Footnote: As an estimate of Voltaire this brilliant essay is inadequate. +Carlyle's maxim, we want to be told "not what is _not_ true but what _is_ +true," prevented him from appreciating the great work of Encyclopaedists.] + +We may compare with this one of the writer's numerous warnings to young +men taking to literature, as to drinking, in despair of anything better +to do, ending with the exhortation, "Witty above all things, oh, be not +witty"; or turn to the passage in the review of Sir Walter Scott:-- + + Is it with ease or not with ease that a man shall do his + best in any shape; above all, in this shape justly named of + soul's travail, working in the deep places of thought?... Not + so, now nor at any time.... Virgil and Tacitus, were they + ready writers? The whole _Prophecies of Isaiah_ are not + equal in extent to this cobweb of a Review article. + Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity; but not till + he had thought with intensity,... no easy writer he. Neither + was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with case. + Goethe tells us he "had nothing sent to him in his sleep," no + page of his but he knew well how it came there. + Schiller--"konnte nie fertig werden"--never could get done. + Dante sees himself "growing lean" over his _Divine Comedy_; + in stern solitary death wrestle with it, to prevail over it + and do it, if his uttermost faculty may; hence too it is done + and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures for + evermore among men. No; creation, one would think, cannot be + easy; your Jove has severe pains and fire flames in the head, + out of which an armed Pallas is struggling! As for + manufacture, that is a different matter.... Write by steam + if thou canst contrive it and sell it, but hide it like + virtue. + +In these and frequent similar passages lies the secret of Carlyle's slow +recognition, long struggle, and ultimate success; also of his occasional +critical intolerance. Commander-in-chief of the "red artillery," he sets +too little store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of the +light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but contempt for the +banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and +salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with +the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he +deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt to +leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can +only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of +ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every +ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher. +Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been +inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no +amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in +"the chamber of little ease," Carlyle travestied Goethe's "worship of +sorrow" till it became a pride in pain. He forgot that rude energy +requires restraint. Hercules Furens and Orlando Furioso did more than cut +down trees; they tore them up; but to no useful end. His power is often +almost Miltonic; it is never Shakespearian; and his insistent earnestness +would run the risk of fatiguing us were it not redeemed by his +humour. But he errs on the better side; and his example is a salutary +counteractive in an age when the dust of so many skirmishers obscures the +air, and laughter is too readily accepted as the test of truth, his stern +conception of literature accounts for his exaltations of the ideal, and +denunciations of the actual, profession of letters in passages which, +from his habit of emphasising opposite sides of truth, instead of +striking a balance, appear almost side by side in contradiction. The +following condenses the ideal:-- + + If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the + high and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have + guidance, freedom, immortality? These two in all degrees + I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind + blow whither it listeth. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, + indignation, despair itself--all these like hell-hounds lie + beleaguering the souls of the poor day worker as of every + man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, + and all these are stifled--all these shrink murmuring far + off in their caves. + +Against this we have to set innumerable tirades on the crime of worthless +writing, _e.g._-- + + No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag + his pen, without saying something; he knows not what + mischief he does, past computation, scattering words without + meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease. + For thistle-down flies abroad on all winds and airs of + wind.... Ship-loads of fashionable novels, sentimental + rhymes, tragedies, farces ... tales by flood and field are + swallowed monthly into the bottomless pool; still does the + press toil,... and still in torrents rushes on the great + army of publications to their final home; and still oblivion, + like the grave, cries give! give! How is it that of all + these countless multitudes no one can ... produce ought that + shall endure longer than "snowflake on the river? Because + they are foam, because there is no reality in them. . . ." + Not by printing ink alone does man live. Literature, as + followed at present, is but a species of brewing or cooking, + where the cooks use poison and vend it by telling + innumerable lies. + +These passages owe their interest to the attestation of their sincerity +by the writer's own practice. "Do not," he counsels one of his unknown +correspondents, "take up a subject because it is singular and will get +you credit, but because you _love_ it;" and he himself acted on the +rule. Nothing more impresses the student of Carlyle's works than his +_thoroughness._ He never took a task in hand without the determination to +perform it to the utmost of his ability; consequently when he satisfied +himself that he was master of his subject he satisfied his readers; but +this mastery was only attained, as it is only attainable, by the most +rigorous research. He seems to have written down his results with +considerable fluency: the molten ore flowed freely forth, but the process +of smelting was arduous. The most painful part of literary work is not +the actual composition, but the accumulation of details, the wearisome +compilation of facts, weighing of previous criticisms, the sifting of the +grains of wheat from the bushels of chaff. This part of his task Carlyle +performed with an admirable conscientiousness. His numerous letters +applying for out-of-the-way books to buy or borrow, for every pamphlet +throwing light on his subject, bear testimony to the careful exactitude +which rarely permitted him to leave any record unread or any worthy +opinion untested about any event of which or any person of whom he +undertook to write. From Templand (1833) he applies for seven volumes of +Beaumarchais, three of Bassompierre, the Memoirs of Abbé Georgel, and +every attainable account of Cagliostro and the Countess de la Motte, to +fuse into _The Diamond Necklace._ To write the essay on _Werner_ and +the _German Playwrights_ he swam through seas of trash. He digested the +whole of _Diderot_ for one review article. He seems to have read through +_Jean Paul Richter,_ a feat to accomplish which Germans require a +special dictionary. When engaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole +shoal of obscure seventeenth-century papers from Yarmouth, the remnant of +a yet larger heap, "read hundredweights of dreary books," and endured +"a hundred Museum headaches." In grappling with _Friedrich_ he waded +through so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping +condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes and places of +which he meant to speak, from St. Ives to Prague, and explored the +battlefields. Work done after this fashion seldom brings a swift return; +but if it is utilised and made vivid by literary genius it has a claim to +permanence. Bating a few instances where his sense of proportion is +defective, or his eccentricity is in excess, Carlyle puts his ample +material to artistic use; seldom making ostentation of detail, but +skilfully concentrating, so that we read easily and readily recall what he +has written. Almost everything he has done has made a mark: his best work +in criticism is final, it does not require to be done again. He interests +us in the fortunes of his leading characters: _first_, because he feels +with them; _secondly_, because he knows how to distinguish the essence +from the accidents of their lives, what to forget and what to remember, +where to begin and where to stop. Hence, not only his set biographies, as +of Schiller and of Sterling, but the shorter notices in his Essays, are +intrinsically more complete and throw more real light on character than +whole volumes of ordinary memoirs. + +With the limitations above referred to, and in view of his antecedents, +the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation is wonderfully wide. Often +perversely unfair to the majority of his English contemporaries, the +scales seem to fall from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of +other nations. The charity expressed in the saying that we should judge +men, not by the number of their faults, but by the amount of their +deflection from the circle, great or small, that bounds their being, +enables him often to do justice to those most widely differing in creed, +sentiment, and lines of activity from one another and from himself. +When treating congenial themes he errs by overestimate rather than by +depreciation: among the qualities of his early work, which afterwards +suffered some eclipse in the growth of other powers, is its flexibility. +It was natural for Carlyle, his successor in genius in the Scotch +lowlands, to give an account of Robert Burns which throws all previous +criticism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong affinities +to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his so-called heroes: but he +is fair to the characters, if not always to the work, of Voltaire and +Diderot, slurs over or makes humorous the escapades of Mirabeau, is +undeterred by the mysticism of Novalis, and in the fervour of his worship +fails to see the gulf between himself and Goethe. + +Carlyle's ESSAYS mark an epoch, _i.e._ the beginning of a new era, in +the history of British criticism. The able and vigorous writers who +contributed to the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly +Reviews_ successfully applied their taste and judgment to such works as +fell within their sphere, and could be fairly tested by their canons; but +they passed an alien act on everything that lay beyond the range of their +insular view. In dealing with the efforts of a nation whose literature, +the most recent in Europe save that of Russia, had only begun to command +recognition, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous. If +the old formulas have been theoretically dismissed, and a conscientious +critic now endeavours to place himself in the position of his author, +the change is largely due to the influence of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._ +Previous to their appearance, the literature of Germany, to which half +of these papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir Walter +Scott's translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen,_ De Quincey's travesties, +and Taylor's renderings from Lessing) a sealed book to English readers, +save those who were willing to breathe in an atmosphere of Coleridgean +mist. Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because he was +the first fully to apprehend its meaning. The _Life of Schiller,_ which +the author himself depreciated, remains one of the best of comparatively +short biographies, it abounds in admirable passages (conspicuously the +contrast between the elder and the younger of the Dioscuri at Weimar) and +has the advantage to some readers of being written in classical English +prose. + +To the essays relating to Germany, which we may accept as the _disjecta +membra_ of the author's unpublished History, there is little to add. +In these volumes we have the best English account of the Nibelungen +Lied--the most graphic, and in the main most just analyses of the genius +of Heyne, Rchter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, who is +recorded to have said, "Carlyle is almost more at home in our literature +than ourselves." With the Germans he is on his chosen ground; but the +range of his sympathies is most apparent in the portrait gallery of +eighteenth-century Frenchmen that forms, as it were, a proscenium to his +first great History. Among other papers in the same collection the most +prominent are the _Signs of the Times_ and _Characteristics,_ in which +he first distinctly broaches some of his peculiar views on political +philosophy and life. + +The scope and some of the limitations of Carlyle's critical power are +exhibited in his second Series of Lectures, delivered in 1838, when (_æt_. +43) he had reached the maturity of his powers. The first three of these +lectures, treating of Ancient History and Literature, bring into strong +relief the speaker's inadequate view of Greek thought and civilisation:-- + + Greek transactions had never anything alive, no result for + us, they were dead entirely ... all left is a few ruined + towers, masses of stone and broken statuary.... The writings + of Socrates are made up of a few wire-drawn notions about + virtue; there is no conclusion, no word of life in him. + +[Footnote: Though a mere reproduction of the notes of Mr. Chisholm Anstey, +this posthumous publication is justified by its interest and obvious +authenticity. The appearance in a prominent periodical (while these sheets +are passing through the press) of _Wotton Reinfred_ is more open to +question. This fragment of a romance, partly based on the plan of _Wilhelm +Meister_, with shadowy love episodes recalling the manner of the "Minerva +Press," can add nothing to Carlyle's reputation.] + + +These and similar dogmatic utterances are comments of the Hebrew on the +Hellene. To the Romans, "the men of antiquity," he is more just, dwelling +on their agriculture and road-making as their "greatest work written +on the planet;" but the only Latin author he thoroughly appreciates is +Tacitus, "a Colossus on edge of dark night." Then follows an exaltation +of the Middle Ages, in which "we see belief getting the victory over +unbelief," in the strain of Newman's _Grammar of Assent_. On the +surrender of Henry to Hildebrand at Canossa his approving comment is, +"the clay that is about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its +rights; the danger is always the other way, that the spiritual part of +man will become overlaid with the bodily part." In the later struggle +between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens his sympathy is with Gregory and +Innocent. In the same vein is his praise of Peter the Hermit, whose motto +was not the "action, action" of Demosthenes, but, "belief, belief." In +the brief space of those suggestive though unequal discourses the speaker +allows awkward proximity to some of the self-contradictions which, even +when scattered farther apart, perplex his readers and render it impossible +to credit his philosophy with more than a few strains of consistent +thought. + + In one page "the judgments of the heart are of more value than those of + the head." In the next "morals in a man are the counterpart of the + intellect that is in him." The Middle Ages were "a healthy age," and + therefore there was next to no Literature. "The strong warrior disdained + to write." "Actions will be preserved when all writers are forgotten." + Two days later, apropos of Dante, he says, "The great thing which any + nation can do is to produce great men.... When the Vatican shall have + crumbled to dust, and St. Peter's and Strassburg Minster be no more; for + thousands of years to come Catholicism will survive in this sublime + relic of antiquity--the _Divina Commedia."_ + + [Footnote: It has been suggested that Carlyle may have been in this + instance a student of Vauvenargues, who in the early years of the much- + maligned eighteenth century wrote "Les graudes pensées viennent du + coeur."] + +Passing to Spain, Carlyle salutes Cervantes and the Cid,--calling Don +Quixote the "poetry of comedy," "the age of gold in self-mockery,"--pays +a more reserved tribute to Calderon, ventures on the assertion that +Cortes was "as great as Alexander," and gives a sketch, so graphic that +it might serve as a text for Motley's great work, of the way in which +the decayed Iberian chivalry, rotten through with the Inquisition, broke +itself on the Dutch dykes. After a brief outline of the rise of the +German power, which had three avatars--the overwhelming of Rome, the +Swiss resistance to Austria, and the Reformation--we have a rough +estimate of some of the Reformers. Luther is exalted even over Knox; +Erasmus is depreciated, while Calvin and Melanchthon are passed by. + +The chapter on the Saxons, in which the writer's love of the sea appears +in picturesque reference to the old rover kings, is followed by unusually +commonplace remarks on earlier English literature, interspersed with some +of Carlyle's refrains. + + The mind is one, and consists not of bundles of faculties at + all ... the same features appear in painting, singing, + fighting ... when I hear of the distinction between the poet + and the thinker, I really see no difference at all.... Bacon + sees, Shakespeare sees through,... Milton is altogether + sectarian--a Presbyterian one might say--he got his + knowledge out of Knox.... Eve is a cold statue. + +Coming to the well-belaboured eighteenth century--when much was done of +which the nineteenth talks, and massive books were written that we are +content to criticise--we have the inevitable denunciations of scepticism, +materialism, argumentation, logic; the quotation, (referred to a motto +"in the Swiss gardens"), "Speech is silvern, silence is golden," and a +loud assertion that all great things are silent. The age is commended +for Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's spinning jenny, and Whitfield's +preaching, but its policy and theories are alike belittled. The summaries +of the leading writers are interesting, some curious, and a few absurd. +On the threshold of the age Dryden is noted "as a great poet born in the +worst of times": Addison as "an instance of one formal man doing great +things": Swift is pronounced "by far the greatest man of that time, not +unfeeling," who "carried sarcasm to an epic pitch": Pope, we are told, +had "one of the finest heads ever known." Sterne is handled with a +tenderness that contrasts with the death sentence pronounced on him by +Thackeray, "much is forgiven him because he loved much,... a good simple +being after all." Johnson, the "much enduring," is treated as in the +_Heroes_ and the Essay. Hume, with "a far duller kind of sense," is +commended for "noble perseverance and Stoic endurance of failure; but his +eye was not open to faith," etc. On which follows a stupendous criticism +of Gibbon, whom Carlyle, returning to his earlier and juster view, ended +by admiring. + + With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more + futile account of human things than he has done of the + _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. + +The sketch of the Pre-Revolution period is slight, and marked by a +somewhat shallow reference to Rousseau. The last lecture on the recent +German writers is a mere _réchauffé_ of the Essays. Carlyle closes +with the famous passage from Richter, one of those which indicate the +influence in style as in thought of the German over the Scotch humorist. +"It is now the twelfth hour of the night, birds of darkness are on the +wing, the spectres uprear, the dead walk, the living dream. Thou, Eternal +Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn." The whole volume is a testimony +to the speaker's power of speech, to his often unsurpassed penetration, +and to the hopeless variance of the often rapidly shifting streams of his +thought. + +Detailed criticism of Carlyle's HISTORIES belongs to the sphere of +separate disquisitions. Here it is only possible to take note of their +general characteristics. His conception of what history should be is +shared with Macaulay. Both writers protest against its being made a mere +record of "court and camp," of royal intrigue and state rivalry, of +pageants of procession, or chivalric encounters. Both find the sources of +these outwardly obtrusive events in the underground current of national +sentiment, the conditions of the civilisation from which they were +evolved, the prosperity or misery of the masses of the people. + + The essence of history does not lie in laws, senate-houses, + or battle-fields, but in the tide of thought and action--the + world of existence that in gloom and brightness blossoms and + fades apart from these. + +But Carlyle differs from Macaulay in his passion for the concrete. The +latter presents us with pictures to illustrate his political theory; the +former leaves his pictures to speak for themselves. "Give him a fact," +says Emerson, "he loaded you with thanks; a theory, with ridicule or +even abuse." It has been said that with Carlyle History was philosophy +teaching by examples. He himself defines it as "the essence of +innumerable biographies." He individualises everything he meets; his +dislike of abstractions is everywhere extreme. Thus while other writers +have expanded biography into history, Carlyle condenses history into +biography. Even most biographies are too vague for him. He delights in +Boswell: he glides over their generalisations to pick out some previously +obscure record from Clarendon or Hume. Even in _The French Revolution,_ +where the author has mainly to deal with masses in tumult, he gives most +prominence to their leaders. They march past us, labelled with strange +names, in the foreground of the scene, on which is being enacted the +death wrestle of old Feudalism and young Democracy. This book is unique +among modern histories for a combination of force and insight only +rivalled by the most incisive passages of the seventh book of Thucydides, +of Tacitus, of Gibbon, and of Michelet. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ a comparison of Carlyle and Michelet in Dr. Oswald's +interesting and suggestive little volume of criticism and selection, +_Thomas Carlyle, ein Lebensbild und Goldkörner aus seinen Werken._] + +_The French Revolution_ is open to the charge of being a comment and a +prophecy rather than a narrative: the reader's knowledge of the main +events of the period is too much assumed for the purpose of a school +book. Even Dryasdust will turn when trod on, and this book has been a +happy hunting field to aggressive antiquarians, to whom the mistake of a +day in date, the omission or insertion of a letter in a name, is of more +moment than the difference between vitalising or petrifying an era. The +lumber merchants of history are the born foes of historians who, like +Carlyle and Mr. Froude, have manifested their dramatic power of making +the past present and the distant near. That the excess of this power is +not always compatible with perfect impartiality may be admitted; for a +poetic capacity is generally attended by heats of enthusiasm, and is +liable to errors of detail; but without some share of it-- + + Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit + Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln. + +Mere research, the unearthing and arrangement of what Sir Philip Sidney +calls "old moth-eaten records," supplies material for the work of the +historian proper; and, occasionally to good purpose, corrects it, but, as +a rule, with too much flourish. Applying this minute criticism to _The +French Revolution,_ one reviewer has found that the author has given the +wrong number to a regiment: another esteemed scholar has discovered that +there are seven errors in the famous account of the flight to Varennes, +to wit:--the delay in the departure was due to Bouille, not to the Queen; +she did not lose her way and so delay the start; Ste. Menehould is too +big to be called a village; on the arrest, it was the Queen who asked for +hot water and eggs; the King only left the coach once; it went rather +faster than is stated; and, above all, _infandum!_ it was not painted +yellow, but green and black. This criticism does not in any degree +detract from the value of one of the most vivid and substantially +accurate narratives in the range of European literature. Carlyle's object +was to convey the soul of the Revolution, not to register its upholstery. +The annalist, be he dryasdust or gossip, is, in legal phrase, "the devil" +of the prose artist, whose work makes almost as great a demand on the +imaginative faculty as that of the poet. Historiography is related to +History as the Chronicles of Holinshed and the Voyages of Hakluyt to the +Plays of Shakespeare, plays which Marlborough confessed to have been +the main source of his knowledge of English history. Some men are born +philologists or antiquarians; but, as the former often fail to see the +books because of the words, so the latter cannot read the story for the +dates. The mass of readers require precisely what has been contemptuously +referred to as the "Romance of History," provided it leaves with them +an accurate impression, as well as an inspiring interest. Save in his +over-hasty acceptance of the French _blague_ version of "The Sinking of +the Vengeur," Carlyle has never laid himself open to the reproach of +essential inaccuracy. As far as possible for a man of genius, he was +a devotee of facts. He is never a careless, though occasionally +an impetuous writer; his graver errors are those of emotional +misinterpretation. It has been observed that, while contemning +Robespierre, he has extenuated the guilt of Danton as one of the main +authors of the September massacres, and, more generally, that "his +quickness and brilliancy made him impatient of systematic thought." But +his histories remain the best illuminations of fact in our language. _The +French Revolution_ is a series of flame-pictures; every page is on fire; +we read the whole as if listening to successive volleys of artillery: +nowhere has such a motley mass been endowed with equal life. This book +alone vindicates Lowell's panegyric: "the figures of most historians seem +like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs through any hole +that criticism may tear in them; but Carlyle's are so real that if you +prick them they bleed." + +When Carlyle generalises, as in the introductions to his Essays, he is +apt to thrust his own views on his subject and on his readers; but, +unlike De Quincey, who had a like love of excursus, he comes to the point +before the close. + +The one claimed the privilege, assumed by Coleridge, of starting from no +premises and arriving at no conclusion; the other, in his capacity as +a critic, arrives at a conclusion, though sometimes from questionable +premises. It is characteristic of his habit of concentrating, rather than +condensing, that Carlyle abandoned his design of a history of the Civil +Wars for _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches._ The events of the +period, whose issues the writer has firmly grasped, are brought into +prominence mainly as they elucidate the career of his hero; but the +"elucidations" have been accepted, with a few reservations, as final. No +other work has gone so far to reverse a traditional estimate. The old +current conceptions of the Protector are refuted out of his own mouth; +but it was left for his editor to restore life to the half-forgotten +records, and sweep away the clouds that obscured their revelations of a +great though rugged character. _Cromwell_ has been generally accepted +in Scotland as Carlyle's masterpiece--a judgment due to the fact of its +being, among the author's mature works, the least apparently opposed +to the theological views prevalent in the north of our island. In +reality--though containing some of his finest descriptions and +battle-pieces, conspicuously that of "Dunbar"--it is the least artistic +of his achievements, being overladen with detail and superabounding in +extract. A good critic has said that it was a labour of love, like +Spedding's _Bacon;_ but that the correspondence, lavishly reproduced in +both works, has "some of the defects of lovers' letters for those to whom +they are not addressed." + +[Footnote: In _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11th, 1881.] + +Carlyle has established that Oliver was not a hypocrite, "not a man of +falsehood, but a man of truth": he has thrown doubts on his being a +fanatic; but he has left it open to M. Guizot to establish that his later +rule was a practical despotism. + +In _Friedrich II._ he undertook a yet greater task; and his work +stretching over a wider arena, is, of necessity, more of a history, less +of a biography, than any of his others. In constructing and composing it +he was oppressed not only by the magnitude and complexity of his theme, +but, for the first time, by hesitancies as to his choice of a hero. +He himself confessed, "I never was admitted much to _Friedrich's_ +confidence, and I never cared very much about him." Yet he determined, +almost of malice prepense, to exalt the narrow though vivid Prussian +as "the last of the kings, the one genuine figure in the eighteenth +century," and though failing to prove his case, he has, like a loyal +lawyer, made the best of his brief. The book embodies and conveys the +most brilliant and the most readable account of a great part of the +century, and nothing he has written bears more ample testimony to the +writer's pictorial genius. It is sometimes garrulous with the fluency of +an old man eloquent; parts of the third volume, with its diffuse extracts +from the king's survey of his realm, are hard if not weary reading; but +the rest is a masterpiece of historic restoration. The introductory +portion, leading us through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy +and political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the procession +of the half-forgotten host of German worthies,--St. Adalbert and his +mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth; +Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret with the mouth; Sigismund +_supra grammaticam_; Augustus the physically strong; Albert Achilles and +Albert Alcibiades; Anne of Cleves; Mr. John Kepler,--who move on the +pages, more brightly "pictured" than those of Livy, like marionettes +inspired with life. In the main body of the book the men and women of the +Prussian court are brought before us in fuller light and shade. Friedrich +himself, at Sans Souci, with his cocked-hat, walking-stick and wonderful +gray eyes; Sophia Charlotte's grace, wit, and music; Wilhelmina and her +book; the old Hyperborean; the black artists Seckendorf and Grumkow; +George I. and his blue-beard chamber; the little drummer; the Old +Dessaner; the cabinet Venus; Grävenitz Hecate; Algarotti; Goetz in his +tower; the tragedy of Katte; the immeasurable comedy of Maupertuis, the +flattener of the earth, and Voltaire; all these and a hundred more are +summoned by a wizard's wand from the land of shadows, to march by +the central figures of these volumes; to dance, flutter, love, hate, +intrigue, and die before our eyes. It is the largest and most varied +showbox in all history; a prelude to a series of battle-pieces--Rossbach, +Leuthen, Molwitz, Zorndorf--nowhere else, save in the author's own pages, +approached in prose, and rarely rivalled out of Homer's verse. + +Carlyle's style, in the chiar-oscuro of which his Histories and +three-fourths of his Essays are set, has naturally provoked much +criticism and some objurgation. M. Taine says it is "exaggerated and +demoniacal." Hallam could not read _The French Revolution_ because of its +"abominable" style, and Wordsworth, whose own prose was perfectly limpid, +is reported to have said, "No Scotchman can write English. C---- is a pest +to the language." + +[Footnote: Carlyle with equal unfairness disparaged Hallam's _Middle +Ages:--"Eh, the poor miserable skeleton of a book," and regarded the +_Literature of Europe_ as a valley of dry bones.] + +Carlyle's style is not that of Addison, of Berkeley, or of Helps; its +peculiarities are due to the eccentricity of an always eccentric being; +but it is neither affected nor deliberately imitated. It has been +plausibly asserted that his earlier manner of writing, as in _Schiller,_ +under the influence of Jeffrey, was not in his natural voice. "They +forget," he said, referring to his critics, "that the style is the skin +of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old woman." Erratic, +metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and therefore a dangerous model, +"the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and +angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the _Birthmark_ +in Hawthorne's romance. To recast a chapter of the _Revolution_ in the +form of a chapter of Macaulay would be like rewriting Tacitus in the +form of Cicero, or Browning in the form of Pope. Carlyle is seldom +obscure, the energy of his manner is part of his matter; its abruptness +corresponds to the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often as +it were by a series of electric shocks, that threaten to break through +the formal restraints of an ordinary sentence. He writes like one who +must, under the spell of his own winged words; at all hazards, +determined to convey his meaning; willing, like Montaigne, to "despise +no phrase of those that run in the streets," to speak in strange tongues, +and even to coin new words for the expression of a new emotion. It is +his fashion to care as little for rounded phrase as for logical argument: +and he rather convinces and persuades by calling up a succession of +feelings than by a train of reasoning. He repeats himself like a +preacher, instead of condensing like an essayist. The American Thoreau +writes in the course of an incisive survey:-- + + Carlyle's ... mastery over the language is unrivalled; it + is with him a keen, resistless weapon; his power of words + is endless. All nature, human and external, is ransacked to + serve and run his errands. The bright cutlery, after all the + dross of Birmingham has been thrown aside, is his style.... + He has "broken the ice, and the torrent streams forth." He + drives six-in-hand over ruts and streams and never upsets.... + With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all + his moods and experiences, and crashes his way through + shoals of dilettante opinions. It is not in man to determine + what his style shall be, if it is to be his own. + +But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a careless or ready +writer. He weighed every sentence: if in all his works, from _Sartor_ to +the _Reminiscences_, you pencil-mark the most suggestive passages you +disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and +fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though +a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a +great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping +his pencil "in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse," now etching his +scenes with the tender touch of a Millet. + +Emerson, in one of his early letters to Carlyle, wrote, "Nothing seems +hid from those wonderful eyes of yours; those devouring eyes; those +thirsty eyes; those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine." +Men of genius, whether expressing themselves in prose or verse, on canvas +or in harmony, are, save when smitten, like Beethoven, by some malignity +of Nature, endowed with keener physical senses than other men. They +actually, not metaphorically, see more and hear more than their fellows. +Carlyle's super-sensitive ear was to him, through life, mainly a torment; +but the intensity of his vision was that of a born artist, and to' it we +owe the finest descriptive passages, if we except those of Mr. Ruskin, in +English prose. None of our poets, from Chaucer and Dunbar to Burns and +Tennyson, has been more alive to the influences of external nature. His +early letters abound in passages like the following, on the view from +Arthur's Seat:-- + + The blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills + swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags + and rude precipices at our feet (where not a hillock rears + its head unsung) with Edinburgh at their base clustering + proudly over her rugged foundations and covering with a + vapoury mantle the jagged black masses of stonework that + stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Faeryland.... + I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and + the moon's fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as + it is, was riding quietly above me. + +Compare with this the picture, in a letter to Sterling, of Middlebie +burn, "leaping into its cauldron, singing a song better than Pasta's"; or +that of the Scaur Water, that may be compared with Tennyson's verses in +the valley of Cauteretz; or the sketches of the Flemish cities in the +tour of 1842, with the photograph of the lace-girl, recalling Sterne at +his purest; or the account of the "atmosphere like silk" over the moor, +with the phrase, "it was as if Pan slept"; or the few lines written at +Thurso, where "the sea is always one's friend"; or the later memories of +Mentone, old and new, in the _Reminiscences_ (vol. ii. pp. 335-340). + +The most striking of those descriptions are, however, those in which the +interests of some thrilling event or crisis of human life or history +steal upon the scene, and give it a further meaning, as in the dim streak +of dawn rising over St. Abb's Head on the morning of Dunbar, or in the +following famous apostrophe:-- + + O evening sun of July, how at this hour thy beams fall slant + on reapers amid peaceful, woody fields; on old women + spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; + on balls at the Orangerie at Versailles, where high-rouged + dames of the palace are even now dancing with + double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring + Hell-porch of an Hôtel-de-Ville. + +Carlyle is, here and there, led astray by the love of contrast; but not +even Heinrich Heine has employed antithesis with more effect than in the +familiar passage on the sleeping city in _Sartor_, beginning, "Ach mein +Lieber ... it is a true sublimity to dwell here," and ending, "But I, +mein Werther, sit above it all. I am alone with the stars." His thought, +seldom quite original, is often a resuscitation or survival, and owes +much of its celebrity to its splendid brocade. _Sartor Resartus_ itself +escaped the failure that was at first threatened by its eccentricity +partly from its noble passion, partly because of the truth of the +"clothes philosophy," applied to literature as to life. + +His descriptions, too often caricatures, of men are equally vivid. They +set the whole great mass of _Friedrich_ in a glow; they lighten the +tedium of _Cromwell's_ lumbering despatches; they give a heart of fire +to _The French Revolution_. Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_ attempts +and fulfils on a smaller what Carlyle achieved on a greater scale. The +historian makes us sympathise with the real actors, even more than the +novelist does with the imaginary characters on the same stage. From the +account of the dying Louis XV. to the "whiff of grapeshot" which closed +the last scene of the great drama, there is not a dull page. Théroigne +de Méricourt, Marat, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Robespierre, +Talleyrand, Mdme. Roland, above all Marie Antoinette--for whom Carlyle +has a strong affection--and Buonaparte, so kindle and colour the scene +that we cannot pause to feel weary of the phrases with which they are +labelled. The author's letters show the same power of baptizing, which he +used often to unfair excess. We can no more forget Count d'Orsay as the +"Phoebus Apollo of Dandyism," Daniel Webster's "brows like cliffs and +huge black eyes," or Wordsworth "munching raisins" and recognising no +poet but himself, or Maurice "attacked by a paroxysm of mental cramp," +than we can dismiss from our memories "The Glass Coachman" or "The +Tobacco Parliament." + +Carlyle quotes a saying of Richter, that Luther's words were half +battles; he himself compares those of Burns to cannon-balls; much of his +own writing is a fusilade. All three were vehement in abuse of things +and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not +sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are, +by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his +humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining +over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as +finely quaint as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's. There is in +it, as in all the highest humour, a sense of apparent contrast, even of +contradiction, in life, of matter for laughter in sorrow and tears in +joy. He seems to check himself, and as if afraid of wearing his heart +in his sleeve, throws in absurd illustrations of serious propositions, +partly to show their universal range, partly in obedience to an instinct +of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermonising and to cut the story +short. Carlyle's grotesque is a mode of his golden silence, a sort of +Socratic irony, in the indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and +at himself. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, ridicule of +his own and other ages, now in droll reference or mock heroic detail, +in an odd conception, a character sketch, an event in parody, in an +antithesis or simile,--sometimes it lurks in a word, and again in a +sentence. In direct pathos--the other side of humour--he is equally +effective. His denunciations of sentiment remind us of Plato attacking +the poets, for he is at heart the most emotional of writers, the greatest +of the prose poets of England; and his dramatic sympathy extends alike to +the actors in real events and to his ideal creations. Few more pathetic +passages occur in literature than his "stories of the deaths of kings." +The following among the less known of his eloquent passages is an +apotheosis of their burials:-- + + In this manner did the men of the Eastern Counties take up + the slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in + the village of Hoxne; seek out the severed head and + reverently reunite the same. They embalmed him with myrrh + and sweet spices, with love, pity, and all high and awful + thoughts; consecrating him with a very storm of melodious, + adoring admiration, and sun-dried showers of tears; joyfully, + yet with awe (as all deep joy has something of the awful in + it), commemorating his noble deeds and godlike walk and + conversation while on Earth. Till, at length, the very Pope + and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear of it; and they, + summing up as correctly as they well could, with _Advocatus + Diaboli_ pleadings and other forms of process, the + general verdict of mankind, declared that he had in very + fact led a hero's life in this world: and, being now gone, + was gone, as they conceived, to God above and reaping his + reward there. Such, they said, was the best judgment they + could form of the case, and truly not a bad judgment. + +Carlyle's reverence for the past makes him even more apt to be touched by +its sorrows than amused by its follies. With a sense of brotherhood he +holds out hands to all that were weary; he feels even for the pedlars +climbing the Hohenzollern valley, and pities the solitude of soul on the +frozen Schreckhorn of power, whether in a dictator of Paraguay or in +a Prussian prince. He leads us to the death chamber of Louis XV., of +Mirabeau, of Cromwell, of Sterling, his own lost friend; and we feel with +him in the presence of a solemnising mystery. Constantly, amid the din of +arms or words, and the sarcasms by which he satirises and contemns old +follies and idle strifes, a gentler feeling wells up in his pages like +the sound of the Angelus. Such pauses of pathos are the records of real +or fanciful situations, as of Teufelsdröckh "left alone with the night" +when Blumine and Herr Towgood ride down the valley; of Oliver recalling +the old days at St. Ives; of the Electress Louisa bidding adieu to her +Elector. + +At the moment of her death, it is said, when speech had fled, he felt +from her hand, which lay in his, three slight slight pressures--farewell +thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easily to forget in this world. + +There is nothing more pathetic in the range of his works, if in that of +our literature, than the account of the relations of father and son in +the domestic history of the Prussian Court, from the first estrangement +between them--the young Friedrich in his prison at Cüstrin, the old +Friedrich gliding about seeking shelter from ghosts, mourning for +Absalom--to the reconciliation, the end, and the afterthoughts:-- + + The last breath of Friedrich Wilhelm having fled, Friedrich + hurried to a private room; sat there all in tears; looking + back through the gulfs of the Past, upon such a Father now + rapt away for ever. Sad all and soft in the moonlight of + memory--the lost Loved One all in the right as we now see, + we all in the wrong!--This, it appears, was the Son's fixed + opinion. Sever, years hence here is how Friedrich concludes + the _History_ of his Father, written with a loyal + admiration throughout: "We have left under silence the + domestic chagrins of this great Prince; readers must have + some indulgence for the faults of the children, in + consideration of the virtues of such a Father." All in + tears he sits at present, meditating these sad things. In a + little while the Old Dessauer, about to leave for Dessau, + ventures in to the Crown Prince, Crown Prince no longer; + "embraces his knees," offers weeping his condolence, his + congratulation; hopes withal that his sons and he will be + continued in their old posts, and that he the Old Dessauer + "will have the same authority as in the late reign." + Friedrich's eyes, at this last clause, flash out tearless, + strangely Olympian. "In your posts I have no thought of + making change; in your posts yes; and as to authority I + know of none there can be but what resides in the king that + is sovereign," which, as it were, struck the breath out of + the Old Dessauer; and sent him home with a painful + miscellany of feelings, astonishment not wanting among them. + At an after hour the same night Friedrich went to Berlin, + met by acclamation enough. He slept there not without + tumult of dreams, one may fancy; and on awakening next + morning the first sound he heard was that of the regiment + Glasenap under his windows, swearing fealty to the new King. + He sprang out of bed in a tempest of emotion; bustled + distractedly to and fro, wildly weeping. Pöllnitz, who came + into the anteroom, found him in this state, "half-dressed, + with dishevelled hair, in tears, and as if beside himself." + "These huzzahings only tell me what I have lost," said the + new King. "He was in great suffering," suggested Pöllnitz; + "he is now at rest." True, he suffered; but he was here with + us; and now----! + +Carlyle has said of Dante's _Francesco_ "that it is a thing woven as of +rainbows on a ground of eternal black." The phrase, well applied to the +_Inferno_, is a perhaps half-conscious verdict on his own tenderness as +exhibited in his life and in his works. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY + +One of the subtlest of Robert Browning's critics, in the opening sentence +of his work, quotes a saying of Hegel's, "A great man condemns the world +to the task of explaining him"; adding, "The condemnation is a double one, +and it generally falls heaviest on the great man himself who has to submit +to explanation." Cousin, the graceful Eclectic, is reported to have said +to the great Philosopher, "will you oblige me by stating the results of +your teaching in a few sentences?" and to have received the reply, "It is +not easy, especially in French." + +[Footnote: _Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher,_ by +Professor Henry Jones, of St. Andrews.] + +The retort applies, with severity, to those who attempt to systematise +Carlyle; for he himself was, as we have seen, intolerant of system. His +mathematical attainment and his antipathy to logical methods beyond +the lines of square and circle, his love of concise fact and his often +sweeping assertions are characteristic of the same contradictions in +his nature as his almost tyrannical premises and his practically +tender-hearted conclusions. A hard thinker, he was never a close +reasoner; in all that relates to human affairs he relies on nobility of +feeling rather than on continuity of thought. Claiming the full latitude +of the prophet to warn, exhort, even to command, he declines either to +preach or to accept the rubric of the partisan or of the priest. + +In praise of German literature, he remarks, "One of its chief qualities +is that it has no particular theory at all on the front of it;" and of +its leaders, "I can only speak of the revelations these men have made to +me. As to their doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be +said"; yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him "out +of the blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that +his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their +discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings, +inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of +credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or mountain air, +and found in them the key of the perennial riddle and the solution of the +insoluble mystery. But in later years the curtain to many of them became +the picture. + +When Carlyle was first recognised in London as a rising author, curiosity +was rife as to his "opinions"; was he a Chartist at heart or an +Absolutist, a Calvinist like Knox, a Deist like Hume, a Feudalist with +Scott, or a Democrat with Burns--inquisitions mostly vain. He had come +from the Scotch moors and his German studies, a strange element, into the +midst of an almost foreign society, not so much to promulgate a new set +of opinions as to infuse a new life into those already existing. He +claimed to have a "mission," but it was less to controvert any form of +creed than to denounce the insufficiency of shallow modes of belief. He +raised the tone of literature by referring to higher standards than those +currently accepted; he tried to elevate men's minds to the contemplation +of something better than themselves, and impress upon them the vacuity +of lip-services; he insisted that the matter of most consequence was the +grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to +sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty +to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only +barren but obstructive; that it is only + + When half-gods go, the gods arrive. + +But his manner of reading these important lessons admitted the retort +that he himself was content rather to dwell on what is _not_ than to +discover what _is_ true. Belief, he reiterates, is the cure for all the +worst of human ills; but belief in what or in whom? In "the eternities +and immensities," as an answer, requires definition. It means that we are +not entitled to regard ourselves as the centres of the universe; that +we are but atoms of space and time, with relations infinite beyond our +personalities; that the first step to a real recognition of our duties is +the sense of our inferiority to those above us, our realisation of the +continuity of history and life, our faith and acquiescence in some +universal law. This truth, often set forth + + By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet, + +no one has enforced with more eloquence than Carlyle; but though he +founded a dynasty of ideas, they are comparatively few; like a group of +strolling players, each with a well-filled wardrobe, and ready for many +parts. + +The difficulty of defining Carlyle results not merely from his frequent +golden nebulosity, but from his love of contradicting even himself. Dr. +Johnson confessed to Boswell that when arguing in his dreams he was often +worsted and took credit for the resignation with which he bore these +defeats, forgetting that the victor and the vanquished were one and the +same. Similarly his successor took liberties with himself which he would +allow to no one else, and in doing so he has taken liberties with his +reader. His praise and blame of the profession of letters, as the highest +priesthood and the meanest trade; his early exaltation of "the writers of +newspapers, pamphlets, books," as "the real effective working church of a +modern country"; and his later expressed contempt for journalism as +"mean and demoralising"--"we must destroy the faith in newspapers"; +his alternate faith and unfaith in Individualism; the teaching of the +_Characteristics_ and the _Signs of the Times_ that all healthy genius is +unconscious, and the censure of Sir Walter Scott for troubling himself +too little with mysteries; his commendation of "the strong warrior" for +writing no books, and his taking sides with the mediæval monks against +the kings--there is no reconciliation of such contradictories. They are +the expression of diverse moods and emphatically of different stages of +mental progress, the later, as a rule, more negative than the earlier. + +This change is most marked in the sphere of politics. At the close of his +student days Carlyle was to all intents a Radical, and believed in +Democracy; he saw hungry masses around him, and, justly attributing some +of their suffering to misgovernment, vented his sympathetic zeal for the +oppressed in denunciation of the oppressors. + +[Footnote: Passage quoted (Chap. II.) about the Glasgow Radical rising in +1819.] + +He began not only by sympathising with the people, but by believing in +their capacity to manage best their own affairs: a belief that steadily +waned as he grew older until he denied to them even the right to choose +their rulers. As late, however, as 1830, he argued against Irving's +conservatism in terms recalled in the _Reminiscences_. "He objected +clearly to my Reform Bill notions, found Democracy a thing forbidden, +leading even to outer darkness: I a thing inevitable and obliged to lead +whithersoever it could." During the same period he clenched his theory by +taking a definite side in the controversy of the age. "This," he writes to +Macvey Napier, "this is the day when the lords are to reject the Reform +Bill. The poor lords can only accelerate (by perhaps a century) their own +otherwise inevitable enough abolition." + +The political part of _Sartor Resartus_, shadowing forth some scheme of +well-organised socialism, yet anticipates, especially in the chapter on +_Organic Filaments_, the writer's later strain of belief in dukes, earls, +and marshals of men: but this work, religious, ethical, and idyllic, +contains mere vague suggestions in the sphere of practical life. About +this time Carlyle writes of liberty: "What art thou to the valiant and +the brave when thou art thus to the weak and timid, dearer than life, +stronger than death, higher than purest love?" and agrees with the +verdict, "The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive +struggles of anarchy." But he soon passed from the mood represented +by Emily Brontë to that of the famous apostrophe of Madame Roland. He +proclaimed that liberty to do as we like is a fatal license, that the +only true liberty is that of doing what is right, which he interprets +living under the laws enacted by the wise. Mrs. Austin in 1832 wrote to +Mrs. Carlyle, "I am that monster made up of all the Whigs hate--a Radical +and an Absolutist." The expression, at the time, accurately defined +Carlyle's own political position: but he shifted from it, till the +Absolutist, in a spirit made of various elements, devoured the Radical. +The leading counsel against the aristocracy changed his brief and became +chief advocate on their side, declaring "we must recognise the hereditary +principle if there is to be any fixity in things." In 1835, he says to +Emerson:-- + + I believe literature to be as good as dead ... and nothing + but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps + three generations.... I suffer also terribly from the + solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a + kind of passion with me to feel myself among my brothers. + And then How? Alas I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay, I + feel it to be a wretched necessity unfit for me; + Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet + these two are the grand categories under which all English + spiritual activity, that so much as thinks remuneration + possible, must range itself. + +And somewhat later-- + + People accuse me, not of being an incendiary Sansculotte, + but of being a Tory, thank Heaven! + +Some one has written with a big brush, "He who is not a radical in his +youth is a knave, he who is not a conservative in his age is a fool." The +rough, if not rude, generalisation has been plausibly supported by +the changes in the mental careers of Burke, Coleridge, Southey, and +Wordsworth. But Carlyle was "a spirit of another sort," of more mixed +yarn; and, as there is a vein of Conservatism in his early Radicalism, +so there is, as also in the cases of Landor and even of Goethe, still +a revolutionary streak in his later Conservatism. Consequently, in his +instance, there is a plea in favour of the prepossession (especially +strong in Scotland) which leads the political or religious party that a +distinguished man has left still to persist in claiming him; while +that which he has joined accepts him, if at all, with distrust. Scotch +Liberals will not give up Carlyle, one of his biographers keenly +asseverating that he was to the last "a democrat at heart"; while +the representative organ of northern Conservatism on the same ground +continues to assail him--"mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst +vergebens." On all questions directly bearing on the physical welfare of +the masses of the people, his speech and action remained consistent with +his declaration that he had "never heard an argument for the corn laws +which might not make angels weep." From first to last he was an advocate +of Free Trade--though under the constant protest that the greatness of +a nation depended in a very minor degree on the abundance of its +possessions--and of free, unsectarian, and compulsory Education. while, +in theology, though remote from either, he was more tolerant of the +dogmatic narrowness of the Low Church of the lower, than of the Ritualism +of the upper, classes. His unwavering interest in the poor and his belief +that legislation should keep them in constant view, was in accord with +the spirit of Bentham's standard: but Carlyle, rightly or wrongly, +came to regard the bulk of men as children requiring not only help and +guidance but control. + +On the question of "the Suffrage" he completely revolved. It appears, +from the testimony of Mr. Froude, that the result of the Reform Bill of +1832 disappointed him in merely shifting power from the owners of land to +the owners of shops, and leaving the handicraftsmen and his own peasant +class no better off. Before a further extension became a point +of practical politics he had arrived at the conviction that the +ascertainment of truth and the election of the fittest did not lie with +majorities. These sentences of 1835 represent a transition stage:-- + + Conservatism I cannot attempt to conserve, believing it to + be a portentous embodied sham.... Whether the Tories stay + out or in, it will be all for the advance of Radicalism, + which means revolt, dissolution, and confusion and a + darkness which no man can see through. + +No one had less faith in the paean chanted by Macaulay and others on the +progress of the nation or of the race, a progress which, without faith +in great men, was to him inevitably downward; no one protested with more +emphasis against the levelling doctrines of the French Revolution. It has +been observed that Carlyle's _Chartism_ was "his first practical step in +politics"; it is more true to say that it first embodied, with more than +his usual precision, the convictions he had for some time held of the +dangers of our social system; with an indication of some of the means to +ward them off, based on the realisation of the interdependence of all +classes in the State. This book is remarkable as containing his last, +very partial, concessions to the democratic creed, the last in which he +is willing to regard a wide suffrage as a possible, though by no means +the best, expedient. Subsequently, in _Past and Present_ and the +_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, he came to hold "that with every extension of the +Franchise those whom the voters would elect would be steadily inferior +and more unfit." Every stage in his political progress is marked by a +growing distrust in the judgment of the multitude, a distrust set forth, +with every variety of metaphor, in such sentences as the following:-- + + There is a divine message or eternal regulation of the + Universe. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count + heads, ask Universal Suffrage by the ballot-box and that + will tell!" From Adam's time till now the Universe was wont + to be of a somewhat abstruse nature, partially disclosing + itself to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was + not the majority. Of what use towards the general result of + finding out what it is wise to do, can the fools be? ... If + of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common + calculation, how in the name of wonder will you ever get a + ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these + ten men? ... Only by reducing to zero nine of these votes can + wisdom ever issue from your ten. The mass of men consulted at + the hustings upon any high matter whatsoever, is as ugly an + exhibition of human stupidity as this world sees.... If the + question be asked and the answer given, I will generally + consider in any case of importance, that the said answer is + likely to be wrong, and that I have to go and do the reverse + of the same ... for how should I follow a multitude to do + evil? Cease to brag to me of America and its model + institutions.... On this side of the Atlantic or on that, + Democracy is for ever impossible! The Universe is a monarchy + and a hierarchy, the noble in the high places, the ignoble in + the low; this is in all times and in all places the Almighty + Maker's law. Democracy, take it where you will, is found a + regulated method of rebellion, it abrogates the old + arrangement of things, and leaves zero and vacuity. It is the + consummation of no-government and _laissez faire_. + +Alongside of this train of thought there runs a constant protest against +the spirit of revolt. In _Sartor_ we find: "Whoso cannot obey cannot be +free, still less bear rule; he that is the inferior of nothing can be the +superior of nothing"; and in _Chartism_-- + + Men who rebel and urge the lower classes to rebel ought to + have other than formulas to go upon, ... those to whom + millions of suffering fellow-creatures are "masses," mere + explosive masses for blowing down Bastiles with, for voting + at hustings for us--such men are of the questionable + species.... Obedience ... is the primary duty of man.... + Of all "rights of men" this right of the ignorant to be + guided by the wiser, gently or forcibly--is the + indisputablest.... Cannot one discern, across all democratic + turbulence, clattering of ballot-boxes, and infinite + sorrowful jangle, that this is at bottom the wish and prayer + of all human hearts everywhere, "Give me a leader"? + +The last sentence indicates the transition from the merely negative +aspect of Carlyle's political philosophy to the positive, which is +his HERO-WORSHIP, based on the excessive admiration for individual +greatness,--an admiration common to almost all imaginative writers, +whether in prose or verse; on his notions of order and fealty, and on a +reverence for the past, which is also a common property of poets. The +Old and Middle Ages, according to his view, had their chiefs, captains, +kings, and waxed or waned with the increase or decrease of their +Loyality. Democracy, the new force of our times, must in its turn be +dominated by leaders. Raised to independence over the arbitrary will of a +multitude, these are to be trusted and followed, if need be, to death. + + Your noblest men at the summit of affairs is the ideal world + of poets.... Other aim in this earth we have none. That + we all reverence "great men" is to me the living rock amid + all rushings down whatsoever. All that democracy ever meant + lies there, the attainment of a truer Aristocracy or + Government of the Best. Make search for the Able man. How to + get him is the question of questions. + +It is precisely the question to which Carlyle never gives, and hardly +attempts, a reply; and his failure to answer it invalidates the +larger half of his Politics. Plato has at least detailed a scheme for +eliminating his philosopher guardians, though it somewhat pedantically +suggests a series of Chinese examinations: his political, though probably +unconscious disciple has only a few negative tests. The warrior or sage +who is to rule is _not_ to be chosen by the majority, especially in our +era, when they would choose the Orators who seduce and "traduce the +State"; nor are we ever told that the election is to rest with either +Under or Upper House: the practical conclusion is that when we find a man +of great force of character, whether representing our own opinions or the +reverse, we should take him on trust. This brings us to the central maxim +of Carlyle's political philosophy, to which we must, even in our space, +give some consideration, as its true meaning has been the theme of so +much dispute. + +It is a misfortune of original thought that it is hardly ever put +in practice by the original thinker. When his rank as a teacher is +recognised, his words have already lost half their value by repetition. +His manner is aped by those who find an easy path to notoriety in +imitation; the belief he held near his heart is worn as a creed like a +badge; the truth he promulgated is distorted in a room of mirrors, half +of it is a truism, the other half a falsism. That which began as a +denunciation of tea-table morality, is itself the tea-table morality of +the next generation: an outcry against cant may become the quintessence +of cant; a revolt from tyranny the basis of a new tyranny; the +condemnation of sects the foundation of a new sect; the proclamation of +peace a bone of contention. There is an ambiguity in most general maxims, +and a seed of error which assumes preponderance over the truth when the +interpreters of the maxim are men easily led by formulæ. Nowhere is this +degeneracy more strikingly manifested than in the history of some of +the maxims which Carlyle either first promulgated or enforced by his +adoption. When he said, or quoted, "Silence is better than speech," he +meant to inculcate patience and reserve. Always think before you speak: +rather lose fluency than waste words: never speak for the sake of +speaking. It is the best advice, but they who need it most are the last +to take it; those who speak and write not because they have something to +say, but because they wish to say or must say something, will continue to +write and speak as long as they can spell or articulate. Thoughtful men +are apt to misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit +still and leave the "war of words to those who like it." When Carlyle +condemned self-consciousness, a constant introspection and comparison of +self with others, he theoretically struck at the root of the morbid moods +of himself and other mental analysts; he had no intention to over-exalt +mere muscularity or to deify athletic sports. It were easy to multiply +instances of truths clearly conceived at first and parodied in their +promulgation; but when we have the distinct authority of the discoverer +himself for their correct interpretation, we can at once appeal to it. +A yet graver, not uncommon, source of error arises when a great writer +misapplies the maxims of his own philosophy, or states them in such a +manner that they are sure to be misapplied. + +Carlyle has laid down the doctrine that MIGHT IS RIGHT at various times +and in such various forms, with and without modification or caveat, that +the real meaning can only be ascertained from his own application of it. +He has made clear, what goes without saying, that by "might" he does not +intend mere physical strength. + + Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute + force; conquest of that kind does not endure. The strong man, + what is he? The wise man. His muscles and bones are not + stronger than ours; but his soul is stronger, clearer, + nobler.... Late in man's history, yet clearly at length, it + becomes manifest to the dullest that mind is stronger than + matter, that not brute Force, but only Persuasion and Faith, + is the king of this world.... Intellect has to govern this + world and will do it. + +There are sentences which indicate that he means something more than even +mental force; as in his Diary (Froude, iv. 422), "I shall have to tell +Lecky, Right is the eternal symbol of Might"; and again in _Chartism_, +"Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them +centuries to try it, and they are found to be identical. The strong thing +is the just thing. In kings we have either a divine right or a diabolic +wrong." On the other hand, we read in _Past and Present_:-- + + Savage fighting Heptarchies: their lighting is an + ascertainment who has the right to rule over them. + +And again-- + + Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: _either_ of + these, once ascertained, puts an end to battle. + +And elsewhere-- + + Rights men have none save to be governed justly.... + + Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere correctly + articulated mights.... All goes by wager of battle in this + world, and it is, well understood, the measure of all + worth.... By right divine the strong and capable govern the + weak and foolish.... Strength we may say is Justice itself. + +It is not left for us to balance those somewhat indefinite definitions. +Carlyle has himself in his Histories illustrated and enforced his own +interpretations of the summary views of his political treatises. There +he has demonstrated that his doctrine, "Might is Right," is no mere +unguarded expression of the truism that moral might is right. In his +hands it implies that virtue is in all cases a property of strength, that +strength is everywhere a property of virtue; that power of whatever sort +having any considerable endurance, carries with it the seal and signal of +its claim to respect, that whatever has established itself has, in the +very act, established its right to be established. He is never careful +enough to keep before his readers what he must himself have dimly +perceived, that victory _by right_ belongs not to the force of will +alone, apart from clear and just conceptions of worthy ends. Even in its +crude form, the maxim errs not so much in what it openly asserts as +in what it implicitly denies. Aristotle (the first among ancients to +_question_ the institution of slavery, as Carlyle has been one of the +last of moderns to defend it) more guardedly admits that strength is +in itself _a_ good,--[Greek: kai estin aei to kratoun en uperochae +agathoutinos],--but leaves it to be maintained that there are forms of +good which do not show themselves in excess of strength. Several of +Carlyle's conclusions and verdicts seem to show that he only acknowledges +those types of excellence that have already manifested themselves as +powers; and this doctrine (which, if adopted in earlier ages, would +practically have left possession with physical strength) colours all his +History and much of his Biography. Energy of any sort compels his homage. +Himself a Titan, he shakes hands with all Titans, Gothic gods, Knox, +Columbus, the fuliginous Mirabeau, burly Danton dying with "no weakness" +on his lips. The fulness of his charity is for the errors of Mohammed, +Cromwell, Burns, Napoleon I.,--whose mere belief in his own star he +calls sincerity,--the atrocious Francia, the Norman kings, the Jacobins, +Brandenburg despots; the fulness of his contempt for the conscientious +indecision of Necker, the Girondists, the Moderates of our own +Commonwealth. He condones all that ordinary judgments regard as the +tyranny of conquest, and has for the conquered only a _væ victis._ In +this spirit, he writes :-- + + M. Thierry celebrates with considerable pathos the fate of + the Saxons; the fate of the Welsh, too, moves him; of the + Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into + the mountains, whither they were not worth following. What + can we say, but that the cause which pleased the gods had in + the end to please Cato also? + +When all is said, Carlyle's inconsistent optimism throws no more light +than others have done on the apparent relapses of history, as the +overthrow of Greek civilisation, the long night of the Dark Ages, the +spread of the Russian power during the last century, or of continental +Militarism in the present. In applying the tests of success or failure we +must bear in mind that success is from its very nature conspicuous. We +only know that brave men have failed when they have had a "sacred bard." +The good that is lost is, _ipso facto_, forgotten. We can rarely tell of +greatness unrecognised, for the very fact of our being able to tell of it +would imply a former recognition. The might of evil walks in darkness: +we remember the martyrs who, by their deaths, ultimately drove the +Inquisition from England; not those whose courage quailed. "It was their +fate," as a recent writer remarks, "that was the tragedy." Reading +Carlyle's maxim between the lines of his chapter on the Reformation, +and noting that the Inquisition triumphed in Spain, while in Austria, +Bavaria, and Bohemia Protestantism was stifled by stratagem or by force; +that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was successful; and that the +revocation of the Edict of Nantes killed the France of Henry IV., we see +its limitations even in the long perspective of the past. Let us, +however, grant that in the ultimate issue the Platonic creed, +"Justice is stronger than injustice," holds good. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Mill's _Liberty_, chap. ii. pp. 52-54] + +It is when Carlyle turns to politics and regards them as history +accomplished instead of history in progress that his principle leads to +the most serious error. No one has a more withering contempt for evil as +meanness and imbecility; but he cannot see it in the strong hand. Of two +views, equally correct, "evil is weakness," such evil as sloth, and +"corruptio optimi pessima," such evil as tyranny--he only recognises the +first. Despising the palpable anarchies of passion, he has no word of +censure for the more settled form of anarchy which announced, "Order +reigns at Warsaw." He refuses his sympathy to all unsuccessful efforts, +and holds that if races are trodden under foot, they are [Greek: phusei +doulo dunamenoi allou einai] they who have allowed themselves to be +subjugated deserve their fate. The cry of "oppressed nationalities" was to +him mere cant. His Providence is on the side of the big battalions, and +forgives very violent means to an orderly end. To his credit he declined +to acknowledge the right of Louis Napoleon to rule France; but he accepted +the Czars, and ridiculed Mazzini till forced to admit, almost with +chagrin, that he had, "after all," substantially succeeded. + + Treason never prospers, what's the reason? + That when it prospers, none dare call it treason. + +Apprehending, on the whole more keenly than any of his contemporaries, +the foundations of past greatness, his invectives and teaching lay +athwart much that is best as well as much that is most hazardous in the +new ideas of the age. Because mental strength, endurance, and industry +do not appear prominently in the Negro race, he looks forward with +satisfaction to the day when a band of white buccaneers shall undo +Toussaint l'Ouverture's work of liberation in Hayti, advises the English +to revoke the Emancipation Act in Jamaica, and counsels the Americans +to lash their slaves--better, he admits, made serfs and not saleable by +auction--not more than is necessary to get from them an amount of work +satisfactory to the Anglo-Saxon mind. Similarly he derides all movements +based on a recognition of the claims of weakness to consideration and +aid. + + Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, + Doing or suffering. + +The application of the maxim, "Might is Right," to a theory of government +is obvious; the strongest government must be the best, _i.e._ that in +which Power, in the last resort supreme, is concentrated in the hands of +a single ruler; the weakest, that in which it is most widely diffused, +is the worst. Carlyle in his Address to the Edinburgh students commends +Machiavelli for insight in attributing the preservation of Rome to +the institution of the Dictatorship. In his _Friedrich_ this view is +developed in the lessons he directs the reader to draw from Prussian +history. The following conveys his final comparative estimate of an +absolute and a limited monarchy:-- + + This is the first triumph of the constitutional Principle + which has since gone to such sublime heights among + us--heights which we begin at last to suspect may be depths + leading down, all men now ask whitherwards. A much-admired + invention in its time, that of letting go the rudder or + setting a wooden figure expensively to take care of it, and + discovering that the ship would sail of itself so much the + more easily. Of all things a nation needs first to be + drilled, and a nation that has not been governed by + so-called tyrants never came to much in the world. + +Among the currents of thought contending in our age, two are +conspicuously opposed. The one says: Liberty is an end not a mere means +in itself; apart from practical results the crown of life. Freedom of +thought and its expression, and freedom of action, bounded only by +the equal claim of our fellows, are desirable for their own sakes as +constituting national vitality: and even when, as is sometimes the case, +Liberty sets itself against improvements for a time, it ultimately +accomplishes more than any reforms could accomplish without it. The fewer +restraints that are imposed from without on human beings the better: the +province of law is only to restrain men from violently or fraudulently +invading the province of other men. This view is maintained and in great +measure sustained by J.S. Mill in his _Liberty_, the _Areopagitica_ of +the nineteenth century, and more elaborately if not more philosophically +set forth in the comprehensive treatise of Wilhelm von Humboldt on _The +Sphere and Duties of Government_. These writers are followed with various +reserves by Grote, Buckle, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and by Mr. Lecky. Mill +writes:-- + + The idea of rational Democracy is not that the people + themselves govern; but that they have security for good + government. This security they can only have by retaining in + their own hands the ultimate control. The people ought to be + masters employing servants more skilful than themselves. + + [Footnote: It should be noted that Mill lays as great + stress on Individualism as Carlyle does, and a more + practical stress. He has the same belief in the essential + mediocrity of the masses of men whose "think ing is done for + them ... through the newspapers," and the same scorn for + "the present low state of society." He writes, "The + initiation of all wise and noble things comes and must come + from individuals: generally at first from some one + individual"; but adds, "I am not countenancing the sort of + 'hero-worship' which applauds the strong man of genius for + forcibly seizing on the government of the world.... All he + can claim is freedom to point out the way."] + +To this Carlyle, with at least the general assent of Mr. Froude, Mr. +Ruskin, and Sir James Stephen, substantially replies:-- + + In freedom for itself there is nothing to raise a man above + a fly; the value of a human life is that of its work done; + the prime province of law is to get from its subjects the + most of the best work. The first duty of a people is to + find--which means to accept--their chief; their second and + last to obey him. We see to what men have been brought by + "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," by the dreams of + idealogues, and the purchase of votes. + +This, the main drift of Carlyle's political teaching, rests on his +absolute belief in strength (which always grows by concentration), on his +unqualified admiration of order, and on his utter disbelief in what his +adverse friend Mazzini was wont, with over-confidence, to appeal to as +"collective wisdom." Theoretically there is much to be said for this +view: but, in practice, it involves another idealism as aerial as that of +any "idealogue" on the side of Liberty. It points to the establishment of +an Absolutism which must continue to exist, whether wisdom survives in +the absolute rulers or ceases to survive. [Greek: Kratein d' esti kai mae +dikios.] The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have been beneficent in +times of revolution; but their right to rule is apt to pass before their +power, and when the latter descends by inheritance, as from M. Aurelius +to Commodus, it commonly degenerates. It is well to learn, from a safe +distance, the amount of good that may be associated with despotism: its +worst evil is lawlessness, it not only suffocates freedom and induces +inertia, but it renders wholly uncertain the life of those under its +control. Most men would rather endure the "slings and arrows" of an +irresponsible press, the bustle and jargon of many elections, the delay +of many reforms, the narrowness of many streets, than have lived from +1814 to 1840, with the noose around all necks, in Paraguay, or even +precariously prospered under the paternal shield of the great Fritz's +extraordinary father, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. + +Carlyle's doctrine of the ultimate identity of "might and right" never +leads, with him, to its worst consequence, a fatalistic or indolent +repose; the withdrawal from the world's affairs of the soul "holding no +form of creed but contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent +optimist nor a consistent pessimist is apparent from his faith in man's +partial ability to mould his fate. Not "belief, belief," but "action, +action," is his working motto. On the title-page of the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_ he quotes from Rushworth on a colloquy of Sir David Ramsay and +Lord Reay in 1638: "Then said his Lordship, 'Well, God mend all!'--'Nay, +by God, Donald; we must help Him to mend it,' said the other." + +"I am not a Tory," he exclaimed, after the clamour on the publication of +_Chartism_, "no, but one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest of +Radicals." With the Toryism which merely says "stand to your guns" and, +for the rest, "let well alone," he had no sympathy. There was nothing +selfish in his theories. He felt for and was willing to fight for +mankind, though he could not trust them; even his "king" he defines to +be a minister or servant of the State. "The love of power," he says, "if +thou understand what to the manful heart power signifies, is a very noble +and indispensable love"; that is, the power to raise men above the "Pig +Philosophy," the worship of clothes, the acquiescence in wrong. "The +world is not here for me, but I for it." "Thou shalt is written upon life +in characters as terrible as thou shalt not"; are protests against the +mere negative virtues which religionists are wont unduly to exalt. + +Carlyle's so-called Mysticism is a part of his German poetry; in the +sphere of common life and politics he made use of plain prose, and often +proved himself as shrewd as any of his northern race. An excessively +"good hater," his pet antipathies are generally bad things. In the +abstract they are always so; but about the abstract there is no +dispute. Every one dislikes or professes to dislike shams, hypocrisies, +phantoms,--by whatever tiresomely reiterated epithet he may be pleased to +address things that are not what they pretend to be. Diogenes's toil with +the lantern alone distinguished the cynic Greek, in admiration of an +honest man. Similarly the genuine zeal of his successor appears in +painstaking search; his discrimination in the detection, his eloquence in +his handling of humbugs. Occasional blunders in the choice of objects +of contempt and of worship--between which extremes he seldom +halts,--demonstrate his fallibility, but outside the sphere of literary +and purely personal criticism he seldom attacks any one, or anything, +without a show of reason. To all gospels there are two sides; and a great +teacher who, by reason of the very fire that makes him great, disdains to +halt and hesitate and consider the _juste milieu,_ seldom guards himself +against misinterpretation or excess. Mazzini writes, "He weaves and +unweaves his web like Penelope, preaches by turns life and nothingness, +and wearies out the patience of his readers by continually carrying them +from heaven to hell." Carlyle, like Ruskin, keeps himself right not by +caveats but by contradictions of himself, and sometimes in a way least to +be expected. Much of his writing is a blast of war, or a protest against +the philanthropy that sets charity before justice. Yet in a letter to the +London Peace Congress of 1851, dated 18th July, we find:-- + + I altogether approve of your object. Clearly the less war + and cutting of throats we have among us, it will be the + better for us all. As men no longer wear swords in the + streets, so neither by and by will nations.... How many + meetings would one expedition to Russia cover the cost of? + +He denounced the Americans, in apparent ignorance of their +"Constitution," for having no Government; and yet admitted that what he +called their anarchy had done perhaps more than anything else could have +done to subdue the wilderness. He spoke with scorn of the "rights of +women," their demand for the suffrage, and the _cohue_ of female authors, +expressing himself in terms of ridiculous disparagement of writers so +eminent as George Sand and George Eliot; but he strenuously advocated +the claim of women to a recognised medical education. He reviled "Model +Prisons" as pampering institutes of "a universal sluggard and scoundrel +amalgamation society," and yet seldom passed on the streets one of the +"Devil's elect" without giving him a penny. He set himself against every +law or custom that tended to make harder the hard life of the poor: there +was no more consistent advocate of the abolition of the "Game Laws." +Emerson says of the mediaeval architects, "they builded better than they +knew." Carlyle felt more softly than he said, and could not have been +trusted to execute one of his own Rhadamanthine decrees. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ a remarkable instance of this in the best short _Life of +Carlyle_, that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147.] + +Scratch the skin of the Tartar and you find beneath the despised +humanitarian. Everything that he has written on "The Condition of England +Question" has a practical bearing, and many of his suggestions have found +a place on our code, vindicating the assertion of the _Times_ of the day +after his death, that "the novelties and paradoxes of 1846 are to a large +extent nothing but the good sense of 1881." Such are:--his insistence on +affording every facility for merit to rise from the ranks, embodied in +measures against promotion by Purchase; his advocacy of State-aided +Emigration, of administrative and civil service Reform,--the abolition of +"the circumlocution office" in Downing Street,--of the institution of a +Minister of Education; his dwelling on the duties as well as the rights +of landowners,--the theme of so many Land Acts; his enlarging on the +superintendence of labour,--made practical in Factory and Limited Hours +Bills--on care of the really destitute, on the better housing of the +poor, on the regulation of weights and measures; his general contention +for fixing more exactly the province of the legislative and the executive +bodies. Carlyle's view that we should find a way to public life for +men of eminence who will not cringe to mobs, has made a step towards +realisation in further enfranchisement of Universities. Other of his +proposals, as the employment of our army and navy in time of peace, and +the forcing of able-bodied paupers into "industrial regiments," have +become matter of debate which may pave the way to legislation. One of +his desiderata, a practical veto on "puffing," it has not yet been found +feasible, by the passing of an almost prohibitive duty on advertisements, +to realise. + +Besides these specific recommendations, three ideas are dominant in +Carlyle's political treatises. _First_--a vehement protest against +the doctrine of _Laissez faire_; which, he says, "on the part of the +governing classes will, we repeat again and again, have to cease; pacific +mutual divisions of the spoil and a would-let-well-alone will no longer +suffice":--a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the Trades Union +wars, of which he failed to see the issue. He is so strongly in favour of +_Free-trade_ between nations that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared +to make it _compulsory_. "All men," he writes in _Past and Present_, +"trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do +it. Our friends of China, who refused to trade, had we not to argue with, +them, in cannon-shot at last?" But in Free-trade between class and class, +man and man, within the bounds of the same kingdom, he has no trust: he +will not leave "supply and demand" to adjust their relations. The +result of doing so is, he holds, the scramble between Capital for larger +interest and Labour for higher wage, in which the rich if unchecked will +grind the poor to starvation, or drive them to revolt. + +_Second_.--As a corollary to the abolition of _Laissez faire_, he +advocates the _Organisation of Labour_, "the problem of the whole future +to all who will pretend to govern men." The phrase from its vagueness +has naturally provoked much discussion. Carlyle's bigoted dislike of +Political Economists withheld him from studying their works; and he seems +ignorant of the advances that have been made by the "dismal science," +or of what it has proved and disproved. Consequently, while brought in +evidence by most of our modern Social idealists, Comtists and Communists +alike, all they can say is that he has given to their protest against the +existing state of the commercial world a more eloquent expression than +their own. He has no compact scheme,--as that of St. Simon or Fourier, or +Owen--few such definite proposals as those of Karl Marx, Bellamy, Hertzka +or Gronlund, or even William Morris. He seems to share with Mill the view +that "the restraints of communism are weak in comparison with those of +capitalists," and with Morris to look far forward to some golden age; he +has given emphatic support to a copartnership of employers and employed, +in which the profits of labour shall be apportioned by some rule of +equity, and insisted on the duty of the State to employ those who are out +of work in public undertakings. + + Enlist, stand drill, and become from banditti soldiers of + industry. I will lead you to the Irish bogs ... English + foxcovers ... New Forest, Salisbury Plains, and Scotch + hill-sides which as yet feed only sheep ... thousands of + square miles ... destined yet to grow green crops and fresh + butter and milk and beef without limit:-- + +an estimate with the usual exaggeration. But Carlyle's later work +generally advances on his earlier, in its higher appreciation of +Industrialism. He looks forward to the boon of "one big railway right +across America," a prophecy since three times fulfilled; and admits that +"the new omnipotence of the steam engine is hewing aside quite other +mountains than the physical," _i.e._ bridging the gulf between races +and binding men to men. He had found, since writing _Sartor_, that dear +cotton and slow trains do not help one nearer to God, freedom, and +immortality. + +Carlyle's _third_ practical point is his advocacy of _Emigration,_ or +rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy for Over-population. +He writes of "Malthusianism" with his constant contempt of convictions +other than his own:-- + + A full formed man is worth more than a horse.... One + man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him + earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded + indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and + delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your + population in the Pampas and Savannahs--in the Curragh of + Kildare? Let there be an _Emigration Service,_ ... so + that every honest willing workman who found England too + strait, and the organisation of labour incomplete, might + find a bridge to carry him to western lands.... Our little + isle has grown too narrow for us, but the world + is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.... If + this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not + everywhere else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to + us "Come and till me, come and reap me"? + +On this follows an eloquent passage about our friendly Colonies, +"overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas." Carlyle +would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans, +and Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; but the +problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines +to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to +overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps. + +In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is +ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of +Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite +tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's +leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public +life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive +to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day +demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of +_laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to +become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one, +of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule +for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample +without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common +good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's +blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many +respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits +of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity with an +eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with equal force put to scorn the +superstition of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts, +some of which may find a mark the archer little meant. + +[Footnote: _Vide passim_ the chapter in _Liberty_ entitled "Limits to the +Authority of Society over the Individual," where Mill denounces the idea +of "the majority of operatives in many branches of industry ... that bad +workmen ought to receive the same wages as good."] + + + + +CHAPTER X + +CARLYLE'S RELIGION AND ETHICS--RELATION TO PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE + +The same advance or retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is +traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages +of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the +widest sense--faith in some supreme Power above us yet acting for us--was +the great factor of his inner life. But when we further question his +Creed, he is either bewilderingly inconsistent or designedly vague. The +answer he gives is that of Schiller: "Welche der Religionen? Keine +von allen. Warum? Aus Religion." In 1870 he writes: "I begin to think +religion again possible for whoever will piously struggle upwards and +sacredly refuse to tell lies: which indeed will mostly mean refusal to +speak at all on that topic." This and other implied protests against +intrusive inquisition are valid in the case of those who keep their own +secrets: it is impertinence to peer and "interview" among the sanctuaries +of a poet or politician or historian who does not himself open their +doors. But Carlyle has done this in all his books. A reticent writer may +veil his convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. An +avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interrogation as to his text. + +With all the evidence before us--his collected works, his friendly +confidences, his journals, his fragmentary papers, as the interesting +series of jottings entitled "Spiritual Optics," and the partial accounts +to Emerson and others of the design of the "Exodus from Hounds-ditch"--it +remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We know that he +abandoned the ministry, for which he was destined, because, at an early +date, he found himself at irreconcilable variance, not on matters of +detail but on essentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism. +We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; that he went, as +continuously as possible for a mind so liable to fits and starts, further +and further from the faith of his fathers; but that he remained to the +last so much affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early +associations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist without +dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a Puritan who had lost +his creed." We know that he revered the character of Christ, and +theoretically accepted the ideal of self-sacrifice: the injunction +to return good for evil he never professed to accept; and vicarious +sacrifice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught that every +man must "dree his weird." We know that he not only believed in God as +revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but +that he threatened, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point +to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in +free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the +greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we +desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of +exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did _not_ believe. +This process is simplified by the fact that he assailed all convictions +other than his own. + +Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all +forms of _Materialism_ and _Hedonism,_ which he brands as "worships of +Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may +lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain. +Similarly he denounces _Atheism,_ never more vehemently than in his +Journals of 1868-1869:-- + + Had no God made this world it were an insupportable place. Laws without + a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. All that is good, + generous, wise, right ... who or what could by any possibility have + given it to me, but One who first had it to give! This is not logic, it + is axiom.... Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic specialities."... + Canst _thou_ by searching find out God? I am not surprised thou canst + not, vain fool. If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered + hearts, there will be seen such a world as few are dreaming of. + +Carlyle calls evidence from all quarters, appealing to Napoleon's +question, "Who made all that?" and to Friedrich's belief that intellect +"could not have been put into him by an entity that had none of its own," +in support of what he calls the Eternal Fact of Facts, to which he clings +as to the Rock of Ages, the sole foundation of hope and of morality to +one having at root little confidence in his fellow-men. + +If people are only driven upon virtuous conduct ... by association of +ideas, and there is no "Infinite Nature of Duty," the world, I should +say, had better count its spoons to begin with, and look out for +hurricanes and earthquakes to end with. + +Carlyle hazardously confessed that as regards the foundations of his +faith and morals, with Napoleon and Friedrich II. on his side, he had +against him the advancing tide of modern _Science._ He did not attempt +to disprove its facts, or, as Emerson, to sublimate them into a new +idealism; he scoffed at and made light of them, _e.g._-- + + Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very + sublime achievement either. I often think ... it is pretty + much all that science in this age has done. ... Protoplasm + (unpleasant doctrine that we are all, soul and body, made of + a kind of blubber, found in nettles among other organisms) + appears to be delightful to many.... Yesterday there came a + pamphlet published at Lewes, a hallelujah on the advent of + Atheism.... The real joy of Julian (the author) was what + surprised me, like the shout of a hyaena on finding that the + whole universe was actually carrion. In about seven minutes + my great Julian was torn in two and lying in the place fit + for him.... Descended from Gorillas! Then where is the place + for a Creator? Man is only a little higher than the tadpoles, + says our new Evangelist.... Nobody need argue with these + people. Logic never will decide the matter, or will seem to + decide it their way. He who traces nothing of God in his own + soul, will never find God in the world of matter--mere + circlings of force there, of iron regulation, of universal + death and merciless indifference.... Matter itself is either + Nothing or else a product due to man's _mind_. ... The + fast-increasing flood of Atheism on me takes no hold--does + not even wet the soles of my feet. + + [Footnote: Cf. Othello, "Not a jot, not a jot." Carlyle writes + on this question with the agitation of one himself not quite at + ease, with none of the calmness of a faith perfectly secure.] + +"Carlyle," says one of his intimates, "speaks as if Darwin wished to rob +or to insult him." _Scepticism_ proper fares as hardly in his hands as +definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in +the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as +intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole +soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal +to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace +of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of life as "a +most melancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean Paul, +"heaven becomes a gas, God a force, and the second world a grave." He +fails to see that all such appeals are beside the question; and deserts +the ground of his answer to John Sterling's expostulation, "that is +downright Pantheism": "What if it were Pot-theism if it is _true_?" It is +the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sympathy for suffering +to override his Stoic theories; but it vitiated his reasoning, and made +it impossible for him to appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional, +religiosity of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called +_Orthodoxy_--whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High or Low; he +abhorred Puseyism, Jesuitry, spoke of the "Free Kirk and other rubbish," +and recorded his definite disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation +and in Miracles. "It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing has +ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation of God's will and +justice, and the stars in their courses are a perpetual miracle, is +his refrain. _This is not what Orthodoxy means_, and no one was more +intolerant than Carlyle of all shifts and devices to slur the difference +between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his own "Exodus from +Houndsditch" might only open the way to the wilderness, he would allow +no one else to take in hand his uncompleted task; and disliked Strauss +and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. "He spoke to me once," says +Mr. Froude, "with loathing of the _Vie de Jésus_." I asked if a true life +could be written. He said, "Yes, certainly, if it were right to do so; +but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to Emerson:-- + + You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom + I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen + were all a kind of half-way-house characters, who I thought + should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in + unbelief, in faint possible _Theism_; which I like + considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, + deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed + among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat. + +What then is left for Carlyle's Creed? Logically little, emotionally +much. If it must be defined, it was that of a Theist with a difference. A +spirit of flame from the empyrean, he found no food in the cold _Deism_ +of the eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image from its +pedestal, as by the music of the "Winter's Tale," to live among men and +inspire them. He inherited and _coûte que coûte_ determined to persist in +the belief that there was a personal God--"a Maker, voiceless, formless, +within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, "My belief in a +special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable"; and +later, "Some strange belief in a special Providence was always in me at +intervals." Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as good +as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days. + +"To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew +prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the God +on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is +He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's God is not a mere +"tendency that makes for righteousness"; He is a guardian and a guide, to +be addressed in the words of Pope's _Universal Prayer_, which he adopted +as his own. A personal God does not mean a great Figure Head of the +Universe,--Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before he became "a +knight" of the Holy Ghost,--it means a Supreme Power, Love, or Justice +having relations to the individual man: in this sense Carlyle believed in +Him, though more as Justice, exacting "the terriblest penalties," than +as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives. He never entered into +controversies about the efficacy of prayer; but, far from deriding, he +recommended it as "a turning of one's soul to the Highest." In 1869 he +writes:-- + + I occasionally feel able to wish, with my whole softened + heart--it is my only form of prayer--"Great Father, oh, if + Thou canst, have pity on her and on me and on all such!" In + this at least there is no harm. + +And about the same date to Erskine:-- + + "Our Father;" in my sleepless tossings, these words, that + brief and grand prayer, came strangely into my mind with an + altogether new emphasis; as if written and shining for me + in mild pure splendour on the black bosom of the night there; + when I as it were read them word by word, with a sudden + check to my imperfect wanderings, with a sudden softness of + composure which was much unexpected. Not for perhaps thirty + or forty years had I once formally repeated that prayer: nay, + I never felt before how intensely the voice of man's soul it + is, the inmost inspiration of all that is high and pious in + poor human nature, right worthy to be recommended with an + "After this manner pray ye." + +Carlyle holds that if we do our duty--the best work we can--and +faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, God will do the best +for us in this life. As regards the next we have seen that he ended with +Goethe's hope. At an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his +father's death (_Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 65) he wrote:-- + + Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told: + yet under time does there not lie eternity? ... Perhaps my + father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near + me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so + please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one + another, recognise one another. ... The possibility, nay (in + some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows + plainer to me. + +On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife: "We shall yet go to her. +God is great. God is good": and earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the +loss of his brother:-- + + "What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead. + + Your brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both + you and I are.... Perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and + the tears be wiped from all eyes. One thing is no perhaps: + surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of + us. If it be not His will, then is it not better so?" + +After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immortality came +uppermost in his mind; but his conclusions are, like those of Burns, +never dogmatic:-- + + The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us. + "In my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are + God you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do + you know more than I, or any of us? + +And later-- + + What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor + mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted + to go farther"? + +To Emerson in 1867 he writes:-- + + I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily + serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final + chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and + Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to + discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their + sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring + nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger + to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my + door against. + +There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's conviction that +he had to make war on credulity and to assail the pretences of a _formal +Belief_ (which he regards as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple +with real Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, the +Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the miracle of miracles; +sight and knowledge leave us no "less forlorn," and beneath all the +soundings of science there is a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind +that qualified him to be the exponent of the religious epochs in history. +"By this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, "he has done so much to vindicate +and bring to light the Augustan age of Christianity in England," adding +that it is the secret also of the great writer's appreciation of the +higher Teutonic literature. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of +"God in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to constrain +unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good and evil are absolute +opposites, are his links with the Puritans, whom he habitually exalts in +variations of the following strain:-- + + The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest + purpose awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts. + Not the body of heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to + die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been, + and yet shall be immortal, has, for the present, passed away. + +Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he regarded with a feeling +akin to worship, was in all essentials the reverse of a Puritan. + +To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, may be applied +the phrase made use of in reference to the greatest of all the series of +ancient books-- + + Hic liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata quaerit, + Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua. + +From passages like those above quoted--his complaints of the falling +off of old Scotch faith; his references to the kingdom of a God who has +written "in plain letters on the human conscience a Law that all may +read"; his insistence that the great soul of the world is just; his +belief in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the divine +depths of sorrow--from all these many of his Scotch disciples persist in +maintaining that their master was to the end essentially a Christian. The +question between them and other critics who assert that "he had renounced +Christianity" is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomenclature; it +is hard exactly to decide it in the case of a man who so constantly found +again in feeling what he had abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was +to the last an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's and +of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies; he attempts in vain to tear +off the husk that cannot be separated from its kernel. He believes in no +historical Resurrection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts +for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the +Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is +withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards +of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives +way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out," +and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity +Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Masson says that "Carlyle had +abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its +Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain on the other side: +but the _Metaphysic_ of Calvinism is precisely what he retained; the +alleged _Facts_ of Revelation he discarded; of the _Ethic_ of the Gospels +he accepted perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard +the teaching of Christ as final. + +[Footnote: A passage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life and Letters of Robert +Browning_, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic for +general quotation.] + +His doctrine of Renunciation (suggested by the Three Reverences in +_Wilhelm Meister's Travels_) is Carlyle's transmutation, if not +transfiguration, of Puritanism; but it took neither in him nor in Goethe +any very consistent form, save that it meant Temperance, keeping the +body well under the control of the head, the will strong, and striving, +through all the lures of sense, to attain to some ideal life. + +Both write of Christianity as "a thing of beauty," a perennial power, +a spreading tree, a fountain of youth; but Goethe was too much of a +Greek--though, as has been said, "a very German Greek"--to be, in any +proper sense of the word, a Christian; Carlyle too much of a Goth. His +Mythology is Norse; his Ethics, despite his prejudice against the race, +are largely Jewish. He proclaimed his code with the thunders of Sinai, +not in the reconciling voice of the Beatitudes. He gives or forces on us +world-old truths splendidly set, with a leaning to strength and endurance +rather than to advancing thought. He did not, says a fine critic of +morals, recognise that "morality also has passed through the straits." He +did not really believe in Content, which has been called the Catholic, +nor in Progress, more questionably styled the Protestant virtue. His +often excellent practical rule to "do the duty nearest to hand" may be +used to gag the intellect in its search after the goal; so that even his +Everlasting Yea, as a predetermined affirmation, may ultimately result in +a deeper negation. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Professor Jones's _Browning as a Philosophical and +Religious, Teacher_, pp. 66-90.] + +"Duty," to him as to Wordsworth, "stern daughter of the voice of God," +has two aspects, on each of which he dwells with a persistent iteration. +The _first_ is _Surrender_ to something higher and wider than ourselves. +That he has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the +self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly means that correct +theories of our complex life are impossible; but Matthew Arnold's +criticism, that his Ethics "are made paradoxical by his attack on +Happiness, which he should rather have referred to as the result of +Labour and of Truth," can only be rebutted by the assertion that the +pursuit of pleasure as an end defeats itself. The _second_ aspect of his +"Duty" is _Work_. His master Goethe is to him as Apollo to Hercules, as +Shakespeare to Luther; the one entire as the chrysolite, the other like +the Schreckhorn rent and riven; the words of the former are oracles, of +the latter battles; the one contemplates and beautifies truth, the other +wrestles and fights for it. Carlyle has a limited love of abstract truth; +of action his love is unlimited. His lyre is not that of Orpheus, but +that of Amphion which built the walls of Thebes. _Laborare est orare._ He +alone is honourable who does his day's work by sword or plough or pen. +Strength is the crown of toil. Action converts the ring of necessity that +girds us into a ring of duty, frees us from dreams, and makes us men. + + The midnight phantoms feel the spell, + The shadows sweep away. + +There are few grander passages in literature than some of those litanies +of labour. They have the roll of music that makes armies march, and if +they have been made so familiar as to cease to seem new, it is largely +owing to the power of the writer which has compelled them to become +common property. + +Carlyle's practical Ethics, though too little indulgent to the light and +play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the +relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his +conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical +imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in +flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite +above and around, but not _in_ the finite. He insisted on the community +of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am I my brother's +keeper?" + + All things, the minutest that man does, influence all men, + the very look of his face blesses or curses.... It is a + mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my + hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe. + +But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and so failed to +attain to the Optimism after which he often strove. He held, with +Browning, that "God's in His heaven," but not that "All's right with the +world." His view was the Zoroastrian _*athanatos machae*_, "in God's +world presided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a "divine +infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who said "The world is a +lie, but God is truth," landed him in an _impasse_; he could not answer +the obvious retort,--Did then God make and love a lie, or make it hating +it? There must have been some other power _to eteron_, or, as Mill in +his Apologia for _Theism_ puts it, a limit to the assumed Omnipotence. +Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, inconsequently halts between them; +and his prevailing view of mankind adds to his dilemma. + +[Footnote: Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist +Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer," +ejaculated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er Remit nicht diese +verdarnmte Basse."] + +He imposes an "infinite duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an +infinite punishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind sets +its hardest tasks to itself; or that, as Emerson declares, "the assertion +of our weakness and deficiency is the fine innuendo by which the soul +makes its enormous claim." Hence, according to Mazzini, "He stands between +the individual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes the +human being by comparing him with God. From, his lips, so daring, we seem +to hear every instant the cry of the Breton mariner, 'My God, protect me; +my bark is so small and Thy ocean so vast.'" Similarly, the critic of +Browning above referred to concludes of the great prose writer, whom he +has called the poet's twin: + +"He has let loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight of the +future: he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there and was +denied the view from Pisgah." + +Carlyle's Theism is defective because it is not sufficiently Pantheistic; +but, in his view of the succession of events in the "roaring loom of +time," of the diorama of majesty girt by mystery, he has found a +cosmic Pantheism and given expression to it in a passage which is the +culmination of the English prose eloquence, as surely as Wordsworth's +great Ode is the high-tide [A phrase applied by Emerson to the +Ode.] mark of the English verse, of this century:-- + + Are we not sprite shaped into a body, into an Appearance; + and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is + no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of + Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us as + round the veriest spectre is Eternity, and to Eternity + minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love + and Faith as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of + beatified Souls? And again do we not squeak and gibber and + glide, bodeful and feeble and fearful, and revel in our mad + dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the morning air + summons us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake + and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon; does the steel + host that yelled in fierce battle shouts at Issus and + Arbela remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, + even as perturbed goblins must? Napoleon, too, with his + Moscow retreats and Austerlitz campaigns, was it all other + than the veriest spectre hunt; which has now with its + howling tumult that made night hideous flitted away? + Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the + earth openly at noontide; some half hundred have vanished + from it, some half hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch + ticks once. O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider + that we not only carry each a future ghost within him, but are + in very deed ghosts. + + [Footnote: _Cf._ "Tempest," "We are such stuff as dreams are + made of."] + + These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life- + blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow; a + shadow system gathered round our _me_, wherein through some + moments or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the + Flesh. So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the + end. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a + body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night on Heaven's mission + appears. What force and fire there is in each he expends, one + grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the + giddy Alpine heights of science; one madly dashed in pieces on + the rocks of Strife in war with his fellow, and then the heaven- + sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even + to sense becomes a vanished shadow. Thus, like some wild naming, + wild thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this + mysterious Mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick- + succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God- + created fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge from the Inane, + haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again + into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas + filled up. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is + stamped; the rear of the host read traces of the earliest van. + But whence, O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not. Faith knows not; + only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. + +Volumes might be written on Carlyle's relations, of sentiment, belief, +opinion, method of thought, and manner of expression, to other thinkers. +His fierce independence, and sense of his own prophetic mission to the +exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often +unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who +impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to +acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been +wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which +exercised so marked an influence on his New England disciples. He never +realised the part played by the philosophers of Greece in moulding the +speculations of modern Europe. He knew Plato mainly through the Socratic +dialogues. There is, however, a passage in a letter to Emerson (March 13th +1853) which indicates that he had read, comparatively late in life, some +portions of _The Republic_. "I was much struck with Plato last year, and +his notions about Democracy--mere _Latter-Day Pamphlets, saxa et faces_ +... refined into empyrean radiance and the lightning of the gods." The +tribute conveyed in the comparison is just; for there is nothing but +community of political view between the bitter acorns dropped from the +gnarled border oak and the rich fruit of the finest olive in Athene's +garden. But the coincidences of opinion between the ancient and the modern +writer are among the most remarkable in literary history. We can only +refer, without comments, to a few of the points of contact in this strange +conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both +possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they +attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:--_Laissez faire_; the growth +of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, +education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian +spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, +which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of +the ages and circumstances admit. They propose the same remedies:-- +a return to simpler manners, and stricter laws, with the best men in the +State to regulate and administer them. Philosophers, says Plato, are to be +made guardians, and they are to govern, not for gain or glory, but for the +common weal. They need not be happy in the ordinary sense, for there is a +higher than selfish happiness, the love of the good. To this love they +must be _systematically educated_ till they are fit to be kings and +priests in the ideal state; if they refuse they _must_, when their turn +comes, be _made to govern_. Compare the following declarations of +Carlyle:-- + + Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teaching + class--these two sometimes combined in one, a Pontiff + King--there did not society exist without those two vital + elements, there will none exist. Whenever there are born + Kings of men you had better seek them out and _breed them + to the work_.... The few wise will have to take command + of the innumerable foolish, they _must be got to do it_. + +The Ancient and the Modern, the Greek and the Teuton, are further +curiously at one:--in their dislike of physical or mental +Valetudinarianism (cf. _Rep._ Bs. ii. and iii. and _Characteristics_); +in their protests against the morality of consequences, of rewards and +punishments as motives for the highest life (the just man, says Plato, +crucified is better than the unjust man crowned); in their contempt for +the excesses of philanthropy and the pampering of criminals (cf. +_Rep._ B. viii.); in their strange conjunctions of free-thinking and +intolerance. Plato in the Laws enacts that he who speaks against the gods +shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and at last, if he persists in his +impiety, put to death; yet he had as little belief in the national +religion as Carlyle. + +[Footnote: Rousseau, in the "Contrat Social," also assumes this position; +allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows +disrespect to the State Religion.] + +They both accept Destiny,--the Parcae or the Norns spin the threads of +life,--and yet both admit a sphere of human choice. In the Republic the +souls select their lots: with Carlyle man can modify his fate. The +juxtaposition in each of Humour and Pathos (cf. Plato's account of the +dogs in a Democracy, and Carlyle's "Nigger gone masterless among the +pumpkins," and, for pathos, the image of the soul encrusted by the world +as the marine Glaucus, or the Vision of Er and Natural Supernaturalism) is +another contact. Both held that philosophers and heroes were few, and yet +both leant to a sort of Socialism, under State control; they both assail +Poetry and deride the Stage (cf. _Rep._ B. ii. and B. x. with Carlyle on +"The Opera"), while each is the greatest prose poet of his race; they are +united in hatred of orators, who "would circumvent the gods," and in +exalting action and character over "the most sweet voices"--the one +enforcing his thesis in the "language of the gods," the other preaching +silence in forty volumes of eloquent English speech. + +Carlyle seems to have known little of Aristotle. His Stoicism was +indigenous; but he always alludes with deference to the teaching of the +Porch. Marcus Aurelius, the nearest type of the Philosophic King, must +have riveted his regard as an instance of the combination of thought and +action; and some interesting parallels have been drawn between their +views of life as an arena on which there is much to be done and little +to be known, a passage from time to a vague eternity. They have the same +mystical vein, alongside of similar precepts of self-forgetfulness, +abnegation, and the waiving of desire, the same confidence in the power +of the spirit to defy or disdain vicissitudes, ideas which brought both +in touch with the ethical side of Christianity; but their tempers and +manner are as far as possible apart. Carlyle speaks of no one with more +admiration than of Dante, recognising in the Italian his own intensity +of love and hate and his own tenacity; but beyond this there is little +evidence of the "Divina Commedia" having seriously attuned his thought: +nor does he seem to have been much affected by any of the elder English +poets. He scarcely refers to Chaucer; he alludes to Spenser here and +there with some homage, but hardly ever, excepting Shakespeare, to the +Elizabethan dramatists. + +Among writers of the seventeenth century, he may have found in Hobbes +some support of his advocacy of a strong government; but his views on +this theme came rather from a study of the history of that age. Milton +he appreciates inadequately. To Dryden and Swift he is just; the latter, +whether consciously to Carlyle or not, was in some respects his English +master, and the points of resemblance in their characters suggest +detailed examination. Their styles are utterly opposed, that of the one +resting almost wholly on its Saxon base, that of the other being a +coat of many colours; but both are, in the front rank of masters of +prose-satire, inspired by the same audacity of "noble rage." Swift's +humour has a subtler touch and yet more scathing scorn; his contempt of +mankind was more real; his pathos equally genuine but more withdrawn; +and if a worse foe he was a better friend. The comparisons already +made between Johnson and Carlyle have exhausted the theme; they remain +associated by their similar struggle and final victory, and sometimes by +their tyrannous use of power; they are dissociated by the divergence of +their intellectual and in some respects even their moral natures; both +were forces of character rather than discoverers, both rulers of debate; +but the one was of sense, the other of imagination, "all compact." The +one blew "the blast of doom" of the old patronage; the other, against +heavier odds, contended against the later tyranny of uninformed and +insolent popular opinion. Carlyle did not escape wholly from the +influence of the most infectious, if the most morbid, of French writers, +J.J. Rousseau. They are alike in setting Emotion over Reason: in +referring to the Past as a model; in subordinating mere criticism to +ethical, religious or irreligious purpose; in being avowed propagandists; +in their "deep unrest"; and in the diverse conclusions that have been +drawn from their teaching. + +Carlyle's enthusiasm for the leaders of the new German literature was, in +some measure, inspired by the pride in a treasure-trove, the regard of a +foster-father or _chaperon_ who first substantially took it by the hand +and introduced it to English society: but it was also due to the feeling +that he had found in it the fullest expression of his own perplexities, +and at least their partial solution. His choice of its representatives is +easily explained. In Schiller he found intellectually a younger brother, +who had fought a part of his own fight and was animated by his own +aspirations; in dealing with his career and works there is a shade +of patronage. Goethe, on the other hand, he recognised across many +divergencies as his master. The attachment of the belated Scotch Puritan +to the greater German has provoked endless comment; but the former has +himself solved the riddle. The contrasts between the teacher and pupil +remain, but they have been exaggerated by those who only knew Goethe as +one who had attained, and ignored the struggle of his hot youth on the +way to attainment. Carlyle justly commends him, not for his artistic +mastery alone, but for his sense of the reality and earnestness of life, +which lifts him to a higher grade among the rulers of human thought +than such more perfect artists and more passionate lyrists as Heine. He +admires above all his conquest over the world, without concession to it, +saying:-- + + With him Anarchy has now become Peace ... the once + perturbed spirit is serene and rich in good fruits.... + Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been + attained by a surrender to Necessity, or any compact with + Delusion--a seeming blessing, such as years and dispiritment + will of themselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no + blessing, since ever-continued battle is better than + captivity. Many gird on the harness, few bear it + warrior-like, still fewer put it off with triumph. Euphorion + still asserts, "To die in strife is the end of life." + +Goethe ceased to fight only when he had won; his want of sympathy with +the so-called Apostles of Freedom, the stump orators of his day, was +genuine and shared by + +Carlyle. In the apologue of the _Three Reverences_ in _Meister_ the +master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike his pupil, verges +on sentimental paradox, declaring through the lips of the Chief in that +imaginary pedagogic province--which here and there closely recalls the +_New Atlantis_--that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery and +despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine--nay, even on sin and crime to +look not as hindrances, but to honour them, as furtherances of what is +holy." In answer to Emerson's Puritanic criticisms Carlyle replies:-- + + Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than + I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John + Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable + _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty + was infinite,--Knox would have passed on wondering, not + reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like + Goethe. His is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, + that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it + was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold + even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when + all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that + man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you + love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is + not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse + to bear than bad, and on the whole whether the glorious + serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane--as + Light, the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning. + +Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in accord with Carlyle +was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of sayings--as "There is but one temple +in the universe, and that is the body of man," "Who touches a human hand +touches God"--that especially commended themselves to his commentator. +Among philosophers proper, Fichte, in his assertion of the Will as a +greater factor of human life and a nearer indication of personality than +pure Thought, was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The _Vocation of the Scholar_ +and _The Way to a Blessed Life_ anticipated and probably suggested much +of the more speculative part of _Sartor_. But to show their relation +would involve a course of Metaphysics. + +We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life +and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man +with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter--_Jean Paul +der einzige_, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted +on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of +humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a +lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have +influenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of queer +titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, and endless +digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream in the first _Flower Piece_ +from the life of Siebenkäs, and that on _New Year's Eve_, are like +pre-visions of _Sartor_, and we find in the fantasies of both authors +much of the same machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of +_Schmelzle's Journey to Flätz_ might pass current for Carlyle's own; and +it is evident that the latter was saturated with _Quintus Fixlein_. The +following can hardly be a mere coincidence. Richter writes of a dead +brother, "For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself +among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him, +melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sank his heart of fire +amid the ice and waves"; while in _Cui Bono_ we have-- + + What is life? a thawing ice-board + On a sea with sunny shore. + +Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of _Fixlein_, especially the +passage, "Then begun the Æolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest +pathos of _Sartor_. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common +"reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness, +and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the _Foreign +Quarterly_ of 1830 might be taken for a criticism of himself. + +Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magnanimity in estimating +his English contemporaries; but the deliberate judgments of his essays +were often more genial than those of his letters and conversation; and +perhaps his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew round +him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful than his severity; it is +good for no man to live with satellites. His practical severance from +Mazzini was mainly a personal loss: the widening of the gulf between +him and Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been better +qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other. Carlyle was the +greater genius; but the question which was the greater mind must be +decided by the conflict between logic and emotion. They were related +proximately as Plato to Aristotle, the one saw what the other missed, and +their hold on the future has been divided. Mill had "the dry light," and +his meaning is always clear; he is occasionally open to the charge +of being a formalist, allowing too little for the "infusion of the +affections," save when touched, as Carlyle was, by a personal loss; yet +the critical range indicated by his essay on "Coleridge" on the one side, +that on "Bentham" on the other, is as wide as that of his friend; and +while neither said anything base, Mill alone is clear from the charge of +having ever said anything absurd. His influence, though more indirect, +may prove, save artistically, more lasting. The two teachers, in their +assaults on _laissez faire,_ curiously combine in giving sometimes +undesigned support to social movements with which the elder at least had +no sympathy. + +Carlyle's best, because his most independent, friend lived beyond the +sea. He has been almost to weariness compared with Emerson, initial +pupil later ally, but their contrasts are more instructive than their +resemblances. They have both at heart a revolutionary spirit, marked +originality, uncompromising aversion to illusions, disdain of traditional +methods of thought and stereotyped modes of expression; but in Carlyle +this is tempered by greater veneration for the past, in which he holds +out models for our imitation; while Emerson sees in it only fingerposts +for the future, and exhorts his readers to stay at home lest they should +wander from themselves. The one loves detail, hates abstraction, delights +to dwell on the minutiæ of biography, and waxes eloquent even on dates. +The other, a brilliant though not always a profound generaliser, tells +us that we must "leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and +study the sentiment as it appeared in hope not in history ... with the +ideal is the rose of joy. But grief cleaves to names and persons, and +the partial interests of to-day and yesterday." The one is bent under a +burden, and pores over the riddle of the earth, till, when he looks up at +the firmament of the unanswering stars, he can but exclaim, "It is a sad +sight." The other is blown upon by the fresh breezes of the new world; +his vision ranges over her clear horizons, and he leaps up elastic under +her light atmosphere, exclaiming, "Give me health and a day and I will +make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a half-Germanised +Scotchman, living near the roar of the metropolis, with thoughts of +Weimar and reminiscences of the Covenanting hills. Emerson studies +Swedenborg and reads the _Phædo_ in his garden, far enough from the din +of cities to enable him in calm weather to forget them. "Boston, London, +are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke; so is society, so is the world." +The one is strong where the other is weak. Carlyle keeps his abode in +the murk of clouds illumined by bolts of fire; he has never seen the sun +unveiled. Emerson's "Threnody" shows that he has known the shadow; but he +has fought with no Apollyons, reached the Celestial City without crossing +the dark river, and won the immortal garland "without the dust and heat." +Self-sacrifice, inconsistently maintained, is the watchword of the one: +self-reliance, more consistently, of the other. The art of the two +writers is in strong contrast. The charm of Emerson's style is its +precision; his sentences are like medals each hung on its own string; the +fields of his thought are combed rather than ploughed: he draws outlines, +as Flaxman, clear and colourless. Carlyle's paragraphs are like streams +from Pactolus, that roll nuggets from their source on their turbid way. +His expressions are often grotesque, but rarely offensive. Both writers +are essentially ascetic,--though the one swallows Mirabeau, and the other +says that Jane Eyre should have accepted Eochester and "left the world in +a minority." But Emerson is never coarse, which Carlyle occasionally is; +and Carlyle is never flippant, as Emerson often is. In condemning the +hurry and noise of mobs the American keeps his temper, and insists on +justice without vindictiveness: wars and revolutions take nothing from +his tranquillity, and he sets Hafiz and Shakespeare against Luther and +Knox. Careless of formal consistency--"the hobgoblin of little minds"--he +balances his aristocratic reserve with a belief in democracy, in +progression by antagonism, and in collective wisdom as a limit to +collective folly. Leaving his intellectual throne as the spokesman of a +practical liberty, Emerson's wisdom was justified by the fact that he was +always at first on the unpopular, and ultimately on the winning, side. +Casting his rote for the diffusion of popular literature, a wide +suffrage, a mild penal code, he yet endorsed the saying of an old +American author, "A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will +sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is +a raft that will never sink, but then your feet are always in water." + +[Footnote: Carlyle, on the other hand, holds "that," as has been said, "we +are entitled to deal with criminals as relics of barbarism in the midst of +civilisation." His protest, though exuberated, against leniency in dealing +with atrocities, emphatically requisite in an age apt to ignore the rigour +of justice, has been so far salutary, and may be more so.] + +Maintaining that the State exists for its members, he holds that the +enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular +governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law +need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men, +"to educate whom the State exists"; but he regards them as inspired +mouthpieces rather than controlling forces: their prime mission is to +"fortify our hopes," their indirect services are their best. The career +of a great man should rouse us to a like assertion of ourselves. We ought +not to obey, but to follow, sometimes by not obeying, him. "It is the +imbecility not the wisdom of men that is always inviting the impudence of +power." + +It is obvious that many of these views are in essential opposition to the +teaching of Carlyle; and it is remarkable that two conspicuous men so +differing and expressing their differences with perfect candour should +have lived so long on such good terms. Their correspondence, ranging +over thirty-eight years (begun in 1834, after Emerson's visit to +Craigenputtock, and ending in 1872, before his final trip to England), +is on the whole one of the most edifying in literary history. The +fundamental accord, unshaken by the ruffle of the visit in 1847, is a +testimony to the fact that the common preservation of high sentiments +amid the irksome discharge of ordinary duties may survive and override +the most distinct antagonisms of opinion. Matthew Arnold has gone so far +as to say that he "would not wonder if Carlyle lived in the long run by +such an invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson +and not by his works." This is paradoxical; but the volumes containing +it are in some respects more interesting than the letters of Goethe and +Schiller, as being records of "two noble kinsmen" of nearer intellectual +claims. The practical part of the relationship on the part of Emerson is +very beautiful; he is the more unselfish, and on the whole appears the +better man, especially in the almost unlimited tolerance that passes with +a smile even such violences as the "Ilias in nuce"; but Carlyle shows +himself to be the stronger. Their mutual criticisms were of real benefit. +Emerson succeeded in convincing his friend that so-called anarchy might +be more effective in subduing the wilderness than any despotism; while +the advice to descend from "Himalaya peaks and indigo skies" to concrete +life is accepted and adopted in the later works of the American, _Society +and Solitude_ and the _Conduct of Life,_ which Carlyle praises without +stint. Keeping their poles apart they often meet half-way; and in matters +of style as well as judgment tinge and tend to be transfused into each +other, so that in some pages we have to look to the signature to be sure +of the writer. Towards the close of the correspondence Carlyle in this +instance admits his debt. + + I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can + speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him. + Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes + to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world + there were still but this one voice that responded + intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all + hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive. + My blessings on you, good Ralph Waldo. + +Emerson answers in 1872, on receipt of the completed edition of his +friend's work: "You shall wear the crown at the Pan-Saxon games, with no +competitor in sight ... well earned by genius and exhaustive labour, and +with nations for your pupils and praisers." + +The general verdict on Carlyle's literary career assigns to him the first +place among the British authors of his time. No writer of our generation, +in England, has combined such abundance with such power. Regarding his +rank as a writer there is little or no dispute: it is admitted that the +irregularities and eccentricities of his style are bound up with its +richness. In estimating the value of his thought we must discriminate +between instruction and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has +taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answer must be, +"few." This is a perhaps inevitable result of the manner of his writing, +or rather of the nature of his mind. Aside from political parties, he +helped to check their exaggerations by his own; seeing deeply into the +under-current evils of the time, even when vague in his remedies he +was of use in his protest against leaving these evils to adjust +themselves--what has been called "the policy of drifting"--or of dealing +with them only by catchwords. No one set a more incisive brand on the +meanness that often marks the unrestrained competition of great cities; +no one was more effective in his insistence that the mere accumulation +of wealth may mean the ruin of true prosperity; no one has assailed with +such force the mammon-worship and the frivolity of his age. Everything he +writes comes home to the individual conscience: his claim to be regarded +as a moral exemplar has been diminished, his hold on us as an ethical +teacher remains unrelaxed. It has been justly observed that he helped +to modify "the thought rather than the opinion of two generations." His +message, as that of Emerson, was that "life must be pitched on a higher +plane." Goethe said to Eckermann in 1827 that Carlyle was a moral force +so great that he could not tell what he might produce. His influence has +been, though not continuously progressive, more marked than that of any +of his compeers, among whom he was, if not the greatest, certainly the +most imposing personality. It had two culminations; shortly after the +appearance of _The French Revolution,_ and again towards the close of the +seventh decade of the author's life. To the enthusiastic reception of his +works in the Universities, Mr. Froude has borne eloquent testimony, and +the more reserved Matthew Arnold admits that "the voice of Carlyle, +overstrained and misused since, sounded then in Oxford fresh and +comparatively sound," though, he adds, "The friends of one's youth cannot +always support a return to them." In the striking article in the _St. +James' Gazette_ of the date of the great author's death we read: "One who +had seen much of the world and knew a large proportion of the remarkable +men of the last thirty years declared that Mr. Carlyle was by far the +most impressive person he had ever known, the man who conveyed most +forcibly to those who approached him [best on resistance principles] +that general impression of genius and force of character which it is +impossible either to mistake or to define." Thackeray, as well as Ruskin +and Froude, acknowledged him as, beyond the range of his own _métier_, +his master, and the American Lowell, penitent for past disparagement, +confesses that "all modern Literature has felt his influence in the right +direction"; while the Emersonian hermit Thoreau, a man of more +intense though more restricted genius than the poet politician, +declares--"Carlyle alone with his wide humanity has, since Coleridge, +kept to us the promise of England. His wisdom provokes rather than +informs. He blows down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light, +like the Jöthuns, to throw the old woman Time; in his work there is too +much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay-making under the sun. He +makes us act rather than think: he does not say, know thyself, which is +impossible, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, no clear +goal, but an endless Atlantic horizon. He exaggerates. Yes; but he makes +the hour great, the picture bright, the reverence and admiration strong; +while mere precise fact is a coil of lead." Our leading journal on the +morning after Carlyle's death wrote of him in a tone of well-tempered +appreciation: "We have had no such individuality since Johnson. Whether +men agreed or not, he was a touchstone to which truth and falsehood were +brought to be tried. A preacher of Doric thought, always in his pulpit +and audible, he denounced wealth without sympathy, equality without +respect, mobs without leaders, and life without aim." To this we may add +the testimony of another high authority in English letters, politically +at the opposite pole: "Carlyle's influence in kindling enthusiasm for +virtues worthy of it, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one +hand and the unreality on the other, of all that men can do and suffer, +has not been surpassed by any teacher now living. Whatever later teachers +may have done in definitely shaping opinion ... here is the friendly +fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark; here the prophet who +first smote the rock." Carlyle, writes one of his oldest friends, "may +be likened to a fugleman; he stood up in the front of Life's Battle and +showed in word and action his notion of the proper attitude and action of +men. He was, in truth, a prophet, and he has left his gospels." To those +who contest that these gospels are for the most part negative, we may +reply that to be taught what not to do is to be far advanced on the way +to do. + +In nothing is the generation after him so prone to be unjust to a fresh +thinker as with regard to his originality. A physical discovery, as +Newton's, remains to ninety-nine out of a hundred a mental miracle; but a +great moral teacher "labours to make himself forgotten." When he begins +to speak he is suspected of insanity; when he has won his way he receives +a Royal Commission to appoint the judges; as a veteran he is shelved for +platitude. So Horace is regarded as a mere jewelry store of the Latin, +Bacon in his _Essays_, of the English, wisdom, which they each in +fact helped to create. Carlyle's paradoxes have been exaggerated, his +partialities intensified, in his followers; his critical readers, not his +disciples, have learnt most from him; he has helped across the Slough of +Despond only those who have also helped themselves. When all is said of +his dogmatism, his petulance, his "evil behaviour," he remains the master +spirit of his time, its Censor, as Macaulay is its Panegyrist, and +Tennyson its Mirror. He has saturated his nation with a wholesome tonic, +and the practice of any one of his precepts for the conduct of life is +ennobling. More intense than Wordsworth, more intelligible than Browning, +more fervid than Mill, he has indicated the pitfalls in our civilisation. +His works have done much to mould the best thinkers in two continents, +in both of which he has been the Greatheart to many pilgrims. Not a +few could speak in the words of the friend whose memory he has so +affectionately preserved, "Towards me it is still more true than towards +England that no one has been and done like you." A champion of ancient +virtue, he appeared in his own phrase applied to Fichte, as "a Cato Major +among degenerate men." Carlyle had more than the shortcomings of a Cato; +he had all the inconsistent vehemence of an imperfectly balanced mind; +but he had a far wider range and deeper sympathies. The message of the +modern preacher transcended all mere applications of the text _delenda +est._ He denounced, but at the same time nobly exhorted, his age. A +storm-tossed spirit, "tempest-buffeted," he was "citadel-crowned" in his +unflinching purpose and the might of an invincible will. + + + + +APPENDIX + +CARLYLE'S RELIGION + +The _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11, 1881, writes:-- + +"It is obvious that from an early age he entirely ceased to believe, in +its only true sense, the creed he had been taught. He never affected +to believe it in any other sense, for he was far too manly and +simple-hearted to care to frame any of those semi-honest transmutations +of the old doctrines into new-fangled mysticism which had so great a +charm for many of his weaker contemporaries. On the other hand, it is +equally true that he never plainly avowed his unbelief. The line he took +up was that Christianity, though not true in fact, had a right to be +regarded as the noblest aspiration after a theory of the Universe and of +human life ever formed: and that the Calvinistic version of Christianity +was on the whole the best it ever assumed; and the one which represented +the largest proportion of truth and the least amount of error. He also +thought that the truths which Calvinism tried to express, and succeeded +in expressing in an imperfect or partially mistaken manner, were the +ultimate governing principles of morals and politics, of whose systematic +neglect in this age nothing but evil could come. + +"Unwilling to take up the position of a rebel or revolutionist by stating +his views plainly--indeed if he had done so sixty years ago he might have +starved--the only resource left to him was that of approaching all the +great subjects of life from the point of view of grim humour, irony, and +pathos. This was the real origin of his unique style; though no doubt its +special peculiarities were due to the wonderful power of his imagination, +and to some extent--to a less extent we think than has been usually +supposed--to his familiarity with German. + +"What then was his creed? What were the doctrines which in his view +Calvinism shadowed forth and which were so infinitely true, so ennobling +to human life? First, he believed in God; secondly, he believed in an +absolute opposition between good and evil; thirdly, he believed that +all men do, in fact, take sides more or less decisively in this great +struggle, and ultimately turn out to be either good or bad; fourthly, he +believed that good is stronger than evil, and by infinitely slow degrees +gets the better of it, but that this process is so slow as to be +continually obscured and thrown back by evil influences of various +kinds--one of which he believed to be specially powerful in the present +day. + +"God in his view was not indeed a personal Being, like the Christian +God--still less was He in any sense identified with Jesus Christ; who, +though always spoken of with rather conventional reverence in his +writings, does not appear to have specially influenced him. The God in +which Mr. Carlyle believed is, as far as can be ascertained, a +Being possessing in some sense or other will and consciousness, and +personifying the elementary principles of morals--Justice, Benevolence +(towards good people), Fortitude, and Temperance--to such a pitch that +they may be regarded, so to speak, as forming collectively the will of +God.... That there is some one who--whether by the earthquake, or +the fire, or the still small voice--is continually saying to +mankind--'_Discite justitiam moniti'_; and that this Being is the +ultimate fact at which we can arrive ... is what Mr. Carlyle seems to +have meant by believing in God. And if any one will take the trouble to +refer to the first few sentences of the Westminster Confession, and to +divest them of their references to Christianity and to the Bible, he will +find that between the God of Calvin and of Carlyle there is the closest +possible similarity.... The great fact about each particular man is the +relation, whether of friendship or enmity, in which he stands to God. In +the one case he is on the side which must ultimately prevail, ... in the +other ... he will, in due time, be crushed and destroyed.... Our relation +to the universe can be ascertained only by experiment. We all have to +live out our lives.... One man is a Cromwell, another a Frederick, a +third a Goethe, a fourth a Louis XV. God hates Louis XV. and loves +Cromwell. Why, if so, He made Louis XV., and indeed whether He made him +or not, are idle questions which cannot be answered and should not be +asked. There are good men and bad men, all pass alike through this +mysterious hall of doom called life: most show themselves in their true +colours under pressure. The good are blessed here and hereafter; the bad +are accursed. Let us bring out as far as may be possible such good as a +man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the +hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr. +Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and +morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in +either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might +regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the +inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival of +the fittest has much in common with the doctrine of election, and +philosophical necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution, +comes practically to much the same result as predestination." + + + + INDEX + + Aberdour + Addiscombe + Addison + Æschylus + Ailsa Craig + Airy (the astronomer) + Aitken, James + Aitken, Mary + Aitken, Mrs. + Aix-la-Chapelle + Albert, Prince + Alison + Alma + America + Annan + Annandale + Annual Register + Antoinette, Marie + Aristotle + Arndt + Arnold, Dr. + Arnold, Matthew + Ashburton, Lord and Lady + Assaye + Atheism + _Athenæum_ + Augustenburg + Austerlitz + Austin + Austin, Mrs. + Azeglio + + Bacon + Badams + Badcort + Balaclava + Balzac + Bamford, Samuel + Barbarossa + Baring, see Ashburton + Bassompierre + Beaconsfield, Lord + Beaumarchais + Beethoven + Belgium + Bellamy + Bentham + Berkeley + Berlin + Bernstoff, Count + Biography (by Froude) + Birmingham + Bismarck + _Blackwood,_ + Boehm + Bohemia + Bolingbroke + Bonn + Boston + Boswell + Breslau + Brewster, Sir David + Bright + Brocken, spectre of the + Bromley, Miss + Bronte, Emily + Brougham + Brown, Prof. + Browne, Sir Thomas + Browning + Bryant _note_ + Buckle + Buller, Charles + Buller, Mrs. + Bunsen + Burke + Burness, William + Burns + Byron + + Caesar + _Cagliostro, Count_ + Cairnes + Calderon + Calvin + Campbell, Macleod + Campbell, Thomas + Carleton + Carlyle (family) + Carlyle, Alexander + Carlyle, James (brother) + Carlyle, James (father) + Carlyle, John, Dr. + Carlyle, Margaret (mother) + Carlyle, Margaret (sister) + Carlyle, Mrs. (Jane Welsh)(wife) + Carlyle, Thomas (grandfather) + Carlyle, Thomas, + birth; + education; + studies German; + lives in Edinburgh and takes pupils; + studies law; + tutor to the Bullers; + goes to London; + at Hoddam Hill; + marriage; + Edinburgh life; + married life; + life at Craigenputtock; + second visit to London; + publishes _Sartor_; + takes house in Chelsea; + life and work in London; + loss of first volume of _French Revolution_; + rewrites first volume of _French Revolution_; + lectures; + founds London Library; + publishes _Chartism_; + writes _Past and Present_; + writes _Life of Cromwell_; + visits Ireland; + visits Paris; + writes _History of Friedrich II._; + excursions to Germany; + nominated Lord Rector of Glasgow; + success of _Friedrich II._; + Lord Rector of Edinburgh; + death of his wife; + writes his _Reminiscences_; + defends Governor Eyre; + writes on Franco-German War; + writes on Russo-Turkish War; + honours; + declining years; + death; + Appreciation of; + authorities for his life; + complaints; + contemporary history; + conversation; + critic, as; + descriptive passages; + domestic troubles; + dreams; + dyspepsia; + elements of his character; + estimates (his) of contemporaries; + ethics; + financial affairs; + friends; + genius; historian, as; + ignorance; + influence; + journal; + jury, serves on a; + letters; + literary artist + mission + nicknaming + mania + noises + opinions + paradoxes + polities + popularity and praise + preacher, as, + rank as a writer + relations to other thinkers + religion + routine + scepticism + sound-proof room, + style + teaching + translations + travels, and visits + truth + verses + views, change of + walks + worker, as + Cassel + Castlebar + Cato + Cavaignac, General + Cervantes + Chalmers, Dr. + Changarnier, General + _Characteristics,_ + Charlemagne + _Chartism,_ + Chatham + Chaucer + Chelsea + Cheyne Row + China + Chotusitz + Christianity + Church, English + Cicero + Cid, the + Civil War + Civil War (American) + Clare, Lady + Clarendon + Clerkenwell explosions + Clough, Arthur + Cobden + Coblenz + Cockburn + Colenso, Bishop + Coleridge + Colonies + Columbus + Comte + Conservatism + Conway, Moncure + Cooper, Thomas + Cornelius + _Correspondence,_ + Cortes + Cousin + Craigcrook + Craigenputtock + Crimean War + Cromwell + _Cromwell, Life and Letters of,_ + Crystal Palace Exhibition + Cushman, Miss + Cüstrin + Cuvier + Czars, the + + Dante + Danton + Dardanelles + Darwin + David II. + _Deism,_ + Democracy, + De Morgan + Demosthenes + De Quincey + Derby, Countess of + Desmoulins + _Dial, The,_ + _Diamond Necklace,_ + Dickens + Diderot + Diogenes + Disraeli. _See_ Beaconsfield + Dobell + _Don Quixote,_ + Döring, Herr + Dresden + Drogheda + Drumclog + Dryden + Duffy, Sir C. Gavan + Dumfries + Dunbar + Dunbar (poet) + Duty + + Ecclefechan + Eckermann + Edinburgh + _Edinburgh Encyclopaedia_ + _Edinburgh Review_ + Education + Eisenach + Eldin, Lord + Eliot, George + Emerson + _Emigration_ + Ems + England + _English Traits_ (Emerson's) + Erasmus + Erfurt + Erskine + _Essay on Proportion_ + _Essays_ (Carlyle's) + Everett, Alexander + _Examiner,_ + "Exodus from Houndsditch," + Eyre, Governor + Eyre, Jane + + Faber + Factory Acts + Faust + Fawcett + Fergusson, Dr. John + Fichte + FitzGerald, Edward + Flaxman + _Foreign Quarterly Preview_ + _Foreign Review_ + Förster + Forster, John + Forster, W.E. + Fouqué + Fourier + Foxton, Mr. + France + Franchise + Francia, Dr. + Frankenstein + Frankfort + _Fraser_ + Free Trade + French Directory + French literature + _French Revolution_ + Friedrich II. + _Friedrich II., History of_ + Fritz. _See_ Friedrich + Fritz (Carlyle's horse) + Froude, Mr. + Fryston + Fuchs, Reinecke + + Galileo + Gallipoli + Galway + Game Laws + Gavazzi, Father + Georgel, Abbé + German literature + German worthies + Germany + Gibbon + Gladstone, Sir T + Gladstone, W. E. + Glasgow + _Glasgow Herald_ + Goethe + Goldsmith + Gordon, Margaret + Gordon (quadroon preacher) + Gotha + Grant, J. + Greek thought + Grimm's law + Gronlund + Grote + Guizot + Gully, Dr. + Gully, Miss + Guntershausen + + Haddington + Hafiz + Hakluyt + Hallam + Hallam, Arthur + Hamburg + Hamilton, Sir William + Hare, Archdeacon + Harrison, Frederick + _Harvard Discourse_ (Emerson's) + Hawthorne + Hayti + Heath (royalist writer) + Hedonism + Hegel + Heine, Heinrich + _Helena_ + Helps + Henry VIII. + _Hero-Worship_ (and _On Heroes_} + Herrnhut + Hertzka + Heyne + Hildebrand + Hill, Lord George + _Histories_ (Carlyle's) + History, definition of + _History_ review of + Hobbes + Hochkirk + Hoddam Hill + Hoffmann + Holinshed + Homburg + Homer + Home Rule + Horace + Home, E.H. + Houghton, Lord + Hudson (Railway King) + Hughes, T. + Hugo, Victor + Humboldt + Hume + Hunef + Hunt, Leigh + Huxley, Professor + + "Ilias Americana in nuce" + Immortality + Inkermann + _In Memoriam_ (Tennyson's) + Inquisition + Ireland + Ireland, Mrs. + Irish Question + Irving, Edward + + Jamaica + Jeffrey + Jena + Jerrold, Douglas + Jewsbury, Geraldine + _Jocelin de Brakelond_ + Johnson + _Johnson_ Review of Boswell's + Johnston, James + Jomini + Jonson, Ben + Journalism, definition of + Judengasse + Junius + Juvenal + + Kant + Keats + Keble + Kingsley, Charles + Kingsley, Henry + Kinnaird + Kirkcakly + Knox + Kolin + Körner + Kossuth + Kunersdorf + + Lamb + Landor + Landshut + Lanin, M. + Laplace + Larkin + _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ + Law, Carlyle's study of + Lawson, Mr., James Carlyle's estimate of + _Lectures_ + Legendre + Leibnitz + Leipzig + Leith + Leslie, Prof. + Leuthen + Leyden + "Liberal Association" + Liberalism + Liegnitz + Literature as a profession + Liverpool + Livy + Lobositz + Locke + "Locksley Hall" + London + London Library + _London Magazine_ + London Peace Congress + Longfellow + Longmans (the publisher) + Louis XIV. + Louis XV. + Louis XVIII. + Louisa, Electress + Lowell + Lucilius + Luichart, Loch + "Luria" + Luther + + Macaulay + Macbeth + Machiavelli + Mackenzie, Miss Stuart + Mahon, Lord + Mainhill + Mainz + Malthusianism + Malvern + Marat + Marburg + Marcus Aurelius + Marlborough + _Marseillaise_ + Marshall + Mavtineau, Miss H. + Marx, Carl + Massou, Prof. + _Materialism_ + Mathematics + Maurice, F. D. + Mazzini + M'Crie + _Meister, Wilhelm_ + Melanchthen + Mentone + Meredith, George + Mericourt + Merimée, Prosper + Metaphysics, Scotch + Michelet + Middle Ages + Mill, J.S. + Millais + Milman + Milton + Mirabeau + _Miscellanies_ + Mitchell, Robert + Mitchell (Young Ireland leader) + Model Prisons + Mohammed + Molesworth + Molwitz + Montague, Basil + Montaigne + Montgomery, Robert + More, Sir Thomas + Morris, William + Motley + Motte, Countess de la + Muirkirk + Murchison, Sir R. + Murray (the publisher) + Murray, Thomas + Musæus + + Napier, Macvey + Napoleon I. + Napoleon III. + Naseby + Nassau + Necker + Negroes + Nelson + "Nero" (Mrs. Carlyle's dog) + Neuberg + New England + Newman, Cardinal + Newspapers + Newton + Nibelungen Lied + Nicholas the Czar + "Nigger Question" + Noble (biographer of Cromwell) + North, Christopher + Norton, Charles E. + _Norway, Early Kings of_ + Novalis + + O'Brien, Smith + O'Connell + Optimism + Orsay, Count d' + Orthodoxy vetoed + Ossoli, Countess (Margaret Fuller) + Owen + Oxford + Oxford, Bishop of + + Paraguay + Pardubitz + Paris + _Past and Present_ + Paton, Noel + Paulets, the + Peel + Pericles + Peter the Hermit + Philanthropy + Philip of Hesse + Plato + Playfair + Political economy + Political philosophy + Pope + Popes + Prague + Prayer + Prescott + Preuss + _Prinzenraub_ + Procter + Procter, Mrs. Anne + Puritanism + Pusey + Putbus + + _Quarterly Review_ + Queen Victoria + + Radicalism + Railways + Raleigh + Ranke + Ranch + "Reading of Books" + Redwood + Reform Bills + _Reminiscences_ + Renan + Rennie, George + Revolution years + Rhine + Ricardo + Richter + Riesen-Gebirge + Riquetti + Ritualism + Robertson + Robespierre + Roland, Madame + Rolandseck + Romans + Rome, cause of its preservation + Romilly, Sir Samuel + Rossbach + Rossetti, Dante + Rotterdam + Rousseau + Rugby + Rügen + Rushworth + Ruskin + Russell, Lord John + Russell, Mrs., at Thornhill + Russia + Russo-Turkish War + + Sadowa + St. Andrews + St. Ives + _St. James's Gazette_ + St. Simon + Samson, Abbot + Sand, George + _Sartor Resartus_ + Saunders and Otley (publishers) + Saxons + Scepticism + Schiller + Schlosser + Science + Scotland + Scotsbrig + _Scotsman_ newspaper + Scott, W.B. + Scott, Sir Walter + Sedan + Sepoy rebellion + Seven Years' War + Shaftesbury, Lord + Shakespeare + Shelley + _Shooting Niagara_ + Sidney, Sir Philip + _Signs of the Times_ + Simon de Montfort + Sinclair, Sir George + Slavery + Sloane, Sir Hans + Smail, Tom + Smith, Adam + Smith, Goldwin + Smith, Sydney + Smollett + Snowdon + Socrates + Sophocles + Southey + Spain + Spedding + Spencer, Herbert + Spenser + Stanley, Dean + Stanley, Lady Augusta + Stanleys (of Alderley) + Steele + Stein + Stephen, Fitzjames + Stephen, Sir James + Sterling + _Sterling, Life of_ + Sterne + Stewart, Dugald + Stodart, Miss Eliza + Stonehenge + Strachey, Mr. + Strachey, Mrs. + Stralsund + Strauss + Stuart, Mary + Sturge + _Sun,_ newspaper + Swift + Swinburne + Switzerland + + Tacitus + Taine, M. + _Tale of a Tub_ (Swift's) + Talleyrand + Talma + Taylor, Henry + Taylor's _German Literature_ + Taylor, Mrs. + Tennyson + Teufelsdröckh + Thackeray + Theism + Thierry, M. + Thiers + Thirlwall, Bishop + Thoreau + Thucydides + Tieck + _Times,_ the + Toplitz + Torgau + Trafalgar + Turgot + Turks + Turner + Tyndall + + _Unto this Last_ (Ruskin's) + Usedom, Baron + + Varennes + Vauvenargues + Vehse + Verses (Carlyle's) + Verses (Mrs. Carlyle's) + Virginia + Voltaire + + _Wanderjahre_ + Wartburg + Washington + Waterloo + Watts, G. F. + Webster, Daniel + Weimar + Weissenfels + Wellington (Duke of) + Welsh, Jane. _See_ Mrs. Carlyle + Welsh, Mrs. + _Werner_ + _Werther_ (Goethe's) + Westminster Abbey + Westminster Confession + _Westminster Review_ + Westport + Wilberforce (Bishop) + William the Conqueror + William the Silent + Willis's Rooms + Wilson + Wolseley + Worcester + Wordsworth + _Work_ + Working classes + _World_ (newspaper) + _Wotton Reinfred_ + + Yarmouth + + Zittau + Zorndorf + + + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thomas Carlyle, by John Nichol + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS CARLYLE *** + +***** This file should be named 9784-8.txt or 9784-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/9/7/8/9784/ + +Produced by Jayam Subramanian, Robert Connal, and PG +Distributed Proofreaders + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Thomas Carlyle + +Author: John Nichol + +Posting Date: November 15, 2011 [EBook #9784] +Release Date: January, 2006 +First Posted: October 15, 2003 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS CARLYLE *** + + + + +Produced by Jayam Subramanian, Robert Connal, and PG +Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thomas Carlyle, by John Nichol + +Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the +copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing +this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. + +This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project +Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a + + + + + + +THOMAS CARLYLE + +BY + +JOHN NICHOL, LL. D, M.A., BALLIOL, OXON + + +1904 + + + +PREFATORY NOTE + +The following record of the leading events of Carlyle's life and attempt +to estimate his genius rely on frequently renewed study of his work, on +slight personal impressions--"vidi tantum"--and on information supplied +by previous narrators. Of these the great author's chosen literary +legatee is the most eminent and, in the main, the most reliable. Every +critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligations to Mr. Froude as +every critic of Byron to Moore or of Scott to Lockhart. The works of +these masters in biography remain the ample storehouses from which every +student will continue to draw. Each has, in a sense, made his subject his +own, and each has been similarly arraigned. + +I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the +persistent, often virulent, attacks directed against a loyal friend, +betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith and the defective reticence that +often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr. +Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on _Sir Walter Scott_ +requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with +explicit authority; that the restrictions under which he was at first +entrusted with the MSS. of the _Reminiscences_ and the _Letters and +Memorials_ (annotated by Carlyle himself, as if for publication) were +withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a +practical injunction to communicate the whole. The worst that can be said +is that, in the last years of Carlyle's career, his own judgment as to +what should be made public of the details of his domestic life may have +been somewhat obscured; but, if so, it was a weakness easily hidden from +a devotee. + +My acknowledgments are due to several of the Press comments which +appeared shortly after Carlyle's death, more especially that of the _St. +James's Gazette_, giving the most philosophical brief summary of his +religious views which I have seen; and to the kindness of Dr. Eugene +Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in supplying me with valuable +hints on matters relating to German History and Literature. I have also +to thank the Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_ for permitting me to +reproduce the substance of my article in its columns of February 1881. +That article was largely based on a contribution on the same subject, in +1859, to Mackenzie's _Imperial Dictionary of Biography_. + +I may add that in the distribution of material over the comparatively +short space at my command, I have endeavoured to give prominence to facts +less generally known, and passed over slightly the details of events +previously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs. Carlyle and the +incidents of her death. To her inner history I have only referred in so +far as it had a direct bearing on her husband's life. As regards the +itinerary of Carlyle's foreign journeys, it has seemed to me that it +might be of interest to those travelling in Germany to have a short +record of the places where the author sought his "studies" for his +greatest work. + + + +CONTENTS + +CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY + +CHAPTER II 1795-1826 ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH + +CHAPTER III 1826-1834 CRAIGENPUTTOCK (from Marriage to London) + +CHAPTER IV 1834-1842 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Mrs. Welsh) + +CHAPTER V 1842-1853 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Carlyle's Mother) + +CHAPTER VI 1853-1866 THE MINOTAUR--(To death of Mrs. Carlyle) + +CHAPTER VII 1866-1881 DECADENCE + +CHAPTER VIII CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN + +CHAPTER IX CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY + +CHAPTER X ETHICS--PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE + +APPENDIX ON CARLYLE'S RELIGION + +INDEX + + + + +THOMAS CARLYLE + + + + +CHAPTER I + +INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY + +Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all +in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the +spirit of four successive generations. They are leading links in an +intellectual chain. + +DAVID HUME (1711-1776) remains the most salient type in our island of the +scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary, +which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some +points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid +temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking +Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau. + +ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796), last of great lyrists inspired by a local +genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people, +spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge +between two eras. Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was +also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the +century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master +musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good +and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or +paralysing caution. + +WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), broadest and most generous, if not loftiest of +the group--"no sounder piece of British manhood," says Carlyle himself +in his inadequate review, "was put together in that century"--the great +revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with a magic +glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was also, like Burns, the +humorist of contemporary life. Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the +manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours, +the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von +Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany. + +THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from +the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening +to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams, +some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill +twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The +reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are +everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to +extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his +thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range. + +Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain +atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant +image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the +relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite +his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle +was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of +the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with +the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could +never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, +dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. +He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, +self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost +mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one +exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with +reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself, +violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation to the great poet, +in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent +inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord +Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other +was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than +Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely +different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge +Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the +other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society. +Both had hot hearts, big brains, and an exhaustless store of winged +and fiery words; both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made +constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of Optimism; +Carlylism is the prose rather than "the male of Byronism." The contrasts +are no less obvious: the author of _Sartor Resartus_, however vaguely, +defended the System of the Universe; the author of _Cain_, with an +audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it. +In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there +is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere," +in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous +incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering +belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the +citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient +name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and, +only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained it. His +career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth, +from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown. +Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence": at his death, in a +sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deafening was the +Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every original thinker is +accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells as it runs till it ends +in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from +America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching came home to +their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland, where, for good or ill, +passions are in extremes, he was long howled down, lampooned, preached +at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a +sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion; and was, often +by the very men who had tried and condemned him for blasphemy, as +senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the +builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the +pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists +whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism. +In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate +successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers +of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass +by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder +and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village +churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets +his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so honoured. + +Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events he celebrates in +his earliest History. In its opening pages, we are made to listen to the +feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace," +where Louis XV. and the _ancien regime_ lay dying; later to the ticking +of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the +steeples that roused the singers of the _Marseillaise_ to march from +"their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last +bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian +characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a commander." +Already, over little more than the space of the author's life--for he was +a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the death of Burns, +Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four, Byron's by seven +years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse of the +"cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea. Two +whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms. +"Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old policies, +governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been +sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig, +Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was +seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory +and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires, +two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions, +revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During his life our sway in +the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Italian +without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Continent, while another +across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes +alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated +and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of the world's most +restless, if not its wisest, age. In the internal affairs of the leading +nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a +pantomime. The Art and Literature of those eighty-six years--stirred to +new thought and form at their commencement by the so-called Romantic +movement, more recently influenced by the Classic reaction, the +Pre-Raphaelite protest, the Aesthetic _mode,_--followed various, even +contradictory, standards. But, in one line of progress, there was no +shadow of turning. Over the road which Bacon laid roughly down and +Newton made safe for transit, Physical Science, during the whole period, +advanced without let and beyond the cavil of ignorance. If the dreams +of the _New Atlantis_ have not even in our days been wholly realised, +Science has been brought from heaven to earth, and the elements made +ministers of Prospero's wand. This apparent, and partially real, conquest +of matter has doubtless done much to "relieve our estate," to make life +in some directions run more smoothly, and to multiply resources to meet +the demands of rapidly-increasing multitudes: but it is in danger of +becoming a conquest of matter over us; for the agencies we have called +into almost fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's miscreated +goblin, to beat us down to the same level. Sanguine spirits who + + throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring, + With, at every mile run taster, O the wondrous, wondrous age, + +are apt to forget that the electric light can do nothing to dispel the +darkness of the mind; that there are strict limits to the power of +prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a +great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable, +accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He +swallows formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes +analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him +by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed +to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by +syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of +Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will--essential Calvinist +or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist, +practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is +consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of +the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was +among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the +link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an +expert in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously subserves +physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a +physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms +of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or +rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with +unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in +his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern +Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously +of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit +the battle-fields of Friedrich II.-- + +Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admiring.... +The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still +infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged flight through +immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of bright? You unfortunate, +you grin as an ape would at such a question: you do not know that unless +you can reach thither in some effectual most veritable sense, you are +lost, doomed to Hela's death-realm and the abyss where mere brutes are +buried. I do not want cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I want what +Novalis calls "God, Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift railways and +sacrifices to Hudson help me towards that? + +The ECONOMIC AND MECHANICAL SPIRIT of the age, faith in mere steel or +stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The others were INSINCERITY in +Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY +without Sense. In our time these two last powers have made such strides +as to threaten the Reign of Law. The Democrat without a ruler, who +protests that one man is by nature as good as another, according to +Carlyle is "shooting Niagara." In deference to the mandate of the +philanthropist the last shred of brutality, with much of decision, +has vanished from our code. Sentiment is in office and Mercy not only +tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When Sir Samuel Romilly began his +beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was at school, talkers of treason were +liable to be disembowelled before execution; now the crime of treason is +practically erased, and the free use of dynamite brings so-called reforms +"within the range of practical politics." Individualism was still a mark +of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi" +survived in Mirabeau's "never name to me that _bete_ of a word +'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador, +"I will break your empire like this vase"; in Nelson turning his blind +eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres +Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found +perhaps its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck. + +This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided +sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men +who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to +the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not +inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute +to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents +may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the +_Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :-- + +"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous +fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated, +formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful +and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy +of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen +Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress, +there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero +that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that +produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble +the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a +fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built _Sartor Resartus_ and the +Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the +earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern +thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally +accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are +denied the faculty of producing nations." + +_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary +of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied +assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that +Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted +Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism +extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three +volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of +revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an +assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly, +every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and +one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr. +Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful +and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results, +but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius, who has thrown Hoods of light on +the inter-relations of the organic world. But there are whole troops +of serfs, "addicti jururo in verba magistri," who, accepting, without +attempt or capacity to verify the conclusions of the master mind, think +to solve all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word +"Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's +divining rod, and you answer "Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart +and sick in head, I were referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to +Grimm's Law or to the Magnetic Belt. + +Let us grant that Caesar was evolved from the currents in the air about +the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and +Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William +I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame +from the altar of the mediaeval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to +masterdom in German woods, or later--not to heap up figures whose +memories still possess the world--that Columbus was a Genoan breeze, +Bacon a _rechauffe_ of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch +dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or Corsican +Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at all events, +were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied and +dominated. + +So much, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistence that great men +are creators as well as creatures of their age. Doubtless, as we advance +in history, direct personal influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In +an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education, +when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised +to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest +civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead +the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be +accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a +mere "matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence of the +matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain +that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become +civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more," +preludes, though over a long interval, the cynic comment of the second +"Locksley Hall" on the "increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier +date "Luria" had protested against the arrogance of mere majorities. + + A people is but the attempt of many + To rise to the completer life of one; + And those who live as models to the mass + Are singly of more value than they all. + +Carlyle set these notes to Tennyson and to Browning in his +_Hero-Worship_--a creed, though in thought, and more in action, older +than Buddha or than Achilles, which he first launched as a dogma on our +times, clenching it with the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau +and Napoleon, mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of +Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made remains marked on the minds of +the men of light who _lead_, and cannot be wholly effaced by the clamour +of the men of words who _orate_. If he leans unduly to the exaltation +of personal power, Carlyle is on the side of those whose defeat can be +beneficent only if it be slow. Further to account for his attitude, +we must refer to his life and to its surroundings, _i.e._ to the +circumstances amid which he was "evolved." + + + + +CHAPTER II + +ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH + +[1795-1826] + +In the introduction to one of his essays, Carlyle has warned us against +giving too much weight to genealogy: but all his biographies, from the +sketch of the Riquetti kindred to his full-length _Friedrich_, prefaced +by two volumes of ancestry, recognise, if they do not overrate, inherited +influences; and similarly his fragments of autobiography abound in +suggestive reference. His family portraits are to be accepted with the +deductions due to the family fever that was the earliest form of his +hero-worship. Carlyle, says the _Athenaeum_ critic before quoted, divides +contemporary mankind into the fools and the wise: the wise are the +Carlyles, the Welshes, the Aitkens, and Edward Irving; the fools all the +rest of unfortunate mortals: a Fuseli stroke of the critic rivalling any +of the author criticised; yet the comment has a grain of truth. + +[Footnote: Even the most adverse critics of Carlyle are often his +imitators, their hands taking a dye from what they work in.] + +The Carlyles are said to have come, from the English town somewhat +differently spelt, to Annandale, with David II.; and, according to a +legend which the great author did not disdain to accept, among them was a +certain Lord of Torthorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The +churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the graves of the +family, all with coats of arms--two griffins with adders' stings. More +definitely we find Thomas, the author's grandfather, settled in that +dullest of county villages as a carpenter. In 1745 he saw the rebel +Highlanders on their southward march: he was notable for his study of +_Anson's Voyages_ and of the _Arabian Nights_: "a fiery man, his stroke +as ready as his word; of the toughness and springiness of steel; an +honest but not an industrious man;" subsequently tenant of a small farm, +in which capacity he does not seem to have managed his affairs with +much effect; the family were subjected to severe privations, the mother +having, on occasion, to heat the meal into cakes by straw taken from the +sacks on which the children slept. In such an atmosphere there grew and +throve the five sons known as the five fighting masons--"a curious +sample of folks," said an old apprentice of one of them, "pithy, bitter +speaking bodies, and awfu' fighters." The second of the group, James, +born 1757, married--first, a full cousin, Janet Carlyle (the sole issue +of which marriage was John, who lived at Cockermouth); second, Margaret +Aitken, by whom he had four sons--THOMAS, 1795-1881; Alexander, +1797-1876; John (Dr. Carlyle, translator of Dante), 1801-1879; and James, +1805-1890; also five daughters, one of whom, Jane, became the wife of her +cousin James Aitken of Dumfries, and the mother of Mary, the niece who +tended her famous uncle so faithfully during the last years of his life. +Nowhere is Carlyle's loyalty to his race shown in a fairer light than in +the first of the papers published under the name of _Reminiscences_. +It differs from the others in being of an early date and free from all +offence. From this pathetic sketch, written when on a visit to London in +1832 he had sudden news of his father's death, we may, even in our brief +space, extract a few passages which throw light on the characters, _i.e._ +the points of contact and contrast of the writer and his theme:-- + +In several respects I consider my father as one of the most interesting +men I have known, ... of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of +any it has been my lot to converse with. None of you will ever forget +that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, +full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all +manner of potent words.... Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to +render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Emphatic I have +heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: his words +were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that +he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet in description, and +for the sake chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man of rigid, even +scrupulous veracity.... He was never visited with doubt. The old Theorem +of the Universe was sufficient for him ... he stood a true man, while +his son stands here on the verge of the new.... A virtue he had which +I should learn to imitate: he never spoke of what was disagreeable and +past. His was a healthy mind. He had the most open contempt for all +"clatter."... He was irascible, choleric, and we all dreaded his wrath, +but passion never mastered him.... Man's face he did not fear: God he +always feared. His reverence was, I think, considerably mixed with +fear--rather awe, as of unutterable depths of silence through which +flickered a trembling hope.... Let me learn of him. Let me write my books +as he built his houses, and walk as blamelessly through this shadow +world.... Though genuine and coherent, living and life-giving, he was +nevertheless but half developed. We had all to complain that we durst not +freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in: he had not the free +means to unbosom himself.... It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear +repelled us from him. To me it was especially so. Till late years I was +ever more or less awed and chilled by him. + +James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. The failings of +both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. They were at one in their +integrity, independence, fighting force at stress, and their command of +winged words; but the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a +broader spirit; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he was a +better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a grimmer Calvinist. +"Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, "is doing very well, and has given us no +more paraphrases." He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged, under +the narrowing influences of the Covenanting land; but he remained stable +and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built with his own hands. James +Carlyle hammered on at Ecclefechan, making in his best year L100, till, +after the first decade of the century, the family migrated to Mainhill, +a bleak farm two miles from Lockerbie, where he so throve by work and +thrift that he left on his death in 1832 about L1000. Strong, rough, and +eminently _straight,_ intolerant of contradiction and ready with words +like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the +Brontes on the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle of +Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological theory as strict as +her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her +favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her +heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a +fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late +in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they +talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she +was to the last proud of the genius which grew in large measure under the +unfailing sunshine of her anxious love. + +Book II. of _Sartor_ is an acknowledged fragment of autobiography, mainly +a record of the author's inner life, but with numerous references to +his environment. There is not much to identify the foster parents of +Teufelsdroeckh, and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the +place of ancestry: Entepfuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, where the ducks +are paddling in the ditch that has to pass muster for a stream, to-day as +a century gone: the severe frugality which (as in the case of Wordsworth +and Carlyle himself) survived the need for it, is clearly recalled; also +the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, "In an orderly house, +where the litter of children's sports is hateful, your training is rather +to bear than to do. I was forbid much, wishes in any measure bold I had +to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of obedience inflexibly held me +down. It was not a joyful life, yet ... a wholesome one." The following +oft-quoted passage is characteristic of his early love of nature and the +humorous touches by which he was wont to relieve his fits of sentiment:-- + +On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread crumb boiled +in milk) and eat it out of doors. On the coping of the wall, which I +could reach by climbing, my porringer was placed: there many a sunset +have I, looking at the distant mountains, consumed, not without relish, +my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of world's +expectation as day died, were still a Hebrew speech for me: nevertheless +I was looking at the fair illumined letters, and had an eye for the +gilding. + +In all that relates to the writer's own education, the Dichtung of +_Sartor_ and the Wahrheit of the _Reminiscences_ are in accord. By +Carlyle's own account, an "insignificant portion" of it "depended on +schools." Like Burns, he was for some years trained in his own parish, +where home influences counted for more than the teaching of not very +competent masters. He soon read eagerly and variously. At the age of +seven he was, by an Inspector of the old order, reported to be "complete +in English." In his tenth year (1805) he was sent to the Grammar School +of Annan, the "Hinterschlag Gymnasium," where his "evil days" began. +Every oversensitive child finds the life of a public school one long +misery. Ordinary boys--those of the Scotch borderland being of the most +savage type--are more brutal than ordinary men; they hate singularity as +the world at first hates originality, and have none of the restraints +which the later semi-civilisation of life imposes. "They obey the impulse +of rude Nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any stricken hart, the +duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all +hands the strong tyrannise over the weak." Young Carlyle was mocked for +his moody ways, laughed at for his love of solitude, and called "Tom the +Tearful" because of his habit of crying. To add much to his discomfort, +he had made a rash promise to his pious mother, who seems, in contrast to +her husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles--a promise +to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well +broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he +refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew +Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty +called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by +appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge +of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began +to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright +prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend. +On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University, +despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, "Educate a +boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." "Thou hast not +done so," said old James in after years, "God be thanked for it;" and the +son pays due tribute to the tolerant patience and substantial generosity +of the father: "With a noble faith he launched me forth into a world +which he himself had never been permitted to visit." Carlyle walked +through Moffat all the way to Edinburgh with a senior student, Tom Smail +(who owes to this fact the preservation of his name), with eyes open +to every shade on the moors, as is attested in two passages of the +_Reminiscences_. The boys, as is the fashion still, clubbed together in +cheap lodgings, and Carlyle attended the curriculum from 1809 to 1814. +Comparatively little is known of his college life, which seems to +have been for the majority of Scotch students much as it is now, a +compulsorily frugal life, with too little variety, relaxation, or society +outside Class rooms; and, within them, a constant tug at Science, mental +or physical, at the gateway to dissecting souls or bodies. We infer, from +hints in later conversations and memorials, that Carlyle lived much with +his own fancies, and owed little to any system. He is clearly thinking +of his own youth in his account of Dr. Francia: "Jose must have been a +loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn reflection, probably +to crying humours, with fits of vehement ill nature--subject to the +terriblest fits of hypochondria." His explosion in _Sartor,_ "It is my +painful duty to say that out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of +all hitherto discovered Universities," is the first of a long series of +libels on things and persons he did not like. The Scotch capital was +still a literary centre of some original brilliancy, in the light of +the circle of Scott, which followed that of Burns, in the early fame of +Cockburn and of Clerk (Lord Eldin), of the _Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh +Reviews,_ and of the elder Alison. The Chairs of the University were +conspicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of ability required +from Professors, some of them--conspicuously Brown (the more original if +less "sound" successor of Dugald Stewart), Playfair, and Leslie--rising +to a higher rank. But great Educational Institutions must adapt +themselves to the training of average minds by requirements and +restrictions against which genius always rebels. Biography more than +History repeats itself, and the murmurs of Carlyle are, like those +of Milton, Gibbon, Locke, and Wordsworth, the protests or growls of +irrepressible individuality kicking against the pricks. He was never in +any sense a classic; read Greek with difficulty--Aeschylus and Sophocles +mainly in translations--and while appreciating Tacitus disparaged Horace. +For Scotch Metaphysics, or any logical system, he never cared, and in his +days there was written over the Academic entrances "No Mysticism." He +distinguished himself in Mathematics, and soon found, by his own vaunt, +the _Principia_ of Newton prostrate at his feet: he was a favourite pupil +of Leslie, who escaped the frequent penalty of befriending him, but he +took no prizes: the noise in the class room hindered his answers, and he +said later to Mr. Froude that thoughts only came to him properly when +alone. + +[Footnote: He went so far as to say in 1847 that "the man who had mastered +the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he +had done before."] + +The social leader of a select set of young men in his own rank, by choice +and necessity _integer vitae_, he divided his time between the seclusion +of study and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was perhaps +the most prolific writer of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed his course +without taking a degree, did some tutorial work, and, in the same year, +accepted the post of Mathematical Usher at Annan as successor to Irving, +who had been translated to Haddington. Still in formal pursuit of the +ministry, though beginning to fight shy of its fences, he went up twice a +year to deliver addresses at the Divinity Hall, one of which, "on the uses +of affliction," was afterwards by himself condemned as flowery; another +was a Latin thesis on the theme, "num detur religio naturalis." The +posthumous publication of some of his writings, e.g. of the fragment of +the novel _Wotton Reinfred_, reconciles us to the loss of those which have +not been recovered. + +In the vacations, spent at Mainhill, he began to study German, and +corresponded with his College friends. Many of Carlyle's early letters, +reproduced in the volumes edited by Mr. Charles E. Norton, are written in +that which, according to Voltaire, is the only unpermissible style, "the +tiresome"; and the thought, far from being precocious, is distinctly +commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell on the fall of Napoleon; +or the following to his parents: "There are few things in this world more +valuable than knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it"; or +to James Johnstone the trite quotation, "Truly pale death overturns with +impartial foot the hut of the poor man and the palace of the king." +Several are marred by the egotism which in most Scotch peasants of +aspiring talent takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves +with others; refrains of the ambition against which the writer elsewhere +inveighs as the "kettle tied to the dog's tail." In a note to Thomas +Murray he writes:-- + +Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known +has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! bestow coronets and crowns and +principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and +noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart unyielding +to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary +fame. + +That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is +ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of +Leyden :-- + + Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye, + For that was a day + When we stood in our array + Like the lion's might at bay. + +"Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell consumes +almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have not, then I +desire you read it (_sic_) and tell me what you think of _him_," etc. +Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the +lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been previously travestied +in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns. "Many of his +opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to refer all the +modifications of national character to the influence of moral causes. +Might it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those which +he denominates moral causes originate from physical circumstances?" The +whole first volume of this somewhat overexpanded collection overflows +with ebullitions of bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of +Byron's early romances seems philanthropy, e.g.-- + +How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this +world. For what are its inhabitants? Its great men and its little, its +fat ones and its lean ... pitiful automatons, despicable Yahoos, yea, +they are altogether an insufferable thing. "O for a lodge in some vast +wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where the scowl of the +purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of the coxcomb, the bray of the +ninny and the clodpole might never reach me more!" + +On the other hand, there are frequent evidences of the imperial +intrepidity, the matchless industry, and the splendid independence of +the writer. In his twenty-first year Carlyle again succeeded his Annan +predecessor (who seems to have given dissatisfaction by some vagaries of +severity) as mathematical teacher in the main school of Kirkcaldy. The +_Reminiscences_ of Irving's generous reception of his protege present one +of the pleasantest pictures in the records of their friendship. The same +chapter is illustrated by a series of sketches of the scenery of the +east coast rarely rivalled in descriptive literature. It is elsewhere +enlivened, if also defaced, by the earliest examples of the cynical +criticisms of character that make most readers rejoice in having escaped +the author's observation. + +During the two years of his residence in Fifeshire, Carlyle encountered +his first romance, in making acquaintance with a well-born young lady, +"by far the brightest and cleverest" of Irving's pupils--Margaret +Gordon--"an acquaintance which might easily have been more" had not +relatives and circumstances intervened. Doubtless Mr. Froude is right in +asserting this lady to have been the original of _Sartor's_ "Blumine"; +and in leaving him to marry "Herr Towgood," ultimately governor of Nova +Scotia, she bequeathed, though in antithetical style, advice that attests +her discrimination of character. "Cultivate the milder dispositions of +the heart, subdue the mere extravagant visions of the brain. Genius +will render you great. May virtue render you beloved. Remove the awful +distance between you and other men by kind and gentle manners. Deal +gently with their inferiority, and be convinced that they will respect +you as much and like you more." To this advice, which he never even +tried to take, she adds, happily perhaps for herself, "I give you not my +address, because I dare not promise to see you." In 1818 Carlyle, always +intolerant of work imposed, came to the conclusion that "it were better +to perish than to continue schoolmastering," and left Kirkcaldy, with L90 +saved, for Edinburgh, where he lived over three years, taking private +pupils, and trying to enter on his real mission through the gates of +literature--gates constantly barred; for, even in those older days of +laxer competition, obstinate eccentricity unredeemed by any social +advantages led to failure and rebuff. Men with the literary form of +genius highly developed have rarely much endurance of defeat. Carlyle, +even in his best moods, resented real or fancied injuries, and at this +stage of his career complained that he got nothing but vinegar from his +fellows, comparing himself to a worm that trodden on would "turn into a +torpedo." He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, which "gnawed +like a rat" at its life-long tenement, his stomach, and by sleeplessness, +due in part to internal causes, but also to the "Bedlam" noises of men, +machines, and animals, which pestered him in town and country from first +to last. He kept hesitating about his career, tried law, mathematical +teaching, contributions to magazines and dictionaries, everything but +journalism, to which he had a rooted repugnance, and the Church, which he +had definitely abandoned. How far the change in his views may have been +due to his reading of Gibbon, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc., how far to self- +reflection, is uncertain; but he already found himself unable, in any +plain sense, to subscribe to the Westminster Confession or to any +"orthodox" Articles, and equally unable by any philosophical +reconciliation of contraries to write black with white on a ground of +neutral gray. + +[Footnote: He refers to Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ as "of all books the +most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. +His winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing, were +often admirably potent and illustrative to me."] + +Mentally and physically adrift he was midway in the valley of the shadow, +which he represents as "The Everlasting No," and beset by "temptations in +the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, "The biographies of men of +letters are the wretchedest chapters in our history, except perhaps the +Newgate Calendar," a remark that recalls the similar cry of Burns, "There +is not among the martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the +poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness +to the absence of a popularity which he yet professes to scorn.--I was +entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles; solitary eating my own heart, +misgivings as to whether there shall be presently anything else to eat, +fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles and miseries ... three +weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free of noise, +... wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual questions unanswered, +etc. + +What is this but Byron's cry, "I am not happy," which his afterwards +stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-jack? + +Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same dismal mood. +"Mainhill," says his biographer, "was never a less happy home to him than +it was this summer (1819). He could not conceal the condition of his +mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a +matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have +seemed as if possessed." + +Returning to Edinburgh in the early winter, he for a time wrote hopefully +about his studies. "The law I find to be a most complicated subject, +yet I like it pretty well. Its great charm in my eyes is that no mean +compliances are requisite for prospering in it." But this strain soon +gave way to a fresh fit of perversity, and we have a record of his +throwing up the cards in one of his most ill-natured notes. + +I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and +converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But +it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere +denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as +wages for all that bogpool of disgust. + +The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radical rising in +Glasgow against the poverty which was the natural aftermath of the great +war, oppressions, half real, half imaginary, of the military force, and +the yeomanry in particular. Carlyle's contribution to the reminiscences +of the time is doubly interesting because written (in the article on +Irving, 1836) from memory, when he had long ceased to be a Radical. A +few sentences suffice to illustrate this phase or stage of his political +progress:-- + +A time of great rages and absurd terrors and expectations, a very fierce +Radical and anti-Radical time. Edinburgh, endlessly agitated by it all +around me ... gentry people full of zeal and foolish terror and fury, and +looking _disgustingly busy and important_.... One bleared Sunday morning +I had gone out for my walk. At the Riding-house in Nicolson Street was a +kind of straggly group, with red-coats interspersed. They took their way, +not very dangerous-looking men of war; but there rose from the little +crowd the strangest shout I have heard human throats utter, not very +loud, but it said as plain as words, and with infinitely more emphasis of +sincerity, "May the devil go with you, ye peculiarly contemptible, and +dead to the distresses of your fellow-creatures!" Another morning ... I +met an advocate slightly of my acquaintance hurrying along, musket in +hand, towards the Links, there to be drilled as item of the "gentlemen" +volunteers now afoot. "You should have the like of this," said he, +cheerily patting his musket "Hm, yes; but I haven't yet quite settled on +which side"--which probably he hoped was quiz, though it really expressed +my feeling ... mutiny and revolt being a light matter to the young. + +This period is illustrated by numerous letters from Irving, who had +migrated to Glasgow as an assistant to Dr. Chalmers, abounding in sound +counsels to persevere in some profession and make the best of practical +opportunities. Carlyle's answers have in no instance been preserved, but +the sole trace of his having been influenced by his friend's advice is his +contribution (1820-1823) of sixteen articles to the _Edinburgh +Encyclopedia_ under the editorship of Sir David Brewster. The scant +remuneration obtained from these was well timed, but they contain no +original matter, and did nothing for his fame. Meanwhile it appears from +one of Irving's letters that Carlyle's thoughts had been, as later in his +early London life, turning towards emigration. He says, writes his friend, +"I have the ends of my thoughts to bring together ... my views of life to +reform, my health to recover, and then once more I shall venture my bark +on the waters of this wide realm, and if she cannot weather it I shall +steer west and try the waters of another world." + +[Footnote: The subjects of these were--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, +Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker, +Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, +Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord Chatham, William Pitt. These articles, on +the whole judiciously omitted from the author's collected works, are +characterised by marks of great industry, commonplace, and general +fairness, with a style singularly formal, like that of the less im +pressive pages of Johnson. The following, among numerous passages, are +curious as illustrating the comparative orthodoxy of the writer's early +judgments: "The brilliant hints which Montesquieu scatters round him with +a liberal hand have excited or assisted the speculations of others in +almost every department of political economy, and he is deservedly +mentioned as a principal founder of that important science." "Mirabeau +confronted him (Necker) like his evil genius; and being totally without +scruple in the employment of any expedient, was but too successful in +overthrowing all reasonable proposals, and conducting the people to that +state of anarchy out of which his own ambition was to be rewarded," etc. +Similarly the verdicts on Pitt, Chatham, Nelson, Park, Lady Montagu, etc., +are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of conscientious research, +fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as +in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend +itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to +show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be +united with a coarse and ignoble heart."] + +The resolves, sometimes the efforts, of celebrated Englishmen,--"nos manet +oceanus,"--as Cromwell, Burns, Coleridge, and Southey (allured, some +critic suggests, by the poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough, +Richard Hengist Horne, and Browning's "Waring," to elude "the fever and +the fret" of an old civilisation, and take refuge in the fancied freedom +of wild lands--when more than dreams--have been failures. + +[Footnote: Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his +New York Press and "plant him where the red deer feed, in the green +forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's banished Duke.] + +Puritan patriots, it is true, made New England, and the scions of the +Cavaliers Virginia; but no poet or imaginative writer has ever been +successfully transplanted, with the dubious exception of Heinrich Heine. +It is certain that, despite his first warm recognition coming from across +the Atlantic, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ would have found +the "States" more fruitful in food for cursing than either Edinburgh or +London. + +The spring of 1820 was marked by a memorable visit to Irving, on +Carlyle's way to spend as was his wont the summer months at home. His +few days in Glasgow are recorded in a graphic sketch of the bald-headed +merchants at the Tontine, and an account of his introduction to Dr. +Chalmers, to whom he refers always with admiration and a respect but +slightly modified. The critic's praise of British contemporaries, other +than relatives, is so rare that the following sentences are worth +transcribing:-- + +He (Chalmers) was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honesty, and +kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination.... He had a +burst of genuine fun too.... His laugh was ever a hearty, low guffaw, +and his tones in preaching would reach to the piercingly pathetic. No +preacher ever went so into one's heart. He was a man essentially of +little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. Such an intellect, +professing to be educated, and yet ... ignorant in all that lies beyond +the horizon in place or time I have almost nowhere met with--a man +capable of so much soaking indolence, lazy brooding ... as the first +stage of his life well indicated, ... yet capable of impetuous activity +and braying audacity, as his later years showed. I suppose there will +never again be such a preacher in any Christian church. "The truth of +Christianity," he said, "was all written in us already in sympathetic +ink. Bible awakens it, and you can read"--a sympathetic image but of no +great weight as an argument addressed to doubting Thomas. Chalmers, whose +originality lay rather in his quick insight and fire than in his mainly +commonplace thought, had the credit of recognising the religious side of +Carlyle's genius, when to the mass of his countrymen he was a rock of +offence. One of the great preacher's criticisms of the great writer is +notably just: "He is a lover of earnestness more than a lover of truth." + +There follows in some of the early pages of the _Reminiscences_ an +account of a long walk with Irving, who had arranged to accompany Carlyle +for the first stage, _i.e._ fifteen miles of the road, of his for the +most part pedestrian march from Glasgow to Ecclefechan, a record among +many of similar excursions over dales and hills, and "by the beached +margent," revived for us in sun and shade by a pen almost as magical as +Turner's brush. We must refer to the pages of Mr. Froude for the +picture of Drumclog moss,--"a good place for Cameronian preaching, and +dangerously difficult for Claverse _(sic)_ and horse soldiery if the +suffering remnant had a few old muskets among them,"--for the graphic +glimpse of Ailsa Craig, and the talk by the dry stone fence, in the +twilight. "It was just here, as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from +me by degrees, in the softest manner, that I did not think as he of the +Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or +should. This, if this was so, he had pre-engaged to take well of me, like +an elder brother, if I would be frank with him. And right loyally he did +so." They parted here: Carlyle trudged on to the then "utterly quiet +little inn" at Muirkirk, left next morning at 4 A.M., and reached +Dumfries, a distance of fifty-four miles, at 8 P.M., "the longest walk I +ever made." He spent the summer at Mainhill, studying modern +languages, "living riotously with Schiller and Goethe." at work on the +_Encyclopedia_ articles, and visiting his friend at Annan, when he was +offered the post of tutor to the son of a Yorkshire farmer, an offer +which Irving urged him to accept, saying, "You live too much in an ideal +world," and wisely adding, "try your hand with the respectable illiterate +men of middle life. You may be taught to forget ... the splendours and +envies ... of men of literature." + +This exhortation led to a result recorded with much humour, egotism, and +arrogance in a letter to his intimate friend Dr. John Fergusson, of Kelso +Grammar School, which, despite the mark "private and confidential," was +yet published, several years after the death of the recipient and shortly +after that of the writer, in a gossiping memoir. We are therefore at +liberty to select from the letter the following paragraphs:-- + + I delayed sending an answer till I might have it in my power + to communicate what seemed then likely to produce a + considerable change in my stile (_sic_) of life, a + proposal to become a "travelling tutor," as they call it, to + a young person in the North Riding, for whom that exercise + was recommended on account of bodily and mental weakness. + They offered me L150 per annum, and withal invited me to + come and examine things on the spot before engaging. I went + accordingly, and happy was it I went; from description I was + ready to accept the place; from inspection all Earndale + would not have hired me to accept it. This boy was a dotard, + a semi-vegetable, the elder brother, head of the family, a + two-legged animal without feathers, intellect, or virtue, + and all the connections seemed to have the power of eating + pudding but no higher power. So I left the barbarous + people....York is but a heap of bricks. Jonathan Dryasdust + (see _Ivanhoe_) is justly named. York is the Boetia of + Britain.... Upon the whole, however, I derived great + amusement from my journey, ... I conversed with all kinds of + men, from graziers up to knights of the shire, argued with + them all, and broke specimens from their souls (if any), + which I retain within the museum of my cranium. I have no + prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown + from another planet on this dark terrestrial ball, an alien, + a pilgrim ... and life is to me like a pathless, a waste, + and a howling wilderness. Do not leave your situation if + you can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a + fearful thing to be swept in by the roaring surge of life, + and then to float alone undirected on its restless, + monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet you may, or if you + must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the waves without + a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cock-boats, yet hold + fast by the Manilla ship, _and do not let go the painter_. + +Towards the close of this year Irving, alarmed by his friend's +despondency, sent him a most generous and delicately-worded invitation to +spend some months under his roof; but Carlyle declined, and in a letter +of March 1821 he writes to his brother John: "Edinburgh, with all its +drawbacks, is the only scene for me," on which follows one of his finest +descriptions, that of the view from Arthur Seat. + +According to the most probable chronology, for many of Carlyle's dates +are hard to fix, the next important event of his life, his being +introduced, on occasion of a visit to Haddington, to Miss Jane Welsh by +her old tutor, Edward Irving--an event which marks the beginning of a new +era in his career--took place towards the close of May or in the first +week of June. To June is assigned the incident, described in _Sartor_ as +the transition from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea, a sort of +revelation that came upon him as he was in Leith Walk--Rue St. Thomas de +l'Enfer in the Romance--on the way to cool his distempers by a plunge in +the sea. The passage proclaiming this has been everywhere quoted; and it +is only essential to note that it resembled the "illuminations" of St. +Paul and of Constantine merely by its being a sudden spiritual impulse. +It was in no sense a conversion to any belief in person or creed, it was +but the assertion of a strong manhood against an almost suicidal mood +of despair; a condition set forth with superabundant paraphernalia of +eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of Teufelsdroeckh had +darkened into disbelief in divine or human justice, freedom, or himself. +If there be a God, He sits on the hills "since the first Sabbath," +careless of mankind. Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire +and fear"; virtue "some bubble of the blood," absence of vitality +perhaps. + +What in these days are terrors of conscience to diseases of the liver? +Not on morality but on cookery let us build our stronghold.... Thus has +the bewildered wanderer to stand, shouting question after question into +the Sibyl cave, and receiving for answer an echo. + +From this scepticism, deeper than that of _Queen Mab,_ fiercer than that +of _Candide,_ Carlyle was dramatically rescued by the sense that he was a +servant of God, even when doubting His existence. + + After all the nameless woe that inquiry had wrought me, + I nevertheless still loved truth, and would hate no jot of my + allegiance....Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me + for following her; no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubberland + were the price of apostacy. + +With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough of despond and +asserts himself: + + Denn ich bin ein Mensch gewesen + Und das heisst ein Kaempfer seyn. + +He finds in persistent action, energy, and courage a present strength, +and a lamp of at least such partial victory as he lived to achieve. + + He would not make his judgment blind; + He faced the spectres of the mind,-- + +but he never "laid them," or came near the serenity of his master, +Goethe; and his teaching, public and private, remained half a wail. He +threw the gage rather in the attitude of a man turning at bay than that of +one making a leap. + + Death? Well, Death ... let it come then, and I will + meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream + of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from + that time the temper of my misery was changed; not ... + whining sorrow ... but grim defiance. + +Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:-- + +I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce, +upon myself and all things earthly....The year is closing. This time +eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago.... + + Oh! little did my mother think, + That day she cradled me, + The lands that I should travel in, + The death I was to dee. + +My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in +a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain. +How have I deserved this? I know not. Then why don't you kill yourself, +sir? Is there not arsenic? Is there not ratsbane of various kinds? And +hemp, and steel? Most true, Sathanas...but it will be time enough to +use them when I have _lost_ the game I am but _losing_, ... and while +my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not +breaking their hearts would still remain....I want health, health, +health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious: my torments are +greater than I am able to bear. + +Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is there any excess of +Optimism; but after the Leith Walk inspiration he had resolved on "no +surrender"; and that, henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have +proof in its more regular, if not more rapid progress. His last hack +service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless we add a +translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's Geometry, begun, +according to some reports, in the Kirkcaldy period, finished in 1822, +and published in 1824. For this task, prefixed by an original _Essay on +Proportion_, much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respectable sum +of L50. Two subsequent candidatures for Chairs of Astronomy showed that +Carlyle had not lost his taste for Mathematics; but this work was his +practical farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an +author were those of an interpreter. His complete mastery of German has +been said to have endowed him with "his sword of sharpness and shoes of +swiftness"; it may be added, in some instances also, with the "fog-cap." +But in his earliest substantial volume, the _Life of Schiller_, there is +nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. This work began to +appear in the _London Magazine_ in 1823, was finished in 1824, and in +1825 published in a separate form. Approved during its progress by an +encouraging article in the _Times_, it was, in 1830, translated into +German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced the work by an +important commendatory preface, and so first brought the author's name +conspicuously before a continental public. Carlyle himself, partly +perhaps from the spirit of contradiction, was inclined to speak +slightingly of this high-toned and sympathetic biography: "It is," said +he, "in the wrong vein, laborious, partly affected, meagre, bombastic." +But these are sentences of a morbid time, when, for want of other +victims, he turned and rent himself. _Pari passu_, he was toiling at his +translation of _Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship_. This was published in +Edinburgh in 1824. Heartily commended in _Blackwood_, it was generally +recognised as one of the best English renderings of any foreign author; +and Jeffrey, in his absurd review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks +in high terms of the skill displayed by the translator. The virulent +attack of De Quincey--a writer as unreliable as brilliant--in the _London +Magazine_ does not seem to have carried much weight even then, and has +none now. The _Wanderjahre_, constituting the third volume of the English +edition, first appeared as the last of four on German Romance--a series +of admirably selected and executed translations from Musaeus, Fouque, +Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Goethe, prefaced by short biographical and +critical notices of each--published in Edinburgh in 1827. This date is +also that of the first of the more elaborate and extensive criticisms +which, appearing in the Edinburgh and Foreign reviews, established +Carlyle as the English pioneer of German literature. The result of these +works would have been enough to drive the wolf from the door and to +render their author independent of the oatmeal from home; while another +source of revenue enabled him not only to keep himself, but to settle +his brother Alick in a farm, and to support John through his University +course as a medical student. This and similar services to the family +circle were rendered with gracious disclaimers of obligation. "What any +brethren of our father's house possess, I look on as a common stock from +which all are entitled to draw." + +For this good fortune he was again indebted to his friend of friends. +Irving had begun to feel his position at Glasgow unsatisfactory, and +at the close of 1821 he was induced to accept an appointment to the +Caledonian Chapel at Hatton Garden. On migrating to London, to make a +greater, if not a safer, name in the central city, and finally, be lost +in its vortex, he had invited Carlyle to follow him, saying, "Scotland +breeds men, but England rears them." Shortly after, introduced by Mrs. +Strachey, one of his worshipping audience, to her sister Mrs. Buller, he +found the latter in trouble about the education of her sons. Charles, the +elder, was a youth of bright but restive intelligence, and it was desired +to find some transitional training for him on his way from Harrow to +Cambridge. Irving urged his being placed, in the interim, under Carlyle's +charge. The proposal, with an offer of L200 a year, was accepted, and the +brothers were soon duly installed in George Square, while their tutor +remained in Moray Place, Edinburgh. The early stages of this relationship +were eminently satisfactory; Carlyle wrote that the teaching of the +Bullers was a pleasure rather than a task; they seemed to him "quite +another set of boys than I have been used to, and treat me in another +sort of manner than tutors are used. The eldest is one of the cleverest +boys I have ever seen." There was never any jar between the teacher and +the taught. Carlyle speaks with unfailing regard of the favourite pupil, +whose brilliant University and Parliamentary career bore testimony to the +good practical guidance he had received. His premature death at the +entrance on a sphere of wider influence made a serious blank in his old +master's life. + +[Footnote: Charles Buller became Carlyle's pupil at the age of fifteen. +He died as Commissioner of the Poor in 1848 (_aet_. forty-two).] + +But as regards the relation of the employer and employed, we are wearied +by the constantly recurring record of kindness lavishly bestowed, +ungraciously received, and soon ungratefully forgotten. The elder +Bullers--the mother a former beauty and woman of some brilliancy, the +father a solid and courteous gentleman retired from the Anglo-Indian +service--came to Edinburgh in the spring of the tutorship, and +recognising Carlyle's abilities, welcomed him to the family circle, and +treated him, by his own confession, with a "degree of respect" he "did +not deserve"; adapting their arrangements, as far as possible, to his +hours and habits; consulting his convenience and humouring his whims. +Early in 1823 they went to live together at Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld, +when he continued to write letters to his kin still praising his patrons; +but the first note of discord is soon struck in satirical references to +their aristocratic friends and querulous complaints of the servants. +During the winter, for greater quiet, a room was assigned to him in +another house near Kinnaird; a consideration which met with the award: +"My bower is the most polite of bowers, refusing admittance to no wind +that blows." And about this same time he wrote, growling at his fare: "It +is clear to me that I shall never recover my health under the economy of +Mrs. Buller." + +In 1824 the family returned to London, and Carlyle followed in June by +a sailing yacht from Leith. On arrival he sent to Miss Welsh a letter, +sneering at his fellow passengers, but ending with a striking picture of +his first impressions of the capital:-- + + We were winding slowly through the forest of masts in the + Thames up to our station at Tower Wharf. The giant bustle, + the coal heavers, the bargemen, the black buildings, the ten + thousand times ten thousand sounds and movements of that + monstrous harbour formed the grandest object I had ever + witnessed. One man seems a drop in the ocean; you feel + annihilated in the immensity of that heart of all the world. + +On reaching London he first stayed for two or three weeks under Irving's +roof and was introduced to his friends. Of Mrs. Strachey and her young +cousin Kitty, who seems to have run the risk of admiring him to excess, +he always spoke well: but the Basil Montagues, to whose hospitality and +friendship he was made welcome, he has maligned in such a manner as to +justify the retaliatory pamphlet of the sharp-tongued eldest daughter +of the house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By letter and +"reminiscence" he is equally reckless in invective against almost all the +eminent men of letters with whom he then came in contact, and also, +in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, +Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in +some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being +addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of +well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain +on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he +writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in +the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature." +And a fortnight later, from Irving's house at Pentonville, he sends to +his mother an account of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him +two alternatives--to go with the family to France or to remain in the +country preparing the eldest boy for Cambridge. He declined both, and +they parted, shaking hands with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a +sentence that recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge, "that I have done +with them ... I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for L200 a +year." + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_ (1st ed. 1851), chap. viii. +p. 79.] + +There followed eight weeks of residence in or about Birmingham, with a +friend called 'Badams, who undertook to cure dyspepsia by a new method +and failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others, +as the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the toiling +squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from radical democracy to +Platonic autocracy, continued to take a deep interest; on other days +they had pleasant excursions to the green fields and old towers of +Warwickshire. On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De +Quincey's review of _Meister_, and in recounting the event credits +himself with the philosophic thought, "This man is perhaps right on some +points; if so let him be admonitory." + +But the description that follows of "the child that has been in hell," +however just, is less magnanimous. Then came a trip, in company with Mr. +Strachey and Kitty and maid, by Dover and Calais along Sterne's route to +Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis XVIII. was then +lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments are mainly acid remarks on the +Palais Royal, with the refrain, "God bless the narrow seas." But he met +Legendre and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and saw Talma act, and, what +was of more moment, had his first glimpse of the Continent and the city +of one phase of whose history he was to be the most brilliant recorder. +Back in London for the winter, where his time was divided between +Irving's house and his own neighbouring room in Southampton Street, +he was cheered by Goethe's own acknowledgment of the translation of +_Meister_, characteristically and generously cordial. + +In March 1825 Carlyle again set his face northward, and travelling by +coach through Birmingham, Manchester, Bolton, and Carlisle, established +himself, in May, at Hoddam Hill; a farm near the Solway, three miles from +Mainhill, which his father had leased for him. His brother Alexander +farmed, while Thomas toiled on at German translations and rode about on +horseback. For a space, one of the few contented periods of his life, +there is a truce to complaining. Here free from the noises which are the +pests of literary life, he was building up his character and forming the +opinions which, with few material changes, he long continued to hold. +Thus he writes from over a distance of forty years :-- + + With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam + Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now + like a not ignoble russet-coated idyll in my memory; one of + the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly + important of my life.... I found that I had conquered all my + scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with + the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch, + and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of + ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory.... Once + more, thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and + still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, + in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep road + before me, the first of the moderns. Bodily health itself + seemed improving.... Nowhere can I recollect of myself such + pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact + and Nature as in these poor Annandale localities. The sound + of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday mornings from + Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, was + strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen + hundred years. + +Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid +storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his +tyrannous love of liberty:-- + + It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of + consciousness--of inward dignity--I have gained since I came + within the walls of this poor cottage--my own four walls. + They simply admit that I am _Herr im Hause_, and act on + this conviction. There is no grumbling about my habitudes + and whims. If I choose to dine on fire and brimstone, they + will cook it for me to their best skill, thinking only that + I am an unintelligible mortal, _facheux_ to deal with, + but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own four walls. + +The last words form the refrain of a set of verses, the most +characteristic, as Mr. Froude justly observes, of the writer, the actual +composition of which seems, however, to belong to the next chapter of his +career, beginning-- + + Wild through the wind the huntsman calls, + As fast on willing nag I haste + Home to my own four walls. + +The feeling that inspires them is clenched in the defiance-- + + King George has palaces of pride, + And armed grooms must ward those halls; + With one stout bolt I safe abide + Within my own four walls. + + Not all his men may sever this; + It yields to friends', not monarchs' calls; + My whinstone house my castle is-- + I have my own four walls. + + When fools or knaves do make a rout, + With gigmen, dinners, balls, cabals, + I turn my back and shut them out; + These are my own four walls. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +CRAIGENPUTTOCK + +[1826-1834] + +"Ah, when she was young, she was a fleein', dancin", light-heartit thing, +Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a' at +ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher; and +he cam' aboot her. Then there was Maister ----. Then there was Maister +Carlyle himsel', and _he_ cam' to finish her off like."--HADDINGTON +NURSE. + +"My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at a +furlong's distance."--T. CARLYLE, from Craigenputtock, Oct. 1830. + +During the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the verge of a crisis +of his career, _i.e._ his making a marriage, for the chequered fortune of +which he was greatly himself to blame. + +No biography can ignore the strange conditions of a domestic life, +already made familiar in so many records that they are past evasion. +Various opinions have been held regarding the lady whom he selected to +share his lot. Any adequate estimate of this remarkable woman belongs to +an account of her own career, such as that given by Mrs. Ireland in her +judicious and interesting abridgment of the material amply supplied. Jane +Baillie Welsh (_b.1801, d. 1866_)--descended on the paternal side from +Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of John Knox; on the maternal owning to +an inheritance of gipsy blood--belonged to a family long esteemed +in the borders. Her father, a distinguished Edinburgh student, and +afterwards eminent surgeon at Haddington, noted alike for his humanity +and skill, made a small fortune, and purchased in advance from his father +his inheritance of Craigenputtock, a remnant of the once larger family +estate. He died in 1819, when his daughter was in her eighteenth year. To +her he left the now world-famous farm and the bulk of his property. Jane, +of precocious talents, seems to have been, almost from infancy, the +tyrant of the house at Haddington, where her people took a place of +precedence in the small county town. Her grandfathers, John of +Penfillan and Walter of Templand, also a Welsh, though of another--the +gipsy--stock, vied for her baby favours, while her mother's quick and +shifty tempers seem at that date to have combined in the process of +"spoiling" her. The records of the schooldays of the juvenile Jane all +point to a somewhat masculine strength of character. Through life, +it must be acknowledged, this brilliant creature was essentially "a +mockingbird," and made game of every one till she met her mate. The +little lady was learned, reading Virgil at nine, ambitious enough to +venture a tragedy at fourteen, and cynical; writing to her life-long +friend, Miss Eliza Stodart, of Haddington as a "bottomless pit of +dulness," where "all my little world lay glittering in tinsel at my +feet." She was ruthless to the suitors--as numerous, says Mr. Froude, +"as those of Penelope "--who flocked about the young beauty, wit, and +heiress. Of the discarded rivals there was only one of note--George +Rennie, long afterwards referred to by Carlyle as a "clever, decisive, +very ambitious, but quite unmelodious young fellow whom we knew here (in +Chelsea) as sculptor and M.P." She dismissed him in 1821 for some cause +of displeasure, "due to pride, reserve, and his soured temper about the +world"; but when he came to take leave, she confesses, "I scarcely heard +a word he said, my own heart beat so loud." Years after, in London, she +went by request of his wife to Rennie's death-bed. + +Meanwhile she had fallen under the spell of her tutor, Edward Irving, +and, as she, after much _finesse_ and evasion, admitted, came to love him +in earnest. Irving saw her weak points, saying she was apt to turn +her powers to "arts of cruelty which satire and scorn are," and "to +contemplate the inferiority of others rather from the point of view +of ridicule and contempt than of commiseration and relief." Later she +retaliated, "There would have been no 'tongues' had Irving married me." +But he was fettered by a previous engagement, to which, after some +struggle for release, he held, leaving in charge of his pupil, as guide, +philosopher, and friend, his old ally and successor, Thomas Carlyle. +Between this exceptional pair there began in 1821 a relationship of +constant growth in intimacy, marked by frequent visits, conversations, +confidences, and a correspondence, long, full, and varied, starting with +interchange of literary sympathies, and sliding by degrees into the +dangerous friendship called Platonic. At the outset it was plain that +Carlyle was not the St. Preux or Wolmar whose ideas of elegance Jane +Welsh--a hasty student of Rousseau--had set in unhappy contrast to the +honest young swains of Haddington. Uncouth, ungainly in manner and +attire, he first excited her ridicule even more than he attracted her +esteem, and her written descriptions of him recall that of Johnson by +Lord Chesterfield. "He scrapes the fender, ... only his tongue should be +left at liberty, his other members are most fantastically awkward"; but +the poor mocking-bird had met her fate. The correspondence falls under +two sections, the critical and the personal. The critical consists of +remarks, good, bad, and indifferent, on books and their writers. Carlyle +began his siege by talking German to her, now extolling Schiller and +Goethe to the skies, now, with a rare stretch of deference, half +conniving at her sneers. Much also passed between them about English +authors, among them comments on Byron, notably inconsistent. Of him +Carlyle writes (April 15th 1824) as "a pampered lord," who would care +nothing for the L500 a year that would make an honest man happy; but +later, on hearing of the death at Mesolonghi, more in the vein of his +master Goethe, he exclaims:-- + + Alas, poor Byron! the news of his death came upon me like + a mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful + twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. O + God! that so many souls of mud and clay should fill up + their base existence to the utmost bound; and this, the + noblest spirit in Europe, should sink before half his course + was run.... Late so full of fire and generous passion and + proud purposes, and now for ever dumb and cold.... Had he + been spared to the age of threescore and ten what might he + not have been! what might he not have been! ... I dreamed of + seeing him and knowing him; but ... we shall go to him, he + shall not return to us. + +This in answer to her account of the same intelligence: "I was told it +all alone in a room full of people. If they had said the sun or the moon +was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of +a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words 'Byron is +dead.'" Other letters of the same period, from London, are studded or +disfigured by the incisive ill-natured sarcasms above referred to, or +they relate to the work and prospects of the writer. Those that bear +on the progress of his suit mark it as the strangest and, when we look +before and after, one of the saddest courtships in literary history. As +early as 1822 Carlyle entertained the idea of making Jane Welsh his wife; +she had begun to yield to the fascinations of his speech--a fascination +akin to that of Burns--when she wrote, "I will be happier contemplating +my beau-ideal than a real, substantial, eating, drinking, sleeping, +honest husband." In 1823 they were half-declared lovers, but there were +recalcitrant fits on both sides. On occasion of a meeting at Edinburgh +there was a quarrel, followed by a note of repentance, in which she +confessed, "Nothing short of a devil could have tempted me to torment +you and myself as I did on that unblessed day." Somewhat earlier she had +written in answer to his first distinct avowal, "My friend, I love you. +But were you my brother I should love you the same. No. Your friend I +will be ... while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife never, +though you were as rich as Croesus, as honoured and renowned as you yet +shall be." To which Carlyle answered with characteristic pride, "I have +no idea of dying in the Arcadian shepherd's style for the disappointment +of hopes which I never seriously entertained, and had no right to +entertain seriously." There was indeed nothing of Corydon and Phyllis in +this struggle of two strong wills, the weaker giving way to the stronger, +the gradual but inexorable closing of an iron ring. Backed by the natural +repugnance of her mother to the match, Miss Welsh still rebelled, bracing +herself with the reflection, "Men and women may be very charming without +having any genius;" and to his renewed appeal (1825), "It lies with +you whether I shall be a right man or only a hard and bitter Stoic," +retorting, "I am not in love with you ... my affections are in a state of +perfect tranquillity." But she admitted he was her "only fellowship and +support," and confiding at length the truth about Irving, surrendered in +the words, "Decide, and woe to me if your reason be your judge and not +your love." In this duel of Puck and Theseus, the latter felt he had won +and pressed his advantage, offering to let her free and adding warnings +to the blind, "Without great sacrifices on both sides, the possibility +of our union is an empty dream." At the eleventh hour, when, in her own +words, she was "married past redemption," he wrote, "If you judge fit, I +will take you to my heart this very week. If you judge fit, I will this +very week forswear you for ever;" and replied to her request that her +widowed mother might live under their wedded roof in terms that might +have become Petruchio: "It may be stated in a word. The man should bear +rule in the house, not the woman. This is an eternal axiom, the law of +nature which no mortal departs from unpunished. . . . Will your mother +consent to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to her +daughter's husband!" + + Was ever woman in this humour woo'd, + Was ever woman in this humour won? + +Miss Welsh at length reluctantly agreed to come to start life at +Scotsbrig, where his family had migrated; but Carlyle pushed another +counter: "Your mother must not visit mine: the mere idea of such a visit +argued too plainly that you _knew nothing_ of the family circle in which +for my sake you were willing to take a place." It being agreed that Mrs. +Welsh was to leave Haddington, where the alliance was palpably unpopular, +Carlyle proposed to begin married life in his mother-in-law's vacant +house, saying in effect to his fiancee that as for intrusive visitors he +had "nerve enough" to kick her old friends out of doors. At this point, +however, her complaisance had reached its limit. The bridegroom-elect had +to soothe his sense of partial retreat by a scolding letter. As regards +difficulties of finance he pointed out that he had L200 to start with, +and that a labourer and his wife had been known to live on L14 a year. + +On the edge of the great change in her life, Jane Welsh writes, "I am +resolved in spirit, in the face of every horrible fate," and says she has +decided to put off mourning for her father, having found a second father. +Carlyle proposed that after the "dreaded ceremony" he and his bride and +his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach from Dumfries +to Edinburgh. In "the last dying speech and marrying words" she objects +to this arrangement, and after the event (October 17th 1826) they drove +in a post-chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself settled +at Templand, had furnished a house for them. Meanwhile the Carlyle family +migrated to Scotsbrig. There followed eighteen comparatively tranquil +months, an oasis in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in +some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social +gatherings--Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their +brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the +northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster, +John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey, +a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as Irving himself. +Procter had introduced Carlyle to the famous editor, who, as a Scotch +cousin of the Welshes, took from the first a keen interest in the still +struggling author, and opened to him the door of the _Edinburgh Review_. +The appearance, of the article on _Richter_, 1827, and that, in the +course of the same year, on _The State of German Literature,_ marks +the beginning of a long series of splendid historical and critical +essays--closing in 1855 with the _Prinzenraub_--which set Carlyle in the +front of the reviewers of the century. The success in the _Edinburgh_ +was an "open sesame;" and the conductors of the _Foreign_ and _Foreign +Quarterly_ Reviews, later, those of _Fraser_ and the _Westminster_, were +ready to receive whatever the new writer might choose to send. + +To the _Foreign Review_ he contributed from Comely Bank the _Life and +Writings of Werner_, a paper on _Helena_, the leading episode of the +second part of "Faust," and the first of the two great Essays on +_Goethe_, which fixed his place as the interpreter of Germany to England. +In midsummer 1827 Carlyle received a letter from Goethe cordially +acknowledging the _Life of Schiller_, and enclosing presents of books for +himself and his wife. This, followed by a later inquiry as to the +author of the article on _German Literature_, was the opening of a +correspondence of sage advice on the one side and of lively gratitude +on the other, that lasted till the death of the veteran in 1832. Goethe +assisted, or tried to assist, his admirer by giving him a testimonial in +a candidature for the Chair (vacant by the promotion of Dr. Chalmers) of +Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Jeffrey, a frequent visitor and host +of the Carlyles, still regarded as "a jewel of advocates ... the most +lovable of little men," urged and aided the canvass, but in vain. The +testimonials were too strong to be judicious, and "it was enough that" +the candidate "was described as a man of original and extraordinary gifts +to make college patrons shrink from contact with him." Another failure, +about the same date and with the same backing, was an application for a +Professorship in London University, practically under the patronage of +Brougham; yet another, of a different kind, was Carlyle's attempt +to write a novel, which having been found--better before than after +publication--to be a failure, was for the most part burnt. "He could +not," says Froude, "write a novel any more than he could write poetry. He +had no _invention._" + +[Footnote: Carlyle's verses also demonstrate that he had no metrical ear. +The only really good lines he ever wrote, save in translations where the +rhythm was set to him, are those constantly quoted about the dawn of +"another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud Hapsburg," and to +Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of Macaulay's school-boy, "Non di +non homines;" but it took much hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact, +and when persuaded he concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of +cymbals!] + +"His genius was for fact; to lay hold on truth, with all his intellect and +all his imagination. He could no more invent than he could lie." + +The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are few: a visit from +his mother; a message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter +Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in +Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new +Annual Register, designed to be a literary _resume_ of the year, make up +the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic +life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox +honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom +saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined together and +read _Don Quixote_ in Spanish. The husband was half forgotten in the +author beginning to prophesy: he wrote alone, walked alone, thought +alone, and for the most part talked alone, _i.e._ in monologue that did +not wait or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, but +there was little companionship. Meanwhile, despite the _Review_ articles, +Carlyle's other works, especially the volumes on German romance, were not +succeeding, and the mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful +whether he could afford to live in Edinburgh; he craved after greater +quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh inheritance, fell +vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His wife yielding, though with a +natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the +Jeffreys kindly assisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of +the Hawks. + +Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British +dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy +straths of grass around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid +bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in +front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or +apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. Here Carlyle +allowed his wife to serve him through six years of household drudgery; +an offence for which he was never quite forgiven, and to estimate its +magnitude here seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother, +and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he was as unfit, +and for some of the same reasons, to make "a happy fireside clime" as was +Jonathan Swift; and less even than Byron had he a share of the mutual +forbearance which is essential to the closest of all relations. + +"Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked everything and +spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, +nor himself." With a slight change of phrase the same may be said of +Carlyle's devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain in +his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of literature as +a profession, nor are there wiser words than those in which the veteran +warns the young men, whose questions he answers with touching solicitude, +against its adoption. "It should be," he declares, "the wine not the food +of life, the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread of +action parches up nature and makes strong souls like Byron dangerous, +the weak despicable." But it was nevertheless the profession of his +deliberate choice, and he soon found himself bound to it as Ixion to his +wheel. The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was +great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out +the heart of the mystery, be it of himself, as in _Sartor_; of Germany, +as in his Goethes and Richters; the state of England, as in _Chartism_ +and _Past and Present;_ of _Cromwell_ or of _Friedrich,_ he faced all +obstacles and overthrew them. Dauntless and ruthless, he allowed nothing +to divert or to mar his designs, least of all domestic cares or even +duties. "Selfish he was,"--I again quote from his biographer,--"if it +be selfish to be ready to sacrifice every person dependent on him as +completely as he sacrificed himself." What such a man wanted was a +housekeeper and a nurse, not a wife, and when we consider that he had +chosen for the latter companionship a woman almost as ambitious as +himself, whose conversation was only less brilliant than his own, of +delicate health and dainty ways, loyal to death, but, according to Mr. +Froude, in some respects "as hard as flint," with "dangerous sparks of +fire," whose quick temper found vent in sarcasms that blistered and words +like swords, who could declare during the time of the engagement, to +which in spite of warnings manifold she clung, "I will not marry to live +on less than my natural and artificial wants"; who, ridiculing his accent +to his face and before his friends, could write, "apply your talents to +gild over the inequality of our births"; and who found herself obliged +to live sixteen miles from the nearest neighbour, to milk a cow, scour +floors and mend shoes--when we consider all this we are constrained to +admit that the 17th October 1826 was a _dies nefastus,_ nor wonder that +thirty years later Mrs. Carlyle wrote, "I married for ambition, Carlyle +has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him, and I am +miserable,"--and to a young friend, "My dear, whatever you do, never +marry a man of genius." + +Carlyle's own references to the life at Craigenputtock are marked by all +his aggravating inconsistency. "How happy we shall be in this Craig o' +Putta," he writes to his wife from Scotsbrig, April 17th 1827; and later +to Goethe:-- + + Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of + Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here + to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good results. + But I came here solely with the design to simplify my way of + life, and to secure the independence through which I could + be enabled to be true to myself. This bit of earth is our + own; here we can live, write, and think as best pleases + ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the + monarch of literature. From some of our heights I can descry, + about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola + and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I + was born, and there both father and mother still live to + love me.... The only piece of any importance that I have + written since I came here is an Essay on Burns. + +This Essay,--modified at first, then let alone, by Jeffrey,--appeared in +the _Edinburgh_ in the autumn of 1828. We turn to Carlyle's journal +and find the entry, "Finished a paper on Burns at this Devil's Den," +elsewhere referred to as a "gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he +confesses, when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I have +really had enough." + + Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Romam. + +Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and in the town for +the moor. During the first twenty years of his London life, in what he +called "the Devil's oven," he is constantly clamouring to return to the +den. His wife, more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently +disliked it; little wonder, between sluttish maid-servants and owl-like +solitude: and she expressed her dislike in the pathetic verses, "To a +Swallow Building under our Eaves," sent to Jeffrey in 1832, and ending-- + + God speed thee, pretty bird; may thy small nest + With little ones all in good time be blest; + I love thee much + For well thou managest that life of thine, + While I! Oh, ask not what I do with mine, + Would I were such! + + _The Desert._ + +The monotony of the moorland life was relieved by visits of relations and +others made and repaid, an excursion to Edinburgh, a residence in London, +and the production of work, the best of which has a chance of living with +the language. One of the most interesting of the correspondences of this +period is a series of letters, addressed to an anonymous Edinburgh friend +who seems to have had some idea of abandoning his profession of the Law +for Literature, a course against which Carlyle strenuously protests. From +these letters, which have only appeared in the columns of the _Glasgow +Herald_, we may extract a few sentences:-- + + Don't disparage the work that gains your bread. What is all + work but a drudgery? no labour for the present joyous, but + grievous. A man who has nothing to admire except himself is + in the minimum state. The question is, Does a man really + love Truth, or only the market price of it? Even literary + men should have something else to do. Katnes was a lawyer, + Roscoe a merchant, Hans Sachs a cobbler, Burns a gauger, + etc. + +The following singular passage, the style of which suggests an imitation +of Sterne, is the acme of unconscious self-satire:-- + + You are infinitely unjust to Blockheads, as they are called. + Ask yourself seriously within your own heart--what right + have you to live wisely in God's world, and they not to live + a little less wisely? Is there a man more to be condoled + with, nay, I will say to be cherished and tenderly treated, + than a man that has no brain? My Purse is empty, it can be + filled again; the Jew Rothschild could fill it; or I can + even live with it very far from full. But, gracious heavens! + What is to be done with my _empty Head_? + +Three of the visits of this period are memorable. Two from the Jeffreys +(in 1828 and 1830) leave us with the same uncomfortable impression of +kindness ungrudgingly bestowed and grudgingly received. Jeffrey had a +double interest in the household at Craigenputtock--an almost brotherly +regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by the range of a keen +though limited appreciation, in the powers of the husband, to whom he +wrote: "Take care of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so +entirely to you," and with a half truth, "You have no mission upon earth, +whatever you may fancy, half so important as to be innocently happy." And +again: "Bring your blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek +shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the "banner with a +strange device," and was either deaf or indignant. The visits passed, +with satirical references from both host and hostess; for Mrs. Carlyle, +who could herself abundantly scoff and scold, would allow the liberty to +no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary of well-doing. Previous to +his promotion as Lord Advocate and consequent transference to London, +he tried to negotiate for Carlyle's appointment as his successor in the +editorship of the _Review,_ but failed to make him accept the necessary +conditions. The paper entitled _Signs of the Times_ was the last +production that he had to revise for his eccentric friend. Those +following on Taylor's _German Literature_ and the _Characteristics_ were +brought out in 1831 under the auspices of Macvey Napier. The other visit +was from the most illustrious of Carlyle's English-speaking friends, +in many respects a fellow-worker, yet "a spirit of another sort," and +destined, though a transcendental mystic, to be the most practical of his +benefactors. Twenty-four hours of Ralph Waldo Emerson (often referred to +in the course of a long and intimate correspondence) are spoken of by +Mrs. Carlyle as a visit from the clouds, brightening the prevailing gray. +He came to the remote inland home with "the pure intellectual gleam" of +which Hawthorne speaks, and "the quiet night of clear fine talk" remained +one of the memories which led Carlyle afterwards to say, "Perhaps our +happiest days were spent at the Craig." Goethe's letters, especially +that in which he acknowledges a lock of Mrs. Carlyle's hair, "eine +unvergleichliche schwarze Haar locke," were also among the gleams of +1829. The great German died three years later, after receiving the +birthday tribute, in his 82nd year, from English friends; and it is +pleasant to remember that in this instance the disciple was to the end +loyal to his master. To this period belong many other correspondences. "I +am scribble scribbling," he says in a letter of 1832, and mere scribbling +may fill many pages with few headaches; but Carlyle wrestled as he wrote, +and not a page of those marvellous _Miscellanies_ but is red with his +life's blood. Under all his reviewing, he was set on a work whose +fortunes were to be the strangest, whose result was, in some respects, +the widest of his efforts. The plan of _Sartor Resartus_ is far from +original. Swift's _Tale of a Tub_ distinctly anticipates the Clothes +Philosophy; there are besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs, +Jean Paul Richter, and other German authors: but in our days originality +is only possible in the handling; Carlyle has made an imaginary German +professor the mere mouthpiece of his own higher aspirations and those of +the Scotland of his day, and it remains the most popular as surely as +his _Friedrich_ is the greatest of his works. The author was abundantly +conscious of the value of the book, and super-abundantly angry at the +unconsciousness of the literary patrons of the time. In 1831 he resolved +if possible to go up to London to push the prospects of this first-born +male child. The _res angusta_ stood in the way. Jeffrey, after asking his +friend "what situation he could get him that he would detest the least," +pressed on him "in the coolest, lightest manner the use of his purse." +This Carlyle, to the extent of L50 as a loan (carefully returned), was +induced ultimately to accept. It has been said that "proud men never +wholly forgive those to whom they feel themselves obliged," but their +resenting benefits is the worst feature of their pride. Carlyle made +his second visit to London to seek types for _Sartor_, in vain. Always +preaching reticence with the sound of artillery, he vents in many pages +the rage of his chagrin at the "Arimaspian" publishers, who would not +print his book, and the public which, "dosed with froth," would not +buy it. The following is little softened by the chiaroscuro of +five-and-thirty years:-- + + Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and + August 1830, _Teufelsdroeckh_ was ready, and I decided + to make for London; night before going, how I remember it.... + The beggarly history of poor _Sartor_ among the + blockheadisms is not worth recording or remembering, least + of all here! In short, finding that I had got L100 (if + memory serve) for _Schiller_ six or seven years before, + and for _Sartor_, at least twice as good, I could not + only not get L200, but even get no Murray or the like to + publish it on half profits. Murray, a most stupendous + object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the evidently + strong wish to say "Yes" and "No,"--my first signal + experience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will + make it "No," then; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for + some two years from one terrified owl to another; published + at last experimentally in _Fraser_, and even then + mostly laughed at, nothing coming of the volume except what + was sent by Emerson from America. + +This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, on Jeffrey's +recommendation, to accept the book; but on finding that Carlyle had +carried the MS. to Longmans and another publisher, in hopes of a better +bargain, and that it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the +matter to his "reader," and the negotiation closed. _Sartor_ struggled +into half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already +contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published +with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a +nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to +justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in +general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense," +pronounced the _Sun_. "Stop that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of +_Fraser's_ constituents. "When is that stupid series of articles by the +crazy tailor going to end?" cried another. At this time Carlyle used +to say there were only two people who found anything in his book worth +reading--Emerson and a priest in Cork, who said to the editor that he +would take the magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of +_Sartor_. The volume was only published in 1838, by Saunders and Otley, +after the _French Revolution_ had further raised the writer's name, and +then on a guarantee from friends willing to take the risk of loss. +It does not appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some +slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in the +_Reminiscences: "I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends, +from not one of whom did I get the smallest whisper even of receipt--a +thing disappointing more or loss to human nature, and which has silently +and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book to +Edinburgh.... The plebs of literature might be divided in their verdicts +about me; though by count of heads I always suspect the guilty clear had +it; but the conscript fathers declined to vote at all." + +[Footnote: _Tempora mutantur_. A few months before Carlyle's death a cheap +edition of _Sartor_ was issued, and 30,000 copies were sold within a few +weeks.] + +In America _Sartor_ was pieced together from _Fraser_, published in +a volume introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by Emerson as "A +criticism of the spirit of the age in which we live; exhibiting in the +most just and novel light the present aspect of religion, politics, +literature, and social life." The editors add: "We believe no book has +been published for many years ... which discovers an equal mastery over +all the riches of the language. The author makes ample amends for the +occasional eccentricity of his genius not only by frequent bursts of pure +splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him." + +Americans are intolerant of honest criticism on themselves; but they are, +more than any other nation, open to appreciate vigorous expressions +of original views of life and ethics--all that we understand by +philosophy--and equally so to new forms of art. The leading critics of +the New England have often been the first and best testers of the fresh +products of the Old. A land of experiment in all directions, ranging from +Mount Lebanon to Oneida Creek, has been ready to welcome the suggestions, +physical or metaphysical, of startling enterprise. Ideas which filter +slowly through English soil and abide for generations, flash over the +electric atmosphere of the West. Hence Coleridge, Carlyle and Browning +were already accepted as prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen +were still examining their credentials. To this readiness, as of a +photographic plate, to receive, must be added the fact that the message +of _Sartor_ crossed the Atlantic when the hour to receive it had struck. +To its publication has been attributed the origin of a movement that was +almost simultaneously inaugurated by Emerson's _Harvard Discourse_. It +was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in +theory, and precedent in Art that gave birth to the Transcendentalism of +_The Dial_--a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a +place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous, +almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally +obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of +the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory +of his critic--to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable +of slightly erring men--with more than the force of a boomorang. A sheaf +of sharp sayings of the same date owe their sting to their half truth, +_e.g._ to a man who excused himself for profligate journalism on the +old plea, "I must live, sir." "No, sir, you need not live, if your body +cannot be kept together without selling your soul." Similarly he was +abusing the periodicals--"mud," "sand," and "dust magazines"--to which +he had contributed, _inter alia_, the great Essay on _Voltaire_ and the +consummate sketch of _Novalis_; with the second paper on _Richler_ to the +_Foreign Review_, the reviews of _History_ and of _Schiller_ to _Fraser_, +and that on _Goethe's Works_ to the _Foreign Quarterly_. During this +period he was introduced to Molesworth, Austin, and J.S. Mill. On his +summons, October 1st 1832, Mrs. Carlyle came up to Ampton Street, where +he then resided, to see him safe through the rest of his London time. +They lamented over the lapse of Irving, now lost in the delirium of +tongues, and made a league of friendship with Mill, whom he describes as +"a partial disciple of mine," a friendship that stood a hard test, but +was broken when the author of _Liberty_ naturally found it impossible to +remain a disciple of the writer of _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Mill, like +Napier, was at first staggered by the _Characteristics_, though he +afterwards said it was one of Carlyle's greatest works, and was +enthusiastic over the review of Boswell's _Johnson_, published in +_Fraser_ in the course of this year. Meanwhile Margaret, Carlyle's +favourite sister, had died, and his brightest, Jean, "the Craw," had +married her cousin, James Aitken. In memory of the former he wrote as a +master of threnody: to the bridegroom of the latter he addressed a letter +reminding him of the duties of a husband, "to do as he would be done by +to his wife"! In 1832 John, again by Jeffrey's aid, obtained a situation +at L300 a year as travelling physician to Lady Clare, and was enabled, +as he promptly did, to pay back his debts. Alexander seems to have been +still struggling with an imperfectly successful farm. In the same year, +when Carlyle was in London, his father died at Scotsbrig, after a +residence there of six years. His son saw him last in August 1831, when, +referring to his Craigenputtock solitude, he said: "Man, it's surely +a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of +Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak." + +The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic services, baking +bread, preserving eggs, and brightening grates till her eyes grew dim; he +to work at his _Diderot_, doing justice to a character more alien to his +own than even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, to +complete the essay; then at _Count Cagliostro_, also for _Fraser_, a link +between his last Craigenputtock and his first London toils. The period +is marked by shoals of letters, a last present from Weimar, a visit to +Edinburgh, and a candidature for a University Chair, which Carlyle +thought Jeffrey could have got for him; but the advocate did not, +probably could not, in this case satisfy his client. In excusing himself +he ventured to lecture the applicant on what he imagined to be the +impracticable temper and perverse eccentricity which had retarded and +might continue to retard his advancement. + +[Footnote: The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.] + +Carlyle, never tolerant of rebuke however just, was indignant, and though +an open quarrel was avoided by letters, on both sides, of courteous +compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and Jeffrey has a +niche in the _Reminiscences_ as a "little man who meant well but did not +see far or know much." Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the +_Diamond Necklace,_ which is a proem to the _French Revolution,_ but inly +growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any +promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his +own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr uebel: all dim, misty, squally, +disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather +than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede. +He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His _Sartor_ is indeed more +contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's +_Confessions,_ or the _Sorrows of Werther,_ or the first two cantos of +_Childe Harold:_ but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay +and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in +the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through +glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At +last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for _me_," and his brave wife +approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his ships and seek his +fortune sink or swim--in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the +initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to +London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in +Chelsea near the Thames. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +CHEYNE ROW + +[1834-1842] + +The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills, +and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds, +as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea, +dotted with brown-sailed ships and holiday boats in place of the +excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle +Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a +stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square." Turning up the row, we find over No. +24, formerly No. 5, the Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house +where the Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men, +lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his headquarters, +but he was a frequent wanderer. About half the time was occupied in trips +almost yearly to Scotland, one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France, +and two to Germany; besides, in the later days, constant visits to +admiring friends, more and more drawn from the higher ranks in English +society, the members of which learnt to appreciate his genius before he +found a hearing among the mass of the people. + +The whole period falls readily under four sections, marking as many phases +of the author's outer and inner life, while the same character is +preserved throughout:-- + +I. 1834-1842--When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the late success of +Carlyle's work relieved him from a long, sometimes severe, struggle with +narrow means. It is the period of the _French Revolution, The Lectures_, +and _Hero-Worship_, and of _Chartism_, the last work with a vestige of +adherence to the Radical creed. + +II. 1842-1853--When the death of his mother loosened his ties to the +North. This decade of his literary career is mainly signalised by the +writing and publication of the _Life and Letters of Cromwell_, of +Carlyle's political works, _Past and Present_ and the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_, and of the _Life of Sterling_, works which mark his now +consummated disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration of +adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed of Christendom." + +III. 1853-1866--When the laurels of his triumphant speech as Lord Rector +at Edinburgh were suddenly withered by the death of his wife. This period +is filled with the _History of Friedrick II._, and marked by a yet more +decidedly accentuated trust in autocracy. + +IV. 1866-1881.--Fifteen years of the setting of the sun. + +The Carlyles, coming to the metropolis in a spirit of rarely realised +audacity on a reserve fund of from L200 to L300 at most, could not +propose to establish themselves in any centre of fashion. In their +circumstances their choice of abode was on the whole a fortunate one. +Chelsea, + + Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite + Beyond it, + +was, even in those days of less constant communication, within measurable +distance of the centres of London life: it had then and still preserves a +host of interesting historic and literary traditions. Among the men who in +old times lived or met together in that outlying region of London, we have +memories of Sir Thomas More and of Erasmus, of the Essayists Addison and +Steele, and of Swift. Hard by is the tomb of Bolingbroke and the Square of +Sir Hans Sloane; Smollett lived for a time in Laurence Street; nearer our +own day, Turner resided in Cheyne Walk, later George Eliot, W.B. Scott, +Dante Rossetti, Swinburne for a season, and George Meredith. When Carlyle +came to settle there, Leigh Huntin Upper Cheyne Row, an almost next-door +neighbour, was among the first of a series of visitors; always welcome, +despite his "hugger-mugger" household and his borrowing tendencies, his +"unpractical messages" and "rose-coloured reform processes," as a bright +"singing bird, musical in flowing talk," abounding in often subtle +criticisms and constant good humour. To the Chelsea home, since the Mecca +of many pilgrims, there also flocked other old Ampton Street friends, +drawn thither by genuine regard, Mrs. Carlyle, by the testimony of Miss +Cushman and all competent judges, was a "_raconteur_ unparalleled." To +quote the same authority, "that wonderful woman, able to live in the full +light of Carlyle's genius without being overwhelmed by it," had a peculiar +skill in drawing out the most brilliant conversationalist of the age. +Burns and Wilson were his Scotch predecessors in an art of which the close +of our century--when every fresh thought is treasured to be printed and +paid for--knows little but the shadow. Of Carlyle, as of Johnson, it might +have been said, "There is no use arguing with him, for if his pistol +misses fire he knocks you down with the butt": both men would have +benefited by revolt from their dictation, but the power to contradict +either was overborne by a superior power to assert. Swift's occasional +insolence, in like manner, prevailed by reason of the colossal strength +that made him a Gulliver in Lilliput. Carlyle in earlier, as in later +times, would have been the better of meeting his mate, or of being +overmatched; but there was no Wellington found for this "grand Napoleon of +the realms" of prose. His reverence for men, if not for things, grew +weaker with the strengthening of his sway, a sway due to the fact that men +of extensive learning are rarely men of incisive force, and Carlyle--in +this respect more akin to Johnson than to Swift--had the acquired material +to serve as fuel for the inborn fire. Hence the least satisfactory of his +criticisms are those passed on his peers. Injustices of conversation +should be pardoned to an impulsive nature, even those of correspondence in +the case of a man who had a mania for pouring out his moods to all and +sundry; but where Carlyle has carefully recarved false estimates in cameo, +his memory must abide the consequence. Quite late in life, referring to +the Chelsea days, he says, "The best of those who then flocked about us +was Leigh Hunt," who never seriously said him nay; "and the worst Lamb," +who was not among the worshippers. No one now doubts that Carlyle's best +adviser and most candid critic might have been John Stuart Mill, for whom +he long felt as much regard as it was possible for him to entertain +towards a proximate equal. The following is characteristic: "He had taken +a great attachment to me (which lasted about ten years and then suddenly +ended, I never knew how), an altogether clear, logical, honest, amicable, +affectionate young man, and respected as such here, though sometimes felt +to be rather colourless, even aqueous, no religion in any form traceable +in him." And similarly of his friend, Mrs. Taylor, "She was a will-o'-the- +wispish iridescence of a creature; meaning nothing bad either"; and again +of Mill himself, "His talk is sawdustish, like ale when there is no wine +to be had." Such criticisms, some ungrateful, others unjust, may be +relieved by reference to the close of two friendships to which (though +even these were clouded by a touch of personal jealousy) he was faithful +in the main; for the references of both husband and wife to Irving's +"delirations" are the tears due to the sufferings of errant minds. Their +last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days was in October 1834, when +he came on horseback to the door of their new home, and left with the +benediction to his lost Jane, "You have made a little Paradise around +you." He died in Glasgow in December of the same year, and his memory is +pathetically embalmed in Carlyle's threnody. The final phases of another +old relationship were in some degree similar. During the first years of +their settlement, Lord Jeffrey frequently called at Cheyne Row, and sent +kind letters to his cousin, received by her husband with the growl, "I am +at work stern and grim, not to be interrupted by Jeffrey's theoretic +flourish of epistolary trumpeting." Carlyle, however, paid more than one +visit to Craigcrook, seeing his host for the last time in the autumn of +1849, "worn in body and thin in mind," "grown lunar now and not solar any +more." Three months later he heard of the death of this benefactor of his +youth, and wrote the memorial which finds its place in the second volume +of the _Reminiscences_. + +[Footnote: Cf. Byron's account of the same household at Pisa. Carlyle +deals very leniently with the malignant volume on Byron which amply +justified the epigram of Moore. But he afterwards spoke more slightly of +his little satellite, attributing the faint praise, in the _Examiner_, of +the second course of lectures to Hunt's jealousy of a friend now +"beginning to be somebody."] + +The work "stern and grim" was the _French Revolution_, the production +of which is the dominant theme of the first chapter of Carlyle's London +life. Mr. Froude, in the course of an estimate of this work which leaves +little room for other criticism, dwells on the fact that it was written +for a purpose, _i.e._ to show that rulers, like those of the French +in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the pleasures and +oblivious of the duties of life, must end by being "burnt up." This, +doubtless, is one of the morals of the _French Revolution_--the other +being that anarchy ends in despotism--and unquestionably a writer who +never ceased to be a preacher must have had it in his mind. But Carlyle's +peculiarity is that he combined the functions of a prophet and of an +artist, and that while now the one, now the other, was foremost, he never +wholly forgot the one in the other. In this instance he found a theme +well fit for both, and threw his heart into it, though under much +discouragement. Despite the Essays, into each of which he had put work +enough for a volume, the Reviews were shy of him; while his _Sartor_ had, +on this side of the Atlantic, been received mainly with jeers. Carlyle, +never unconscious of his prerogative and apostolic primogeniture, felt +like an aspirant who had performed his vigils, and finding himself still +ignored, became a knight of the rueful countenance. Thoroughly equipped, +adept enough in ancient tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German +and a fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from +Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "tragically hard," +exclaiming, "I could learn to do all things I have seen done, and am +forbidden to try any of them." The efforts to keep the wolf from his own +doors were harder than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed in +London with his L200 reserve, he could easily have made way in the +usual ruts; but he would have none of them, and refused to accept the +employment which is the most open, as it is the most lucrative, to +literary aspirants. To nine out of ten the "profession of literature" +means Journalism; while Journalism often means dishonesty, always +conformity. Carlyle was, in a sense deeper than that of the sects, +essentially a nonconformist; he not only disdained to write a word he +did not believe, he would not suppress a word he did believe--a rule +of action fatal to swift success. During these years there began an +acquaintance, soon ripening into intimacy, the memories of which are +enshrined in one of the most beautiful of biographies. Carlyle's relation +to John Sterling drew out the sort of affection which best suited +him--the love of a master for a pupil, of superior for inferior, of the +benefactor for the benefited; and consequently there is no line in the +record of it that jars. Sterling once tried to benefit his friend, and +perhaps fortunately failed. He introduced Carlyle to his father, then the +chief writer in the _Times_, and the Editor invited the struggling author +to contribute to its columns, but, according to Mr. Froude, "on the +implied conditions ... when a man enlists in the army, his soul as well +as his body belong to his commanding officer." Carlyle talked, all his +life, about what his greatest disciple calls "The Lamp of Obedience"; but +he himself would obey no one, and found it hard to be civil to those who +did not see with his eyes. Ho rejected--we trust in polite terms--the +offer of "the Thunderer." "In other respects also," says our main +authority, "he was impracticable, unmalleable, and as independent and +wilful as if he were the heir to a peerage. He had created no 'public' of +his own; the public which existed could not understand his writings +and would not buy them; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more +neglected than he had been in Scotland." Welcome to a limited range of +literary society, he astonished and amused by his vehement eloquence, +but when crossed he was not only "sarcastic" but rude, and speaking of +people, as he wrote of them, with various shades of contempt, naturally +gave frequent offence. Those whose toes are trodden on, not by accident, +justifiably retaliate. "Are you looking for your t-t-turban?" Charles +Lamb is reported to have said in some entertainer's lobby after listening +for an evening to Carlyle's invectives, and the phrase may have rankled +in his mind. Living in a glass case, while throwing stones about, +super-sensitive to criticism though professing to despise critics, he +made at least as many enemies as friends, and by his own confession +became an Ishmaelite. In view of the reception of _Sartor_, we do not +wonder to find him writing in 1833-- + + It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the + craft of literature, and yet I know no fault I have + committed.... I am tempted to go to America.... I shall quit + literature, it does not invite me. Providence warns me to + have done with it. I have failed in the Divine Infernal + Universe; + +or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world +like Teufelsdroeckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet +all the time, with incomparable naivete, he was asserting:-- + + The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my + feeling of natural superiority to them.... The literary + world here is a thing which I have no other course left me + but to defy.... I can reverence no existing man. With health + and peace for one year, I could write a better book than + there has been in this country for generations. + +All through his journal and his correspondence there is a perpetual +alternation of despair and confidence, always closing with the refrain, +"Working, trying is the only remover of doubt," and wise counsels often +echoed from Goethe, "Accomplish as well as you can the task on hand, and +the next step will become clear;" on the other hand--A man must not only +be able to work but to give over working.... If a man wait till he has +entirely brushed off his imperfections, he will spin for ever on his +axis, advancing no whither.... The _French Revolution_ stands pretty +fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to +splash down what I know in large masses of colours, that it may look like +a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance. + +The progress of this work was retarded by the calamity familiar to every +reader, but it must be referred to as throwing one of the finest lights +on Carlyle's character. His closest intellectual link with J.S. Mill was +their common interest in French politics and literature; the latter, +himself meditating a history of the Revolution, not only surrendered in +favour of the man whose superior pictorial genius he recognised, but +supplied him freely with the books he had accumulated for the enterprise. +His interest in the work was unfortunately so great as to induce him to +borrow the MS. of the first volume, completed in the early spring of +1835, and his business habits so defective as to permit him to lend it +without authority; so that, as appears, it was left lying about by Mrs. +Taylor and mistaken by her servant for waste paper: certainly it was +destroyed; and Mill came to Cheyne Row to announce the fact in such a +desperate state of mind that Carlyle's first anxiety seems to have been +to console his friend. According to Mrs. Carlyle, as reported by Froude, +"the first words her husband uttered as the door closed were, 'Well, +Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him +how very serious this business is to us.'" This trait of magnanimity under +the first blow of a disaster which seemed to cancel the work of years +should be set against his nearly contemporaneous criticisms of Coleridge, +Lamb, Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Macaulay, etc. + +[Footnote: Carlyle had only been writing the volume for five months; but +he was preparing for it during much of his life at Craigenputtock.] + +Mill sent a cheque of L200 as "the slightest external compensation" for +the loss, and only, by urgent entreaty, procured the acceptance of half +the sum. Carlyle here, as in every real emergency, bracing his resolve +by courageous words, as "never tine heart or get provoked heart," set +himself to re-write the volume with an energy that recalls that of Scott +rebuilding his ruined estate; but the work was at first so "wretched" +that it had to be laid aside for a season, during which the author +wisely took a restorative bath of comparatively commonplace novels. The +re-writing of the first volume was completed in September 1835; the whole +book in January 1837. The mood in which it was written throws a light on +the excellences as on the defects of the history. The _Reminiscences_ +again record the gloom and defiance of "Thomas the Doubter" walking +through the London streets "with a feeling similar to Satan's stepping +the burning marl," and scowling at the equipages about Hyde Park Corner, +sternly thinking, "Yes, and perhaps none of you could do what I am at. I +shall finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and +withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." In an adjacent page he reports +himself as having said to his wife-- + + What they will do with this book none knows, my lass; but + they have not had for two hundred years any book that came + more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample + it under foot and hoof as they see best.... "They cannot + trample that," she would cheerily answer. + +This passage points at once to the secret of the writer's spell and to +the limits of his lasting power. His works were written seldom with +perfect fairness, never with the dry light required for a clear +presentation of the truth; they have all "an infusion from the will and +the affections"; but they were all written with a whole sincerity and +utter fervour; they rose from his hot heart, and rushed through the air +"like rockets druv' by their own burnin'." Consequently his readers +confess that he has never forgot the Horatian maxim-- + + Si vis me flere, dolendum est + Primum ipsi tibi. + +About this time Carlyle writes, "My friends think I have found the art of +living upon nothing," and there must, despite Mill's contribution, have +been "bitter thrift" in Cheyne REow during the years 1835-1837. He +struggled through the unremunerative interval of waiting for the sale +of a great work by help of fees derived from his essay on the _Diamond +Necklace_ (which, after being refused by the _Foreign Quarterly,_ +appeared in _Fraser,_ 1837), that on _Mirabeau_ in the _Westminster,_ +and in the following year, for the same periodical, the article on _Sir +Walter Scott._ To the last work, undertaken against the grain, he refers +in one of the renewed wails of the year: "O that literature had never +been devised. I am scourged back to it by the whip of necessity." The +circumstance may account for some of the manifest defects of one of the +least satisfactory of Carlyle's longer' reviews. Frequent references in +previous letters show that he never appreciated Scott, to whom he refers +as a mere Restaurateur. + +Meanwhile the appearance of the _French Revolution_ had brought the +name of its author, then in his forty-third year, for the first time +prominently before the public. It attracted the attention of Thackeray, +who wrote a generous review in the _Times,_ of Southey, Jeffrey, +Macaulay, Hallam, and Brougham, who recognised the advent of an equal, if +sometimes an adverse power in the world of letters. But, though the book +established his reputation, the sale was slow, and for some years the +only substantial profits, amounting to about L400, came from America, +through the indefatigable activity and good management of Emerson. It +is pleasant to note a passage in the interesting volumes of their +_Correspondence_ which shows that in this instance the benefited +understood his financial relation to the benefactor: "A reflection I +cannot but make is that, at bottom, this money was all yours; not a penny +of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful friend-ship.... I +could not examine it (the account) without a kind of crime." Others +who, at this period, made efforts to assist "the polar Bear" were less +fortunate. In several instances good intentions paved the palace of +Momus, and in one led a well-meaning man into a notoriously false +position. Mr. Basil Montagu being in want of a private secretary offered +the post to his former guest, as a temporary makeshift, at a salary of +L200, and so brought upon his memory a torrent of contempt. Undeterred by +this and similar warnings, the indefatigable philanthropist, Miss Harriet +Martineau, who at first conciliated the Carlyles by her affection for +"this side of the street," and was afterwards an object of their joint +ridicule, conceived the idea of organising a course of lectures to an +audience collected by canvass to hoar the strange being from the moors +talk for an hour on end about literature, morals, and history. He was +then an object of curiosity to those who knew anything about him at all, +and lecturing was at that time a lucrative and an honourable employment. +The "good Harriet," so called by Cheyne Row in its condescending mood, +aided by other kind friends of the Sterling and Mill circles--the former +including Frederick Denison Maurice--made so great a success of the +enterprise that it was thrice repeated. The _first_ course of six +lectures on "German Literature," May 1837, delivered in Willis's Rooms, +realised L135; the _second_ of twelve, on the "History of European +Literature," at 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, had a net result of +L300; the _third,_ in the same rooms, on "Revolutions," brought L200; the +_fourth,_ on "Heroes," the same. In closing this course Carlyle appeared +for the last time on a public platform until 1866, when he delivered +his Inaugural Address as Lord Rector to the students of Edinburgh. The +impression he produced on his unusually select audiences was that of a +man of genius, but roughly clad. The more superficial auditors had a +new sensation, those who came to stare remained to wonder; the more +reflective felt that they had learnt something of value. Carlyle had +no inconsiderable share of the oratorical power which he latterly so +derided; he was able to speak from a few notes; but there were comments +more or less severe on his manner and style. J. Grant, in his _Portraits +of Public Characters,_ says: "At times he distorts his features as if +suddenly seized by some paroxysm of pain ... he makes mouths; he has a +harsh accent and graceless gesticulation." Leigh Hunt, in the _Examiner,_ +remarks on the lecturer's power of extemporising; but adds that he often +touches only the mountain-tops of the subject, and that the impression +left was as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalised by +German philosophy. Bunsen, present at one of the lectures, speaks of +the striking and rugged thoughts thrown at people's heads; and Margaret +Fuller, afterwards Countess Ossoli, referred to his arrogance redeemed +by "the grandeur of a Siegfried melting down masses of iron into sunset +red." Carlyle's own comments are for the most part slighting. He refers +to his lectures as a mixture of prophecy and play-acting, and says that +when about to open his course on "Heroes" he felt like a man going to be +hanged. To Emerson, April 17th 1839, he writes :-- + + My lectures come on this day two weeks. O heaven! I cannot + "speak"; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a + spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by + want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then--! + Shall it be Switzerland? shall it be Scotland? nay, shall it + be America and Concord? + +Emerson had written about a Boston publication of the _Miscellanies_ +(first there collected), and was continually urging his friend to +emigrate and speak to more appreciative audiences in the States; but +the London lectures, which had, with the remittances from over sea, +practically saved Carlyle from ruin or from exile, had made him decide +"to turn his back to the treacherous Syren"--the temptation to sink into +oratory. Mr. Froude's explanation and defence of this decision may be +clenched by a reference to the warning his master had received. He had +announced himself as a preacher and a prophet, and been taken at his +word; but similarly had Edward Irving, who for a season of sun or glamour +gathered around him the same crowd and glitter: the end came; twilight +and clouds of night. Fashion had flocked to the sermons of the elder +Annandale youth--as to the recitatives of the younger--to see a wild man +of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on" +to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with +"unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed +his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause, +madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with +the fixed resolve, "De me fabula non narrabitur," he shut the book on +this phase of his life. + +The lectures on "Hero-Worship" (a phrase taken from Hume) were published +in 1841, and met with considerable success, the name of the writer having +then begun to run "like wildfire through London." At the close of the +previous year he had published his long pamphlet on _Chartism_, it having +proved unsuitable for its original destination as an article in the +_Quarterly_. Here first he clearly enunciates, "Might is right"--one +of the few strings on which, with all the variations of a political +Paganini, he played through life. This tract is on the border line +between the old modified Radicalism of _Sartor_ and the less modified +Conservatism of his later years. In 1840 Carlyle still speaks of himself +as a man foiled; but at the close of that year all fear of penury was +over, and in the following he was able to refuse a Chair of History at +Edinburgh, as later another at St. Andrews. Meanwhile his practical +power and genuine zeal for the diffusion of knowledge appeared in his +foundation of the London Library, which brought him into more or less +close contact with Tennyson, Milman, Forster, Helps, Spedding, Gladstone, +and other leaders of the thought and action of the time. + +There is little in Carlyle's life at any time that can be called +eventful. From first to last it was that of a retired scholar, a thinker +demanding sympathy while craving after solitude, and the frequent +inconsistency of the two requirements was the source of much of his +unhappiness. Our authorities for all that we do not see in his +published works are found in his voluminous correspondence, copious +autobiographical jottings, and the three volumes of his wife's letters +and journal dating from the commencement of the struggle for recognition +in London, and extending to the year of her death. Criticism of these +remarkable documents, the theme of so much controversy, belongs rather +to a life of Mrs. Carlyle; but a few salient facts may here be noted. It +appears on the surface that husband and wife had in common several +marked peculiarities; on the intellectual side they had not only an +extraordinary amount but the same kind of ability, superhumanly keen +insight, and wonderful power of expression, both with tongue and pen; the +same intensity of feeling, thoroughness, and courage to look the ugliest +truths full in the face; in both, these high qualities were marred by a +tendency to attribute the worst motives to almost every one. Their joint +contempt for all whom they called "fools," _i.e._ the immense majority of +mankind, was a serious drawback to the pleasure of their company. It is +indeed obvious that, whether or not it be correct to say that "his nature +was the soft one, her's the hard," Mrs. Carlyle was the severer cynic of +the two. Much of her writing confirms the impression of those who have +heard her talk that no one, not even her husband, was safe from the +shafts of her ridicule. Her pride in his genius knew no bounds, and it is +improbable that she would have tolerated from any outsider a breath of +adverse criticism; but she herself claimed many liberties she would not +grant. She was clannish as Carlyle himself, yet even her relations +are occasionally made to appear ridiculous. There was nothing in her +affections, save her memory of her own father, corresponding to his +devotion to his whole family. With equal penetration and greater scorn, +she had no share of his underlying reverence. Such limited union as was +granted to her married life had only soured the mocking-bird spirit +of the child that derided her grandfather's accent on occasion of his +bringing her back from a drive by another route to "varry the shane." + +Carlyle's constant wailings take from him any claim to such powers of +endurance as might justify his later attacks on Byron. But neither +had his wife any real reticence. Whenever there were domestic +troubles--flitting, repairing, building, etc., on every occasion of +clamour or worry, he, with scarce pardonable oblivion of physical +delicacy greater than his own, went off, generally to visit distinguished +friends, and left behind him the burden and the heat of the day. She +performed her unpleasant work and all associated duties with a practical +genius that he complimented as "triumphant." She performed them, +ungrudgingly perhaps, but never without complaint; her invariable +practice was to endure and tell. "Quelle vie," she writes in 1837 to John +Sterling, whom she seems to have really liked, "let no woman who values +peace of soul ever marry an author"; and again to the same in 1839, +"Carlyle had to sit on a jury two days, to the ruin of his whole being, +physical, moral, and intellectual," but "one gets to feel a sort of +indifference to his growling." Conspicuous exceptions, as in the case of +the Shelleys, the Dobells, and the Brownings, have been seen, within +or almost within our memories, but as a rule it is a risk for two +supersensitive and nervous people to live together: when they are +sensitive in opposite ways the alliance is fatal; fortunately the +Carlyles were, in this respect, in the main sympathetic. With most of the +household troubles which occupy so exaggerated a space in the letters and +journals of both--papering, plastering, painting, deceitful or disorderly +domestics--general readers have so little concern that they have reason +to resent the number of pages wasted in printing them; but there was one +common grievance of wider and more urgent interest, to which we must here +again finally refer, premising that it affected not one period but the +whole of their lives, _i.e._ their constant, only half-effectual struggle +with the modern Hydra-headed Monster, the reckless and needless Noises +produced or permitted, sometimes increased rather than suppressed, by +modern civilisation. Mrs. Carlyle suffered almost as much as her husband +from these murderers of sleep and assassins of repose; on her mainly fell +the task of contending with the cochin-chinas, whose senseless shrieks +went "through her like a sword," of abating a "Der Freischuetz of cats," +or a pandemonium of barrel organs, of suppressing macaws for which +Carryle "could neither think nor live"; now mitigating the scales on a +piano, now conjuring away, by threat or bribe, from their neighbours +a shoal of "demon fowls"; lastly of superintending the troops of +bricklayers, joiners, iron-hammerers employed with partial success to +convert the top story of 5 Cheyne Row into a sound-proof room. Her +hard-won victories in this field must have agreeably added to the sense +of personality to which she resolutely clung. Her assertion, "Instead +of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle +round every individuality," is the essence of much of her mate's +philosophy; but, in the following to Sterling, she somewhat bitterly +protests against her own absorption: "In spite of the honestest efforts +to annihilate my I---ity or merge it in what the world doubtless +considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting, and, +alas, self-seeking me." + +The ever-restive consciousness of being submerged is one of the dominant +notes of her journal, the other is the sense of being even within the +circle unrecognised. "C. is a domestic wandering Jew.... When he is at +work I hardly ever see his face from breakfast to dinner."... "Poor +little wretch that I am, ... I feel as if I were already half-buried ... +in some intermediate state between the living and the dead.... Oh, so +lonely." These are among the _suspiria de profundis_ of a life which her +husband compared to "a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother, +whom he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming:--"Solitude, +indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad like Bedlam; absence +of delirium is possible only for me in solitude"; a sentiment almost +literally acted on. In his offering of penitential cypress, referring to +his wife's delight in the ultimate success of his work, he says, "She +flickered round me like a perpetual radiance." But during their joint +lives their numerous visits and journeys were made at separate times or +apart. They crossed continually on the roads up and down, but when +absent wrote to one another often the most affectionate letters. Their +attraction increased, contrary to Newton's law, in the _direct_ ratio of +the square of the distance, and when it was stretched beyond the stars +the long-latent love of the survivor became a worship. + +Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his +bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration +for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him +unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic +differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have +practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in +comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond +was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first +great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many +callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne +Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, +in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant +friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) +had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with +so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in +her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was +accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to +having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed +on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to +interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her +mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too +characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. +Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger +than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of +candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with +an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother +resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which +prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will +that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round +which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has +recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many +graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane +down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They +parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, +perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but +bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet +waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 +news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried +north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; +when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her +mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle +came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that +the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as +executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, +devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of +pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in +the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading +them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of +the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, +with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again +revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said +of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the +Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place +opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness +of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. +Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath +that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry +scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies +completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the +Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. + +The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife +more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once +Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been +glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the +restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was +constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land +to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed +better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdroeckh wanderings +abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A +letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- + +Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his +bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration +for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him +unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic +differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have +practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in +comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond +was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first +great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many +callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne +Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, +in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant +friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) +had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with +so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in +her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was +accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to +having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed +on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to +interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her +mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too +characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. +Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger +than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of +candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with +an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother +resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which +prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will +that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round +which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has +recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many +graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane +down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They +parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, +perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but +bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet +waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 +news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried +north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; +when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her +mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle +came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that +the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as +executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, +devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of +pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in +the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading +them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of +the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, +with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again +revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said +of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the +Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place +opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness +of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. +Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath +that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry +scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies +completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the +Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. + +The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife +more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once +Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been +glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the +restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was +constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land +to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed +better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdroeckh wanderings +abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A +letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- + + This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont: and as for + my particular case uses me not worse but better than of old. + Nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for + me.... The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge + roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of + nerves as mine. + + The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the + streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to + be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressingly + as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be _buried_ at + least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub ... + if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I + will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge. + +The competence had come, the death of Mrs. Welsh leaving to his wife and +himself practically from L200 to L300 a year: why not finally return to +the home of their early restful secluded life, "in reducta, valle," with +no noise around it but the trickle of rills and the nibbling of sheep? +Craigenputtock was now their own, and within its "four walls" they would +begin a calmer life. Fortunately Mrs. Carlyle, whose shrewd practical +instinct was never at fault, saw through the fallacy, and set herself +resolutely against the scheme. Scotland had lost much of its charm for +her--a year later she refused an invitation from Mrs. Aitken, saying, "I +could do nothing at Scotsbrig or Dumfries but cry from morning to night." +She herself had enough of the Hill of the Hawks, and she know that within +a year Carlyle would again be calling it the Devil's Den and lamenting +Cheyne Row. He gave way with the protest, "I cannot deliberately mean +anything that is harmful to you," and certainly it was well for him. + +There is no record of an original writer or artist coming from the +north of our island to make his mark in the south, succeeding, and then +retracing his steps. Had Carlyle done so, he would probably have passed +from the growing recognition of a society he was beginning to find on the +whole congenial, to the solitude of intellectual ostracism. Scotland may +be breezy, but it is not conspicuously free. Erratic opinions when duly +veiled are generally allowed; but this concession is of little worth. On +the tolerance of those who have no strong belief in anything, Carlyle, +thinking possibly of rose-water Hunt and the litterateurs of his tribe, +expressed himself with incisive and memorable truth: "It is but doubt +and indifference. _Touch the thing they do believe and value, their own +self-conceit: they are rattlesnakes then_." + +[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] + +Tolerance for the frank expression of views which clash with the sincere +or professed faith of the majority is rare everywhere; in Scotland +rarest. English Churchmen, high and broad, were content to condone the +grim Calvinism still infiltrating Carlyle's thoughts, and to smile, at +worst, at his idolatry of the iconoclast who said, "the idolater shall +die the death." But the reproach of "Pantheism" was for long fatal to his +reception across the Tweed. + +Towards the close of this period he acknowledged that London was "among +improper places" the best for "writing books," after all the one use of +living "for him;" its inhabitants "greatly the best" he "had ever walked +with," and its aristocracy--the Marshalls, Stanleys, Hollands, Russells, +Ashburtons, Lansdownes, who held by him through life--its "choicest +specimens." Other friendships equally valued he made among the leading +authors of the age. Tennyson sought his company, and Connop Thirlwall. +Arnold of Rugby wrote in commendation of the _French Revolution_ and +hailed _Chartism._ Thackeray admired him and reviewed him well. In +Macaulay, condemned to limbo under the suspicion of having reviewed him +ill, he found, when the suspicion was proved unjust, a promise of +better things. As early as 1839 Sterling had written an article in the +_Westminster,_ which gave him intense pleasure; for while contemning +praise in almost the same words as Byron did, he loved it equally well. +In 1840 he had crossed the Rubicon that lies between aspiration and +attainment. The populace might be blind or dumb, the "rattlesnakes"--the +"irresponsible indolent reviewers," who from behind a hedge pelt every +wrestler till they found societies for the victor--might still obscurely +hiss; but Carlyle was at length safe by the verdict of the "Conscript +Fathers." + +[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] + + + + +CHAPTER V + +CHEYNE ROW + +[1842-1853] + +The bold venture of coming to London with a lean purse, few friends, +and little fame had succeeded: but it had been a terrible risk, and the +struggle had left scars behind it. To this period of his life we may +apply Carlyle's words,--made use of by himself at a later date,--"The +battle was over and we were sore wounded." It is as a maimed knight +of modern chivalry, who sounded the _reveil_ for an onslaught on the +citadels of sham, rather than as a prophet of the future that his name is +likely to endure in the history of English thought. He has also a place +with Scott amongst the recreators of bygone ages, but he regarded their +annals less as pictures than as lesson-books. His aim was that expressed +by Tennyson to "steal fire from fountains of the past," but his design +was to admonish rather than "to glorify the present." This is the avowed +object of the second of his distinctly political works, which following +on the track of the first, _Charlism_, and written in a similar spirit, +takes higher artistic rank. _Past and Present_, suggested by a visit to +the poorhouse of St. Ives and by reading the chronicle of _Jocelin de +Brakelond_, was undertaken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a +greater work,--the duty he felt laid upon him to say some thing that +should bear directly on the welfare of the people, especially of the poor +around him. It was an impulse similar to that which inspired _Oliver +Twist_, but Carlyle's remedies were widely different from those of +Dickens. Not merely more kindness and sympathy, but paternal government, +supplying work to the idle inmates of the workhouse, and insisting, by +force if need be, on it being done, was his panacea. It had been Abbot +Samson's way in his strong government of the Monastery of St. Edmunds, +and he resolved, half in parable, half in plain sermon, to recommend it +to the Ministers Peel and Russell. + +In this mood, the book was written off in the first seven weeks of +1843, a _tour de force_ comparable to Johnson's writing of _Rasselas_. +Published in April, it at once made a mark by the opposition as well as +by the approval it excited. Criticism of the work--of its excellences, +which are acknowledged, and its defects as manifold--belongs to a review +of the author's political philosophy: it is enough here to note that it +was remarkable in three ways. _First_, the object of its main attack, +_laissez faire_, being a definite one, it was capable of having and had +some practical effect. Mr. Froude exaggerates when he says that Carlyle +killed the pseudo-science of orthodox political economy; for the +fundamental truths in the works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, and Mill +cannot be killed: but he pointed out that, like Aristotle's leaden rule, +the laws of supply and demand must be made to bend; as Mathematics made +mechanical must allow for friction, so must Economics leave us a little +room for charity. There is ground to believe that the famous Factory Acts +owed some of their suggestions to _Past and Present_. Carlyle always +speaks respectfully of the future Lord Shaftesbury. "I heard Milnes +saying," notes the Lady Sneerwell of real life, "at the Shuttleworths +that Lord Ashley was the greatest man alive: he was the only man that +Carlyle praised in his book. I daresay he knew I was overhearing him." +But, while supplying arguments and a stimulus to philanthropists, his +protests against philanthropy as an adequate solution of the problem of +human misery became more pronounced. About the date of the conception of +this book we find in the Journal:-- + + Again and again of late I ask myself in whispers, is it the + duty of a citizen to paint mere heroisms? ... Live to make + others happy! Yes, surely, at all times, so far as you can. + But at bottom that is not the aim of my life ... it is mere + hypocrisy to call it such, as is continually done + nowadays.... Avoid cant. Do not think that your life means + a mere searching in gutters for fallen figures to wipe and + set up. + +_Past and Present_, in the _second_ place, is notable as the only +considerable consecutive book--unless we also except the _Life of +Sterling_,--which the author wrote without the accompaniment of +wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts. _Thirdly_, though marking a stage +in his mental progress, the fusion of the refrains of _Chartism_ and +_Hero-Worship_, and his first clear breach with Mazzini and with Mill, +the book was written as an interlude, when he was in severe travail with +his greatest contribution to English history. The last rebuff which +Carlyle encountered came, by curious accident, from the _Westminster_, to +which Mill had engaged him to contribute an article on "Oliver Cromwell." +While this was in preparation, Mill had to leave the country on account +of his health, and gave the review in charge to an Aberdonian called +Robertson, who wrote to stop the progress of the essay with the message +that _he_ had decided to undertake the subject himself. Carlyle was +angry; but, instead of sullenly throwing the MS. aside, he set about +constructing on its basis a History of the Civil War. + +Numerous visits and tours during the following three years, though +bringing him into contact with new and interesting personalities, were +mainly determined by the resolve to make himself acquainted with the +localities of the war; and his knowledge of them has contributed to give +colour and reality to the finest battle-pieces in modern English prose. +In 1842 with Dr. Arnold he drove from Rugby fifteen miles to Naseby, and +the same year, after a brief yachting trip to Belgium--in the notes on +which the old Flemish towns stand out as clearly as in Longfellow's +verse--he made his pilgrimage to St. Ives and Ely Cathedral, where Oliver +two centuries before had called out to the recalcitrant Anglican in the +pulpit, "Cease your fooling and come down." In July 1843 Carlyle made a +trip to South Wales; to visit first a worthy devotee called Redwood, and +then Bishop Thirlwall near Carmarthen. "A right solid simple-hearted +robust man, very strangely swathed," is the visitor's meagre estimate of +one of our most classic historians. + +On his way back he carefully reconnoitred the field of Worcester. Passing +his wife at Liverpool, where she was a guest of her uncle, and leaving +her to return to London and brush up Cheyne Row, he walked over Snowdon +from Llanheris to Beddgelert with his brother John. He next proceeded +to Scotsbrig, then north to Edinburgh, and then to Dunbar, which he +contrived to visit on the 3rd of September, an anniversary revived in his +pictured page with a glow and force to match which we have to revert +to Bacon's account of the sea-fight of the _Revenge_. From Dunbar he +returned to Edinburgh, spent some time with his always admired and +admiring friend Erskine of Linlathen, a Scotch broad churchman of the +type of F.D. Maurice and Macleod Campbell, and then went home to set in +earnest to the actual writing of his work. He had decided to abandon +the design of a History, and to make his book a Biography of Cromwell, +interlacing with it the main features and events of the Commonwealth. The +difficulties even of this reduced plan were still immense, and his groans +at every stage in its progress were "louder and more loud," _e.g._ "My +progress in _Cromwell_ is frightful." "A thousand times I regretted that +this task was ever taken up." "The most impossible book of all I ever +before tried," and at the close, "_Cromwell_ I must have written in 1844, +but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to +me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling, +and misery I used to count it had cost me." The book issued in 1845 soon +went through three editions, and brought the author to the front as the +most original historian of his time. Macaulay was his rival, but in +different paths of the same field. About this time Mr. Froude became his +pupil, and has left an interesting account (iii. 290-300) of his master's +influence over the Oxford of those days, which would be only spoilt +by selections. Oxford, like Athens, ever longing after something new, +patronised the Chelsea prophet, and then calmed down to her wonted +cynicism. But Froude and Ruskin were, as far as compatible with the +strong personality of each, always loyal; and the capacity inborn in +both, the power to breathe life into dry records and dead stones, had at +least an added impulse from their master. + +The year 1844 is marked by the publication in the _Foreign Quarterly_ of +the essay on _Dr. Francia,_ and by the death of John Sterling,--loved +with the love of David for Jonathan--outside his own family losses, the +greatest wrench in Carlyle's life. Sterling's published writings are as +inadequate to his reputation as the fragmentary remains of Arthur Hallam; +but in friendships, especially unequal friendships, personal fascination +counts for more than half, and all are agreed as to the charm in both +instances of the inspiring companionships. Archdeacon Hare having given a +somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergyman, Carlyle three +years later, in 1851, published his own impressions of his friend as +a thinker, sane philanthropist, and devotee of truth, in a work that, +written in a three months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though +faltering, as prose after verse, with _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, and +Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_. + +These years are marked by a series of acts of unobtrusive benevolence, +the memory of which has been in some cases accidentally rescued from the +oblivion to which the benefactor was willing to have them consigned. +Carlyle never boasted of doing a kindness. He was, like Wordsworth, +frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as generous in giving as he +was ungenerous in judging. His assistance to Thomas Cooper, author of the +_Purgatory of Suicides_, his time spent in answering letters of "anxious +enquirers,"--letters that nine out of ten busy men would have flung into +the waste-paper basket,--his interest in such works as Samuel Bamford's +_Life of a Radical_, and admirable advice to the writer; his instructions +to a young student on the choice of books, and well-timed warning to +another against the profession of literature, are sun-rifts in the storm, +that show "a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The same +epoch, however,--that of the start of the great writer's almost +uninterrupted triumph--brings us in face of an episode singularly delicate +and difficult to deal with, but impossible to evade. + +[Footnote: These letters to Bamford, showing a keen interest in the +working men of whom his correspondent had written, point to the ideal of a +sort of Tory Democracy. Carlyle writes: "We want more knowledge about the +Lancashire operatives; their miseries and gains, virtues and vices. Winnow +what you have to say, and give us wheat free from chaff. Then the rich +captains of workers will he willing to listen to you. Brevity and +sincerity will succeed. Be brief and select, omit much, give each subject +its proper proportionate space; and be exact without caring to round off +the edges of what you have to say." Later, he declines Bamford's offer of +verses, saying "verse is a bugbear to booksellers at present. These are +prosaic, earnest, practical, not singing times."] + +Carlyle, now generally recognised in London as having one of the most +powerful intellects and by far the greatest command of language among his +contemporaries, was beginning to suffer some of the penalties of renown +in being beset by bores and travestied by imitators; but he was also +enjoying its rewards. Eminent men of all shades of opinion made his +acquaintance; he was a frequent guest of the genial Maecenas, an admirer +of genius though no mere worshipper of success, R. Monckton Milnes; +meeting Hallam, Bunsen, Pusey, etc., at his house in London, and +afterwards visiting him at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. The future Lord +Houghton was, among distinguished men of letters and society, the one of +whom he spoke with the most unvarying regard. Carlyle corresponded with +Peel, whom he set almost on a par with Wellington as worthy of +perfect trust, and talked familiarly with Bishop Wilberforce, whom he +miraculously credits with holding at heart views much like his own. At +a somewhat later date, in the circle of his friends, bound to him by +various degrees of intimacy, History was represented by Thirlwall, Grote, +and Froude; Poetry by Browning, Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Clough; +Social Romance by Kingsley; Biography by James Spedding and John Forster; +and Criticism by John Ruskin. His link to the last named was, however, +their common distrust of political economy, as shown in _Unto This Last_, +rather than any deep artistic sympathy. In Macaulay, a conversationalist +more rapid than himself, Carlyle found a rival rather than a companion; +but his prejudiced view of physical science was forgotten in his personal +affection for Tyndall and in their congenial politics. His society was +from the publication of _Cromwell_ till near his death increasingly +sought after by the aristocracy, several members of which invited him to +their country seats, and bestowed on him all acceptable favours. In this +class he came to find other qualities than those referred to in the +_Sartor_ inscription, and other aims than that of "preserving their +game,"--the ambition to hold the helm of the State in stormy weather, and +to play their part among the captains of industry. In the _Reminiscences_ +the aristocracy are deliberately voted to be "for continual grace of +bearing and of acting, steadfast honour, light address, and cheery +stoicism, actually yet the best of English classes." There can be no +doubt that his intercourse with this class, as with men of affairs and +letters, some of whom were his proximate equals, was a fortunate sequel +to the duck-pond of Ecclefechan and the lonely rambles on the Border +moors. + + Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, + Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt. + +The life of a great capital may be the crown of education, but there is +a danger in homage that comes late and then without reserve. Give me +neither poverty nor riches, applies to praise as well as to wealth; and +the sudden transition from comparative neglect to + + honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, + +is a moral trial passing the strength of all but a few of the "irritable +race" of writers. The deference paid to Carlyle made him yet more +intolerant of contradiction, and fostered his selfishness, in one +instance with the disastrous result of clouding a whole decade of his +domestic life. In February 1839 he speaks of dining--"an eight-o'clock +dinner which ruined me for a week"--with "a certain Baring," at whose +table in Bath House he again met Bunsen, and was introduced to Lord +Mahon. This was the beginning of what, after the death of Sterling, +grew into the most intimate friendship of his life. Baring, son of Lord +Ashburton of the American treaty so named, and successor to the title on +his father's death in 1848, was a man of sterling worth and sound sense, +who entered into many of the views of his guest. His wife was by general +consent the most brilliant woman of rank in London, whose grace, wit, +refinement, and decision of character had made her the acknowledged +leader of society. Lady Harriet, by the exercise of some overpowering +though purely intellectual spell, made the proudest of men, the modern +Diogenes, our later Swift, so much her slave that for twelve years, +whenever he could steal a day from his work, he ran at her beck from town +to country, from castle to cot; from Addiscombe, her husband's villa in +Surrey, to the Grange, her father-in-law's seat in Hampshire; from Loch +Luichart and Glen Finnan, where they had Highland shootings, to the +Palais Eoyal. Mr. Froude's comment in his introduction to the Journal +is substantially as follows: Lady Harriet Baring or Ashburton was the +centre of a planetary system in which every distinguished public man of +genuine worth then revolved. Carlyle was naturally the chief among them, +and he was perhaps at one time ambitious of himself taking some part in +public affairs, and saw the advantage of this stepping-stone to enable +him to do something more for the world, as Byron said, than write books +for it. But the idea of entering Parliament, which seems to have once +suggested itself to him in 1849, was too vague and transient to have ever +influenced his conduct. It is more correct to say that he was flattered +by a sympathy not too thorough to be tame, pleased by adulation never +gross, charmed by the same graces that charmed the rest, and finally +fascinated by a sort of hypnotism. The irritation which this strange +alliance produced in the mind of the mistress of Cheyne Row is no matter +of surprise. Pride and affection together had made her bear with all her +husband's humours, and share with him all the toils of the struggle +from obscurity. He had emerged, and she was still half content to be +systematically set aside for his books, the inanimate rivals on which he +was building a fame she had some claim to share. But her fiery spirit was +not yet tamed into submitting to be sacrificed to an animate rival, or +passively permitting the usurpation of companionship grudged to herself +by another woman, whom she could not enjoy the luxury of despising. Lady +Harriet's superiority in _finesse_ and geniality, as well as advantages +of station, only aggravated the injury; and this with a singular want of +tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting +the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, +were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between +the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently +unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental +neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's +"Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen goddess," while Mrs. +Carlyle, with reference to her favourite dog "Nero," was in her turn +nicknamed "Agrippina." + +In midsummer of 1846, after an enforced sojourn at Addiscombe in worse +than her usual health, she returned to Chelsea with "her mind all churned +to froth," and opened it to her husband with such plainness that "there +was a violent scene": she left the house in a mood like that of the first +Mrs. Milton, and took refuge with her friends the Paulets at Seaforth +near Liverpool, uncertain whether or not she would return. There were +only two persons from whom it seemed natural for her at such a crisis +to ask advice; one was Geraldine Jewsbury, a young Manchester lady, +authoress of a well-known novel, _The Half-Sisters_, from the beginning +of their acquaintance in 1841 till the close in 1866 her most intimate +associate and chosen confidant, who, we are told, "knew all" her secrets. + +[Footnote: Carlyle often speaks, sometimes slightingly, of Miss Jewsbury, +as a sensational novelist and admirer of George Sand, but he appreciated +her genuine worth.] + +The other was the inspired Italian, pure patriot and Stoic moralist Joseph +Mazzini. To him she wrote twice--once apparently before leaving London, +and again from Seaforth. His letters in reply, tenderly sympathetic and +yet rigidly insistent on the duty of forbearance and endurance, availed to +avert the threatened catastrophe; but there are sentences which show how +bitter the complaints must have been. + + It is only you who can teach yourself that, whatever the + _present_ may be, you must front it with dignity.... I + could only point out to you the fulfilment of duties which + can make life--not happy--what can? but earnest, sacred, and + resigned.... I am carrying a burden even heavier than you, + and have undergone even bitterer deceptions. Your life + proves an empty thing, you say. Empty! Do not blaspheme. + Have you never done good? Have you never loved? ... Pain and + joy, deception and fulfilled hopes are just the rain and the + sunshine that must meet the traveller on his way. Bless the + Almighty if He has thought proper to send the latter to + you.... Wrap your cloak round you against the first, but do + not think a single moment that the one or the other have + anything to do with the _end_ of the journey. + +Carlyle's first letter after the rupture is a mixture of reproach +and affection. "We never parted before in such a manner; and all for +literally nothing.... Adieu, dearest, for that is, and, if madness +prevail not, may for ever be your authentic title." Another, enclosing +the birthday present which he had never omitted since her mother's death, +softened his wife's resentment, and the storm blew over for a time. +But while the cause remained there was in the house at best a surface +tranquillity, at worst an under tone of misery which (October 1855 to May +1856) finds voice in the famous Diary, not merely covered with "black +spider webs," but steeped in gall, the publication of which has made so +much debate. It is like a page from _Othello_ reversed. A few sentences +condense the refrain of the lament. "Charles Buller said of the Duchess +de Praslin, 'What could a poor fellow do with a wife that kept a journal +but murder her?'" "That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand +miles Mr. C. has walked between here and there?" "Being an only child, I +never wished to sew men's trousers--no, never!" + + I gin to think I've sold myself + For very little cas." + +"To-day I called on my lady: she was perfectly civil, for a wonder." + +"Edward Irving! The past is past and gone is gone-- + + O waly, waly, love is bonnie, + A little while when it is new;" + +quotations which, laid alongside the records of the writer's visit to the +people at Haddington, "who seem all to grow so good and kind as they grow +old," and to the graves in the churchyard there, are infinitely pathetic. +The letters that follow are in the same strain, _e.g._ to Carlyle when +visiting his sister at the Gill, "I never forget kindness, nor, alas, +unkindness either": to Luichart, "I don't believe thee, wishing yourself +at home.... You don't, as weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself +for the pleasure of others"; to Mrs. Russell at Thornhill, "My London +doctor's prescription is that I should be kept always happy and +tranquil(!!!)." + +In the summer of 1856 Lady Ashburton gave a real ground for offence in +allowing both the Carlyles, on their way north with her, to take a seat +in an ordinary railway carriage, beside her maid, while she herself +travelled in a special saloon. Partly, perhaps in consequence, Mrs. +Carlyle soon went to visit her cousins in Fifeshire, and afterwards +refused to accompany her ladyship on the way back. This resulted in +another quarrel with her husband, who had issued the command from +Luichart--but it was their last on the subject, for Gloriana died on the +4th of the following May, 1857, at Paris: "The most queen-like woman I +had ever known or seen, by nature and by culture _facile princeps_ she, I +think, of all great ladies I have ever seen." This brought to a close an +episode in which there were faults on both sides, gravely punished: the +incidents of its course and the manner in which they were received show, +among other things, that railing at the name of "Happiness" does little +or nothing to reconcile people to the want of the reality. In 1858 Lord +Ashburton married again--a Miss Stuart Mackenzie, who became the attached +friend of the Carlyles, and remained on terms of unruffled intimacy with +both till the end: she survived her husband, who died in 1864, leaving a +legacy of L2000 to the household at Cheyne Row. _Sic transiit._ + +From this date we must turn back over nearly twenty years to retrace the +main steps of the great author's career. Much of the interval was devoted +to innumerable visits, in acceptance of endless hospitalities, or in +paying his annual devotions to Annandale,--calls on his time which kept +him rushing from place to place like a comet. Two facts are notable about +those expeditions: they rarely seemed to give him much pleasure, even at +Scotsbrig he complained of sleepless nights and farm noises; and he was +hardly ever accompanied by his wife. She too was constantly running north +to her own kindred in Liverpool or Scotland, but their paths did not run +parallel, they almost always intersected, so that when the one was on the +way north the other was homeward bound, to look out alone on "a horizon +of zero." Only a few of these visits are worth recording as of general +interest. Most of them were paid, a few received. In the autumn of 1846, +Margaret Fuller, sent from Emerson, called at Cheyne Row, and recorded +her impression of the master as "in a very sweet humour, full of wit and +pathos, without being overbearing," adding that she was "carried away by +the rich flow of his discourse"; and that "the hearty noble earnestness +of his personal bearing brought back the charm of his writing before she +wearied of it." A later visitor, Miss Martineau, his old helper in days +of struggle, was now thus esteemed: "Broken into utter wearisomeness, +a mind reduced to these three elements--imbecility, dogmatism, and +unlimited hope. I never in my life was more heartily bored with any +creature!" In 1847 there followed the last English glimpse of Jeffrey and +the last of Dr. Chalmers, who was full of enthusiasm about _Cromwell_; +then a visit to the Brights, John and Jacob, at Rochdale: with the former +he had "a paltry speaking match" on topics described as "shallow, totally +worthless to me," the latter he liked, recognising in him a culture and +delicacy rare with so much strength of will and independence of thought. +Later came a second visit from Emerson, then on a lecturing tour to +England, gathering impressions revived in his _English Traits_. "His +doctrines are too airy and thin," wrote Carlyle, "for the solid practical +heads of the Lancashire region. We had immense talkings with him here, +but found that he did not give us much to chew the cud upon. He is a +pure-minded man, but I think his talent is not quite so high as I had +anticipated." They had an interesting walk to Stonehenge together, +and Carlyle attended one of his friend's lectures, but with modified +approval, finding this serene "spiritual son" of his own rather "gone +into philanthropy and moonshine." Emerson's notes of this date, on the +other hand, mark his emancipation from mere discipleship. "Carlyle had +all the kleinstadtlicher traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and +reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a +vast continent.... In him, as in Byron, one is more struck with the +rhetoric than with the matter.... There is more character than intellect +in every sentence, therein strangely resembling Samuel Johnson." The same +year Carlyle perpetrated one of his worst criticisms, that on Keats:-- + + The kind of man he was gets ever more horrible to me. Force + of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other + force.... Such a structure of soul, it would once have been + very evident, was a chosen "Vessel of Hell"; + +and in the next an ungenerously contemptuous reference to Macaulay's +_History_:-- + + The most popular ever written. Fourth edition already, + within perhaps four months. Book to which four hundred + editions could not add any value, there being no depth of + sense in it at all, and a very great quantity of rhetorical + wind. + +Landor, on the other hand, whom he visited later at Bath, he appreciated, +being "much taken with the gigantesque, explosive but essentially +chivalrous and almost heroic old man." He was now at ease about the sale +of his books, having, _inter alia_, received L600 for a new edition of +the _French Revolution_ and the _Miscellanies_. His journal is full of +plans for a new work on Democracy, Organisation of Labour, and Education, +and his letters of the period to Thomas Erskine and others are largely +devoted to politics. + +[Footnote: This is one of the few instances in which further knowledge led +to a change for the better in Carlyle's judgment. In a letter to Emerson, +1840, he speaks disparagingly of Landor as "a wild man, whom no extent of +culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be +weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about +anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind +shows him this side or the other of the object: and _sides_ of an object +are all that he sees." _De te faliula._ Emerson answers defending Landor, +and indicating points of likeness between him and Carlyle.] + +In 1846 he spent the first week of September in Ireland, crossing from +Ardrossan to Belfast, and then driving to Drogheda, and by rail to +Dublin, where in Conciliation Hall he saw O'Connell for the first time +since a casual glimpse at a radical meeting arranged by Charles Buller--a +meeting to which he had gone out of curiosity in 1834. O'Connell was +always an object of Carlyle's detestation, and on this occasion he does +not mince his words. + + Chief quack of the then world ... first time I had ever + heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney + ... the big beggar-man who had L15,000 a year, and, _proh + pudor!_ the favour of English ministers instead of the + pillory. + +At Dundrum he met by invitation Carleton the novelist, with Mitchell and +Gavan Duffy, the Young Ireland leaders whom he seems personally to have +liked, but he told Mitchell that he would probably be hanged, and said +during a drive about some flourishing and fertile fields of the Pale, "Ah! +Duffy, there you see the hoof of the bloody Saxon." + +[Footnote: Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the "Conversations and Correspondence," +now being published in the _Contemporary Review_, naturally emphasises +Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several expressions of +sympathy with the "Tenant Agitations"; but his demur to the _Reminiscences +of My Irish Journey_ being accepted as an accurate account of the writer's +real sentiments is of little avail in face of the letters to Emerson, more +strongly accentuating the same views, _e.g._ "Bothered almost to madness +with Irish balderdash.... '_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars,' I +sometimes advised, 'and sell them in Brazil as niggers!'--perhaps +Parliament on sweet constraint will allow you to advance them to be +niggers!"] + +He returned from Kingston to Liverpool on the 10th, and so closed his +short and unsatisfactory trip. Three years later, July to August 6th, +1849, he paid a longer and final visit to the "ragged commonweal" or +"common woe," as Raleigh called it, landing at Dublin, and after some days +there passing on to Kildare, Kilkenny, Lismore, Waterford, beautiful +Killarney and its beggar hordes, and then to Limerick, Clare, Castlebar, +where he met W.E. Forster, whose acquaintance he had made two years +earlier at Matlock. At Gweedore in Donegal he stayed with Lord George +Hill, whom he respected, though persuaded that he was on the wrong road to +Reform by Philanthropy in a country where it had never worked; and then on +to half Scotch Derry. There, August 6th, he made an emphatic after- +breakfast speech to a half-sympathetic audience; the gist of it being that +the remedy for Ireland was not "emancipation" or "liberty," but to "cease +following the devil, as it had been doing for two centuries." The same +afternoon he escaped on board a Glasgow steamer, and landed safe at 2 A.M. +on the morning of the 7th. The notes of the tour, set down on his return +to Chelsea and republished in 1882, have only the literary merit of the +vigorous descriptive touches inseparable from the author's lightest +writing; otherwise they are mere rough-and-tumble jottings, with no +consecutive meaning, of a rapid hawk's-eye view of the four provinces. + +But Carlyle never ceased to maintain the thesis they set forth, that +Ireland is, for the most part, a country of semi-savages, whose +staple trade is begging, whose practice is to lie, unfit not only +for self-government but for what is commonly called constitutional +government, whose ragged people must be coerced, by the methods of +Raleigh, of Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and +respect for law. At Westport, where "human swinery has reached its acme," +he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred +hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, +while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be +a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of +the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his +neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers +generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country +when he formulated his idea of the Home Rule that seemed to him most for +their good. + + Kildare Railway: big blockhead sitting with his dirty feet + on seat opposite, not stirring them for one who wanted to + sit there. "One thing we're all agreed on," said he; "we're + very ill governed: Whig, Tory, Radical, Repealer, all all + admit we're very ill-governed!" I thought to myself, "Yes, + indeed; you govern yourself! He that would govern you well + would probably surprise you much, my friend--laying a hearty + horse-whip over that back of yours." + +And a little later at Castlebar he declares, "Society here would have to +eat itself and end by cannibalism in a week, if it were not held up by +the rest of our Empire standing afoot." These passages are written in +the spirit which inspired his paper on "The Nigger Question" and the +aggressive series of assaults to which it belongs, on what he regarded as +the most prominent quackeries, shams, and pretence philanthropies of the +day. His own account of the reception of this work is characteristic:-- + + In 1849, after an interval of deep gloom and bottomless + dubitation, came _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, which + unpleasantly astonished everybody, set the world upon the + strangest suppositions--"Carlyle got deep into whisky," said + some,--ruined my reputation according to the friendliest + voices, and in effect divided me altogether from the mob of + "Progress-of-the-species" and other vulgar; but were a great + relief to my own conscience as a faithful citizen, and have + been ever since. + +These pamphlets alienated Mazzini and Mill, and provoked the assault +of the newspapers; which, by the author's confession, did something to +arrest and restrict the sale. + +Nor was this indignation wholly unnatural. Once in his life, on occasion +of his being called to serve at a jury trial, Carlyle, with remarkable +adroitness, coaxed a recalcitrant juryman into acquiescence with the +majority; but coaxing as a rule was not his way. When he found himself in +front of what he deemed to be a falsehood his wont was to fly in its face +and tear it to pieces. His satire was not like that of Horace, who taught +his readers _ridendo dicere verum_, it was rather that of the elder +Lucilius or the later Juvenal; not that of Chaucer, who wrote-- + + That patience is a virtue high is plain, + Because it conquers, as the clerks explain, + Things that rude valour never could attain, + +but that of _The Lye_, attributed to Raleigh, or Swift's _Gulliver_ or +the letters of Junius. The method of direct denunciation has advantages: +it cannot be mistaken, nor, if strong enough, ignored; but it must lay +its account with consequences, and Carlyle in this instance found them +so serious that he was threatened at the height of his fame with +dethronement. Men said he had lost his head, gone back to the everlasting +"No," and mistaken swearing all round for political philosophy. The +ultimate value attached to the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ must depend to a +large extent on the view of the critic. It is now, however, generally +admitted on the one hand that they served in some degree to counteract +the rashness of Philanthropy; on the other, that their effect was marred +by more than the writer's usual faults of exaggeration. It is needless to +refer the temper they display to the troubles then gathering about his +domestic life. A better explanation is to be found in the public events +of the time. + +The two years previous to their appearance were the Revolution years, +during which the European world seemed to be turned upside down. The +French had thrown out their _bourgeois_ king, Louis Philippe--"the +old scoundrel," as Carlyle called him,--and established their second +Republic. Italy, Hungary, and half Germany were in revolt against the old +authorities; the Irish joined in the chorus, and the Chartist monster +petition was being carted to Parliament. Upheaval was the order of the +day, kings became exiles and exiles kings, dynasties and creeds were +being subverted, and empires seemed rocking as on the surface of an +earthquake. They were years of great aspirations, with beliefs in all +manner of swift regeneration-- + + Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, + +all varieties of doctrinaire idealisms. Mazzini failed at Rome, Kossuth +at Pesth; the riots of Berlin resulted in the restoration of the old +dull bureaucratic regime; Smith O'Brien's bluster exploded in a cabbage +garden; the Railway Bubble burst in the fall of the bloated king Hudson, +and the Chartism of the time evaporated in smoke. The old sham gods, with +Buonaparte of the stuffed eagle in front, came back; because, concluded +Carlyle, there was no man in the front of the new movement strong enough +to guide it; because its figure-heads were futile sentimentalists, +insurgents who could not win. The reaction produced by their failure had +somewhat the same effect on his mind that the older French Revolution had +on that of Burke: he was driven back to a greater degree than Mr. Froude +allows on practical conservatism and on the negations of which +the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ are the expression. To this series of +_pronunciamentos_ of political scepticism he meant to add another, of +which he often talks under the name of "Exodus from Houndsditch," boldly +stating and setting forth the grounds of his now complete divergence from +all forms of what either in England or Europe generally could be called +the Orthodox faith in Religion. He was, we are told, withheld from this +by the feeling that the teaching even of the priests he saw and derided +in Belgium or in Galway was better than the atheistic materialism which +he associated with the dominion of mere physical science. He may have +felt he had nothing definite enough to be understood by the people to +substitute for what he proposed to destroy; and he may have had a thought +of the reception of such a work at Scotsbrig. Much of the _Life of +Sterling_, however, is somewhat less directly occupied with the same +question, and though gentler in tone it excited almost as much clamour as +the _Pamphlets_, especially in the north. The book, says Carlyle himself, +was "utterly revolting to the religious people in particular (to my +surprise rather than otherwise). 'Doesn't believe in us either!' Not he +for certain; can't, if you will know." During the same year his almost +morbid dislike of materialism found vent in denunciations of the "Crystal +Palace" Exhibition of Industry; though for its main promoter, Prince +Albert, he subsequently entertained and expressed a sincere respect. + +In the summer of 1851 the Carlyles went together to Malvern, where they +met Tennyson (whose good nature had been proof against some slighting +remarks on his verses), Sydney Dobell, then in the fame of his +"Roman," and other celebrities. They tried the "Water Cure," under the +superintendence of Dr. Gully, who received and treated them as guests; +but they derived little good from the process. "I found," says Carlyle, +"water taken as medicine to be the most destructive drug I had ever +tried." Proceeding northward, he spent three weeks with his mother, then +in her eighty-fourth year and at last growing feeble; a quiet time only +disturbed by indignation at "one ass whom I heard the bray of in some +Glasgow newspaper," comparing "our grand hater of shams" to Father +Gavazzi. His stay was shortened by a summons to spend a few days with the +Ashburtons at Paris on their return from Switzerland. Though bound by +a promise to respond to the call, Carlyle did not much relish it. +Travelling abroad was always a burden to him, and it was aggravated in +this case by his very limited command of the language for conversational +purposes. Fortunately, on reaching London he found that the poet Browning, +whose acquaintance he had made ten years before, was, with his wife, about +to start for the same destination, and he prevailed upon them, though +somewhat reluctant, to take charge of him. + +[Footnote: Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life of Robert Browning_.] + +The companionship was therefore not accidental, and it was of great +service. "Carlyle," according to Mrs. Browning's biographer, "would have +been miserable without Browning," who made all the arrangements for the +party, passed luggage through the customs, saw to passports, fought the +battles of all the stations, and afterwards acted as guide through the +streets of the great city. By a curious irony, two verse-makers and +admirers of George Sand made it possible for the would-be man of action to +find his way. The poetess, recalling the trip afterwards, wrote that she +liked the prophet more than she expected, finding his "bitterness only +melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." Browning himself continued through +life to regard Carlyle with "affectionate reverence." "He never ceased," +says Mrs. Orr, "to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his +wife, or to believe that, in the matter of their domestic unhappiness, she +was the more responsible of the two.... He always thought her a hard +unlovable woman, and I believe little liking was lost between them ... Yet +Carlyle never rendered him that service--easy as it appears--which one man +of letters most justly values from another, that of proclaiming the +admiration which he privately professed for his work." The party started, +September 24th, and reached Dieppe by Newhaven, after a rough passage, the +effects of which on some fellow-travellers more unfortunate than himself +Carlyle describes in a series of recently-discovered jottings [Footnote: +Partially reproduced, _Pall Mall Gazette,_ April 9th 1890, with +illustrative connecting comments.] made on his return, October 2nd, to +Chelsea. On September 25th they reached Paris. Carlyle joined the +Ashburtons at Meurice's Hotel; there dined, went in the evening to the +Theatre Francais, cursed the play, and commented unpleasantly on General +Changarnier sitting in the stalls. + +During the next few days he met many of the celebrities of the time, and +caricatured, after his fashion, their personal appearance, talk, and +manner. These criticisms are for the most part of little value. The +writer had in some of his essays shown almost as much capacity of +understanding the great Frenchmen of the last century as was compatible +with his Puritan vein; but as regards French literature since the +Revolution he was either ignorant or alien. What light could be thrown on +that interesting era by a man who could only say of the authors of _La +Comedie Humaine_ and _Consuelo_ that they were ministers in a Phallus +worship? Carlyle seems to have seen most of Thiers, whom he treats with +good-natured condescension, but little insight: "round fat body, tapering +like a ninepin into small fat feet, placidly sharp fat face, puckered +eyeward ... a frank, sociable kind of creature, who has absolutely +no malignity towards any one, and is not the least troubled with +self-seekings." Thiers talked with contempt of Michelet; and Carlyle, +unconscious of the numerous affinities between that historian of genius +and himself, half assented. Prosper Merimee, on the other hand, +incensed him by some freaks of criticism, whether in badinage or in +earnest--probably the former. "Jean Paul," he said, getting on the theme +of German literature, "was a hollow fool of the first magnitude," and +Goethe was "insignificant, unintelligible, a paltry kind of Scribe +manque." "I could stand no more of it, but lighted a cigar, and adjourned +to the street. 'You impertinent blasphemous blockhead!' this was sticking +in my throat: better to retire without bringing it out." + +[Footnote: The two men were mutually antagonistic; Merimee tried to read +the _French Revolution_, but flung the book aside in weariness or in +disdain.] + +Of Guizot he writes, "Tartuffe, gaunt, hollow, resting on the everlasting +'No' with a haggard consciousness that it ought to be the everlasting +'Yea.'" "To me an extremely detestable kind of man." Carlyle missed +General Cavaignac, "of all Frenchmen the one" he "cared to see." In the +streets of Paris he found no one who could properly be called a gentleman. +"The truly ingenious and strong men of France are here (_i.e_. among the +industrial classes) making money, while the politician, literary, etc. +etc. class is mere play-actorism." His summary before leaving at the close +of a week, rather misspent, is: "Articulate-speaking France was altogether +without beauty or meaning to me in my then diseased mood; but I saw traces +of the inarticulate ... much worthier." + +Back in London, he sent Mrs. Carlyle to the Grange (distinguishing +himself, in an interval of study at home, by washing the back area flags +with his own hands), and there joined her till the close of the year. +During the early part of the next he was absorbed in reading and planning +work. Then came an unusually tranquil visit to Thomas Erskine of +Linlathen, during which he had only to complain that the servants were +often obliged to run out of the room to hide their laughter at his +humorous bursts. At the close of August 1852 he embarked on board a Leith +steamer bound for Rotterdam, on his first trip to Germany. Home once +more, in October, he found chaos come, and seas of paint overwhelming +everything; "went to the Grange, and back in time to witness from Bath +House the funeral, November 18th, of the great Duke," remarking, "The +one true man of official men in England, or that I know of in Europe, +concludes his long course.... Tennyson's verses are naught. Silence alone +is respectable on such an occasion." In March, again at the Grange, he +met the Italian minister Azeglio, and when this statesman disparaged +Mazzini--a thing only permitted by Carlyle to himself--he retorted with +the remark, "Monsieur, vous ne le connaissez pas du tout, du tout." At +Chelsea, on his return, the fowl tragic-comedy reached a crisis, "the +unprotected male" declaring that he would shoot them or poison them. "A +man is not a Chatham nor a Wallenstein; but a man has work too, which the +Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two and sixpence +worth of bantams.... They must either withdraw or die." Ultimately his +mother-wife came to the rescue of her "babe of genius"; the cocks +were bought off, and in the long-talked-of sound-proof room the last +considerable work of his life, though painfully, proceeded. Meanwhile +"brother John" had married, and Mrs. Carlyle went to visit the couple at +Moffat. While there bad tidings came from Scotsbrig, and she dutifully +hurried off to nurse her mother-in-law through an attack from which the +strong old woman temporarily rallied. But the final stroke could not be +long delayed. When Carlyle was paying his winter visit to the Grange in +December news came that his mother was worse, and her recovery +despaired of; and, by consent of his hostess, he hurried off to +Scotsbrig,--"mournful leave given me by the Lady A., mournful +encouragement to be speedy, not dilatory,"--and arrived in time to hear +her last words. "Here is Tom come to bid you good-night, mother," said +John. "As I turned to go, she said, 'I'm muckle obleeged to you.'" She +spoke no more, but passed from sleep after sleep of coma to that of +death, on Sunday, Christmas Day, 1853. "We can only have one mother," +exclaimed Byron on a like event--the solemn close of many storms. But +between Margaret Carlyle and the son of whom she was so proud there had +never been a shadow. "If," writes Mr. Froude, "she gloried in his fame +and greatness, he gloried more in being her son, and while she lived she, +and she only, stood between him and the loneliness of which he so often +and so passionately complained." + +Of all Carlyle's letters none are more tenderly beautiful than those +which he sent to Scotsbrig. The last, written on his fifty-eighth +birthday, December 4th, which she probably never read, is one of the +finest. The close of their wayfaring together left him solitary; his +"soul all hung with black," and, for months to come, everything around +was overshadowed by the thought of his bereavement. In his journal of +February 28th 1854, he tells us that he had on the Sunday before seen a +vision of Mainhill in old days, with mother, father, and the rest getting +dressed for the meeting-house. "They are gone now, vanished all; their +poor bits of thrifty clothes, ... their pious struggling efforts; their +little life, it is all away. It has all melted into the still sea, it +was rounded with a sloop." The entry ends, as fitting, with a prayer: "O +pious mother! kind, good, brave, and truthful soul as I have ever found, +and more than I have elsewhere found in this world. Your poor Tom, long +out of his schooldays now, has fallen very lonely, very lame and broken +in this pilgrimage of his; and you cannot help him or cheer him ... any +more. From your grave in Ecclefechan kirkyard yonder you bid him trust in +God; and that also he will try if he can understand and do." + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE MINOTAUR + +[1853-1866] + +Carlyle was now engaged on a work which required, received, and well nigh +exhausted all his strength, resulting in the greatest though the least +generally read of all his books. _Cromwell_ achieved, he had thrown +himself for a season into contemporary politics, condescending even, +contrary to his rule, to make casual contributions to the Press; but his +temper was too hot for success in that arena, and his letters of the time +are full of the feeling that the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ had set the world +against him. Among his generous replies to young men asking advice, none +is more suggestive than that in which he writes from Chelsea (March 9th +1850):-- + + If my books teach you anything, don't mind in the least + whether other people believe it or not; but lay it to + heart ... as a real message left with you, which you must + set about fulfilling, whatever others do.... And be not + surprised that "people have no sympathy with you." That is + an accompaniment that will attend you all your days if you + mean to live an earnest life. + +But he himself, though "ever a fighter," felt that, even for him, it was +not good to be alone. He decided there "was no use railing in vain like +Timon"; he would go back again from the present to the past, from the +latter days of discord to seek countenance in some great figure of +history, under whose aegis he might shelter the advocacy of his views. +Looking about for a theme, several crossed his mind. He thought of +Ireland, but that was too burning a subject; of William the Conqueror, of +Simon de Montfort, the Norsemen, the Cid; but these may have seemed to +him too remote. Why, ask patriotic Scotsmen, did he not take up his and +their favourite Knox? But Knox's life had been fairly handled by M'Crie, +and Carlyle would have found it hard to adjust his treatment of that +essentially national "hero" to the "Exodus from Houndsditch." "Luther" +might have been an apter theme; but there too it would have been a strain +to steer clear of theological controversy, of which he had had enough. +Napoleon was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste. Looking over +Europe in more recent times, he concluded that the Prussian monarchy had +been the main centre of modern stability, and that it had been made so by +its virtual creator, Friedrich II., called the Great. Once entertained, +the subject seized him as with the eye of Coleridge's mariner, and, in +spite of manifold efforts to get free, compelled him, so that he could +"not choose but" write on it. Again and again, as the magnitude of the +task became manifest, we find him doubting, hesitating, recalcitrating, +and yet captive. He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own Memoirs +and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains through which he had to dig. +"Prussian Friedrich and the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust +lay crushing me with the continual question, Dare I try it? Dare I not?" +At length, gathering himself together for the effort, he resolved, as +before in the case of Cromwell, to visit the scenes of which he was to +write. Hence the excursion to Germany of 1852, during which, with the +kindly-offered guidance of Mr. Neuberg, an accomplished German admirer of +some fortune resident in London, he made his first direct acquaintance +with the country of whose literature he had long been himself the English +interpreter. The outlines of the trip may be shortly condensed from the +letters written during its progress to his wife and mother. He reached +Rotterdam on September 1st; then after a night made sleepless by "noisy +nocturnal travellers and the most industrious cocks and clamorous bells" +he had ever heard, he sailed up the river to Bonn, where he consulted +books, saw "Father Arndt," and encountered some types of the German +professoriate, "miserable creatures lost in statistics." There he met +Neuberg, and they went together to Rolandseck, to the village of Hunef +among the Sieben-Gebirge, and then on to Coblenz. After a detour to Ems, +which Carlyle, comminating the gaming-tables, compared to Matlock, and +making a pilgrimage to Nassau as the birthplace of William the Silent, +they rejoined the Rhine and sailed admiringly up the finest reach of the +river. From Mainz the philosopher and his guide went on to Frankfort, +paid their respects to Goethe's statue and the garret where _Werther_ was +written, the Judengasse, "grimmest section of the Middle Ages," and the +Roemer--election hall of the old Kaisers; then to Homburg, where they saw +an old Russian countess playing "gowpanfuls of gold pieces every +stake," and left after no long stay, Carlyle, in a letter to Scotsbrig, +pronouncing the fashionable Badeort to be the "rallying-place of such a +set of empty blackguards as are not to be found elsewhere in the world." +We find him next at Marburg, where he visited the castle of Philip of +Hesse. Passing through Cassel, he went to Eisenach, and visited the +neighbouring Wartburg, where he kissed the old oaken table, on which the +Bible was made an open book for the German race, and noted the hole in +the plaster where the inkstand had been thrown at the devil and his +noises; an incident to which eloquent reference is made in the lectures +on "Heroes." Hence they drove to Gotha, and lodged in Napoleon's room +after Leipzig. Then by Erfurt, with more Luther memories, they took rail +to Weimar, explored the houses of Goethe and of Schiller, and dined by +invitation with the Augustenburgs; the Grand Duchess, with sons and +daughters, conversing in a Babylonish dialect, a melange of French, +English, and German. The next stage seems to have been Leipzig, then in +a bustle with the Fair. "However," says Carlyle, "we got a book or two, +drank a glass of wine in Auerbach's keller, and at last got off safe to +the comparative quiet of Dresden." He ignores the picture galleries; and +makes a bare reference to the palaces from which they steamed up the Elbe +to the heart of Saxon Switzerland. There he surveyed Lobositz, first +battle-field of the Seven Years' War, and rested at the romantic mountain +watering-place of Toeplitz. "He seems," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, "to be getting +very successfully through his travels, thanks to the patience and +helpfulness of Neuberg. He makes in every letter frightful _misereres_ +over his sleeping accommodations; but he cannot conceal that he is really +pretty well." The writer's own _misereres_ are as doleful and nearly +as frequent; but she was really in much worse health. From Toeplitz the +companions proceeded in weary stellwagens to Zittau in Lusatia, and so on +to + + Herrnhut, the primitive city of the Moravian brethren: a + place not bigger than Annan, but beautiful, pure, and quiet + beyond any town on the earth, I daresay; and, indeed, more + like a saintly dream of ideal Calvinism made real than a town + of stone and lime. + +Onward by "dreary moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred +"the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his +worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of +the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we have, October +1st:-- + + I am dead stupid; my heart nearly choked out of me, and my + head churned to pieces.... Berlin is loud almost as London, + but in no other way great ... about the size of Liverpool, + and more like Glasgow. + +They spent a week there (sight-seeing being made easier by an +introduction from Lady Ashburton to the Ambassador), discovering at +length an excellent portrait of Fritz, meeting Tieck, Cornelius, Rauch, +Preuss, etc., and then got quickly back to London by way of Hanover, +Cologne, and Ostend. Carlyle's travels are always interesting, and would +be more so without the tiresome, because ever the same, complaints. Six +years later (1858) he made his second expedition to Germany, in the +company of two friends, a Mr. Foxton--who is made a butt--and the +faithful Neuberg. Of this journey, undertaken with a more exclusively +business purpose, and accomplished with greater dispatch, there are fewer +notes, the substance of which may be here anticipated. He sailed (August +21st) from Leith to Hamburg, admiring the lower Elbe, and then went out +of his way to accept a pressing invitation from the Baron Usedom and his +wife to the Isle of Ruegen, sometimes called the German Isle of Wight. He +went there by Stralsund, liked his hosts and their pleasant place, where +for cocks crowing he had doves cooing; but in Putbus, the Richmond of the +island, he had to encounter brood sows as well as cochin-chinas. From +Ruegen he went quickly south by Stettin to Berlin, then to Cuestrin to +survey the field of Zorndorf, with what memorable result readers of +_Friedrich_ know. His next halt was at Liegnitz, headquarters for +exploring the grounds of "Leuthen, the grandest of all the battles," +and Molwitz--first of Fritz's fights--of which we hear so much in the +_Reminiscences_. His course lay on to Breslau, "a queer old city as ever +you heard of, high as Edinburgh or more so," and, by Landshut, through +the picturesque villages of the Riesen-Gebirge into Bohemia. There he +first put up at Pardubitz in a vile, big inn, for bed a "trough eighteen +inches too short, a mattress forced into it which cocked up at both +ends"--such as most travellers in remoter Germany at that period have +experienced. Carlyle was unfavourably impressed by the Bohemians; and +"not one in a hundred of them could understand a word of German. They +are liars, thieves, slatterns, a kind of miserable, subter-Irish +people,--Irish with the addition of ill-nature." He and his friends +visited the fields of Chotusitz and Kolin, where they found the "Golden +Sun," from which "the last of the Kings" had surveyed the ground, "sunk +to be the dirtiest house probably in Europe." Thence he made for Prague, +whose picturesque grandeur he could not help extolling. "Here," he +writes, enclosing the flower to his wife, "is an authentic wild pink +plucked from the battle-field. Give it to some young lady who practises +'the Battle of Prague' on her piano to your satisfaction." On September +15th he dates from Dresden, whence he spent a laborious day over Torgau. +Thereafter they sped on, with the usual tribulations, by Hochkirk, +Leipzig, Weissenfels, and Rossbach. Hurrying homeward, they were obliged +to decline another invitation from the Duchess at Weimar; and, making +for Guntershausen, performed the fatiguing journey from there to +Aix-la-Chapelle in one day, _i.e._ travelling often in slow trains from 4 +A.M. to 7 P.M., a foolish feat even for the eupeptic. Carlyle visited the +cathedral, but has left a very poor account of the impression produced +on him by the simple slab sufficiently inscribed, "Carolo Magno." "Next +morning stand upon the lid of Charlemagne, abominable monks roaring +out their idolatrous grand music within sight." By Ostend and Dover he +reached home on the 22nd. A Yankee scamper trip, one might say, but for +the result testifying to the enormous energy of the traveller. "He speaks +lightly," says Mr. Froude, "of having seen Kolin, Torgau, etc. etc. No +one would guess from reading these short notices that he had mastered the +details of every field he visited; not a turn of the ground, not a brook, +not a wood ... had escaped him.... There are no mistakes. Military +students in Germany are set to learn Frederick's battles in Carlyle's +account of them." + +During the interval between those tours there are few events of interest +in Carlyle's outer, or phases of his inner life which have not been +already noted. The year 1854 found the country ablaze with the excitement +of the Crimean War, with which he had as little sympathy as had Cobden +or Bright or the members of Sturge's deputation. He had no share in the +popular enthusiasm for what he regarded as a mere newspaper folly. All +his political leaning was on the side of Russia, which, from a safe +distance, having no direct acquaintance with the country, he always +admired as a seat of strong government, the representative of wise +control over barbarous races. Among the worst of these he reckoned the +Turk, "a lazy, ugly, sensual, dark fanatic, whom we have now had for 400 +years. I would not buy the continuance of him in Europe at the rate of +sixpence a century." Carlyle had no more faith in the "Balance of power" +than had Byron, who scoffed at it from another, the Republican, side as +"balancing straws on kings' noses instead of wringing them off," _e.g._-- + + As to Russian increase of strength, he writes, I would wait + till Russia meddled with me before I drew sword to stop his + increase of strength. It is the idle population of editors, + etc., that has done all this in England. One perceives + clearly that ministers go forward in it against their will. + +Even our heroisms at Alma--"a terrible, almost horrible, +operation"--Balaclava, and Inkermann, failed to raise a glow in his mind, +though he admitted the force of Tennyson's ringing lines. The alliance +with the "scandalous copper captain," elected by the French, as the Jews +chose Barabbas,--an alliance at which many patriots winced--was to him +only an added disgrace. Carlyle's comment on the subsequent visit to +Osborne of Victor Hugo's "brigand," and his reception within the pale of +legitimate sovereignty was, "Louis Bonaparte has not been shot hitherto. +That is the best that can be said." Sedan brought most men round to his +mind about Napoleon III.: but his approval of the policy of the Czars +remains open to the criticism of M. Lanin. In reference to the next great +struggle of the age, Carlyle was in full sympathy with the mass of his +countrymen. He was as much enraged by the Sepoy rebellion as were those +who blew the ringleaders from the muzzles of guns. "Tongue cannot speak," +he exclaims, in the spirit of Noel Paton's picture, before it was amended +or spoilt, "the horrors that were done on the English by these mutinous +hyaenas. Allow hyaenas to mutiny and strange things will follow." He +never seems to have revolved the question as to the share of his admired +Muscovy in instigating the revolt. For the barbarism of the north he had +ready apologies, for the savagery of the south mere execration; and he +writes of the Hindoos as he did, both before and afterwards, of the +negroes in Jamaica. + +Three sympathetic obituary notices of the period expressed his softer +side. In April 1854, John Wilson and Lord Cockburn died at Edinburgh. His +estimate of the former is notable as that generally entertained, now that +the race of those who came under the personal spell of Christopher North +has passed:-- + + We lived apart as in different centuries; though to say the + truth I always loved Wilson, he had much nobleness of heart, + and many traits of noble genius, but the central tie-beam + seemed always wanting; very long ago I perceived in him the + most irreconcilable contradictions--Toryism with + Sansculottism, Methodism of a sort with total incredulity, + etc.... Wilson seemed to me always by far the most gifted + of our literary men, either then or still: and yet + intrinsically he has written nothing that can endure. + +Cockburn is referred to in contrast as "perhaps the last genuinely +national type of rustic Scotch sense, sincerity, and humour--a wholesome +product of Scotch dialect, with plenty of good logic in it." Later, +Douglas Jerrold is described as "last of the London wits, I hope the +last." Carlyle's letters during this period are of minor interest: many +refer to visits paid to distinguished friends and humble relatives, with +the usual complaints about health, servants, and noises. At Farlingay, +where he spent some time with Edward FitzGerald, translator of _Omar +Khayyam_, the lowing of cows took the place of cocks crowing. Here and +there occurs a, criticism or a speculation. That on his dreams is, in the +days of "insomnia," perhaps worth noting (F. iv. 154, 155); _inter alia_ +he says:--"I have an impression that one always dreams, but that only in +cases where the nerves are disturbed by bad health, which produces light +imperfect sleep, do they start into such relief as to force themselves on +our waking consciousness." Among posthumously printed documents of Cheyne +Row, to this date belongs the humorous appeal of Mrs. Carlyle for a +larger allowance of house money, entitled "Budget of a Femme Incomprise." +The arguments and statement of accounts, worthy of a bank auditor, were +so irresistible that Carlyle had no resource but to grant the request, +_i.e._ practically to raise the amount to L230, instead of L200 per +annum. It has been calculated that his reliable income even at this time +did not exceed L400, but the rent of the house was kept very low, L30: +he and his wife lived frugally, so that despite the expenses of the +noise-proof room and his German tour he could afford in 1857 to put a +stop to her travelling in second-class railway carriages; in 1860, when +the success of the first instalment of his great work made an end of +financial fears, to keep two servants; and in 1863 to give Mrs. Carlyle +a brougham. Few men have left on the whole so unimpeachable a record in +money matters. + +In November 1854 there occurred an incident hitherto unrecorded in any +biography. The Lord Rectorship of the University of Glasgow having fallen +vacant, the "Conservative Club" of the year had put forward Mr. Disraeli +as successor to the honorary office. A small body of Mr. Carlyle's +admirers among the senior students on the other side nominated him, +partly as a tribute of respect and gratitude, partly in opposition to +a statesman whom they then distrusted. The nomination was, after much +debate, adopted by the so-called "Liberal Association" of that day; +and, with a curious irony, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ and +_Friedrich II._ was pitted, as a Radical, against the future promoter of +the Franchise of 1867 as a Tory. It soon appeared that his supporters +had underestimated the extent to which Mr. Carlyle had offended Scotch +theological prejudice and outraged the current Philanthropy. His name +received some sixty adherents, and had ultimately to be withdrawn. The +nomination was received by the Press, and other exponents of popular +opinion, with denunciations that came loudest and longest from the +leaders of orthodox Dissent, then arrogating to themselves the profession +of Liberalism and the initiation of Reform. Among the current expressions +in reference to his social and religious creeds were the following:-- + + Carlyle's philanthropy is not that of Howard, his cure for + national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving + wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be + described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong." + He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down + into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is + a sham.... Elect him and you bid God-speed to Pantheism and + spiritualism. + + [Footnote: Mr. Wylie states that "twice before his election by his + own University he (Carlyle) had been invited to allow himself to + be nominated for the office of Lord Rector, once by students in + the University of Glasgow and once by those of Aberdeen: but both + of these invitations he had declined." This as regards Glasgow is + incorrect.] + + Mr. Carlyle neither possesses the talent nor the distinction, nor + does he occupy the position which entitle a man to such an honour + as the Rectorial Chair. The _Scotch Guardian_ writes: But for the + folly exhibited in bringing forward Mr. Disraeli, scarcely any + party within the College or out of it would have ventured to + nominate a still more obnoxious personage. This is the first + instance we have been able to discover in which the suffrages of + the youth of the University have been sought for a candidate who + denied in his writings that the revealed Word of God is "the way, + the truth, the life." It is impossible to separate Mr. Carlyle + from that obtrusive feature of his works in which the solemn + verities of our holy religion are sneered at as wornout + "biblicalities," "unbelievabilities," and religious profession is + denounced as "dead putrescent cant." The reader of the _Life of + Sterling_ is not left to doubt for a moment the author's malignant + hostility to the religion of the Bible. In that work, saving faith + is described as "stealing into heaven by the modern method of + sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on earth," that is + to say, by believing in the doctrines of the Gospels. How, after + this, could the Principal and Professors of the University, the + guardians of the faiths and morals of its inexperienced youth, + accompany to the Common Hall, and allow to address the students a + man who has degraded his powers to the life-labour of sapping and + mining the foundations of the truth, and opened the fire of his + fiendish raillery against the citadel of our best aspirations and + dearest hopes? + +In the result, two men of genius--however diverse--were discarded, and +a Scotch nobleman of conspicuous talent, always an active, if not +intrusive, champion of orthodoxy, was returned by an "overwhelming +majority." In answer to intelligence transmitted to Mr. Carlyle of these +events, the president of the Association of his supporters--who had +nothing on which to congratulate themselves save that only the benches +of the rooms in which they held their meetings had been riotously +broken,--received the following previously unpublished letter:-- + + Chelsea, _16th December_ 1854. + + DEAR SIR--I have received your Pamphlet; and return many + thanks for all your kindness to me. I am sorry to learn, as + I do for the first time from this narrative, what angry + nonsense some of my countrymen see good to write of me. Not + being much a reader of Newspapers, I had hardly heard of the + Election till after it was finished; and I did not know that + anything of this melancholy element of Heterodoxy, + "Pantheism," etc. etc., had been introduced into the matter. + It is an evil, after its sort, this of being hated and + denounced by fools and ignorant persons; but it cannot be + mended for the present, and so must be left standing there. + + That another wiser class think differently, nay, that they + alone have any real knowledge of the question, or any real + right to vote upon it, is surely an abundant compensation. + If that be so, then all is still right; and probably there + is no harm done at all!--To you, and the other young + gentlemen who have gone with you on this occasion, I can + only say that I feel you have loyally meant to do me a great + honour and kindness; that I am deeply sensible of your + genial recognition, of your noble enthusiasm (which reminds + me of my own young years); and that in fine there is no loss + or gain of an Election which can in the least alter these + valuable facts, or which is not wholly insignificant to me, + in comparison with them. "Elections" are not a thing + transacted by the gods, in general; and I have known very + unbeautiful creatures "elected" to be kings, chief-priests, + railway kings, etc., by the "most sweet voices," and the + spiritual virtue that inspires these, in our time! + + Leaving all that, I will beg you all to retain your + honourable good feelings towards me; and to think that if + anything I have done or written can help any one of you in + the noble problem of living like a wise man in these evil + and foolish times, it will be more valuable to me than never + so many Elections or Non-elections. With many good wishes + and regards I heartily thank you all, and remain--Yours very + sincerely, + + T. CARLYLE. + +[Footnote: For the elucidation of some points of contact between Carlyle +and Lord Beaconsfield, _vide_ Mr. Froude's _Life_ of the latter.] + +Carlyle's letters to strangers are always valuable, for they are terse +and reticent. In writing to weavers, like Bamford; to men in trouble, as +Cooper; to students, statesmen, or earnest inquirers of whatever degree, +a genuine sympathy for them takes the place of the sympathy for himself, +often too prominent in the copious effusions to his intimates. The letter +above quoted is of special interest, as belonging to a time from which +comparatively few survive; when he was fairly under weigh with a task +which seemed to grow in magnitude under his gaze. The _Life of Friedrich_ +could not be a succession of dramatic scenes, like the _French +Revolution_, nor a biography like _Cromwell_, illustrated by the +surrounding events of thirty years. Carlyle found, to his dismay, that he +had involved himself in writing the History of Germany, and in a measure +of Europe, during the eighteenth century, a period perhaps the most +tangled and difficult to deal with of any in the world's annals. He was +like a man who, with intent to dig up a pine, found himself tugging at +the roots of an Igdrasil that twined themselves under a whole Hercynian +forest. His constant cries of positive pain in the progress of the work +are distressing, as his indomitable determination to wrestle with and +prevail over it is inspiring. There is no imaginable image that he does +not press into his service in rattling the chains of his voluntary +servitude. Above all, he groans over the unwieldy mass of his +authorities--"anti-solar systems of chaff." + + "I read old German books dull as stupidity itself--nay + superannuated stupidity--gain with labour the dreariest + glimpses of unimportant extinct human beings ... but when I + begin operating: _how_ to reduce that widespread black + desert of Brandenburg sand to a small human garden! ... I have + no capacity of grasping the big chaos that lies around me, + and reducing it to order. Order! Reducing! It is like + compelling the grave to give up its dead!" + +Elsewhere he compares his travail with the monster of his own creation +to "Balder's ride to the death kingdoms, through frozen rain, sound of +subterranean torrents, leaden-coloured air"; and in the retrospect of +the _Reminiscences_ touchingly refers to his thirteen years of rarely +relieved isolation. "A desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my whole +strength devoted to it ... withdrawn from all the world." He received few +visitors and had few correspondents, but kept his life vigorous by riding +on his horse Fritz (the gift of the Marshalls), "during that book, some +30,000 miles, much of it, all the winter part of it, under cloud of +night, sun just setting when I mounted. All the rest of the day I sat, +silent, aloft, insisting upon work, and such work, _invitissima Minerva_, +for that matter." Mrs. Carlyle had her usual share of the sufferings +involved in "the awful _Friedrich_." "That tremendous book," she writes, +"made prolonged and entire devastation of any satisfactory semblance of +home life or home happiness." But when at last, by help of Neuberg and of +Mr. Larkin, who made the maps of the whole book, the first two volumes +were in type (they appeared in autumn 1858), his wife hailed them in a +letter sent from Edinburgh to Chelsea: "Oh, my dear, what a magnificent +book this is going to be, the best of all your books, forcible, clear, and +sparkling as the _French Revolution_; compact and finished as _Cromwell_. +Yes, you shall see that it will be the best of all your books, and small +thanks to it, it has taken a doing." On which the author naively purrs: +"It would be worth while to write books, if mankind would read them as +you." Later he speaks of his wife's recognition and that of Emerson--who +wrote enthusiastically of the art of the work, though much of it was +across his grain--as "the only bit of human criticism in which he could +discern lineaments of the thing." But the book was a swift success, two +editions of 2000 and another of 1000 copies being sold in a comparatively +brief space. Carlyle's references to this--after his return from another +visit to the north and the second trip to Germany--seen somewhat +ungracious:-- + + Book ... much babbled over in newspapers ... no better to me + than the barking of dogs ... officious people put reviews + into my hands, and in an idle hour I glanced partly into + these; but it would have been better not, so sordidly ignorant + and impertinent were they, though generally laudatory. + +[Footnote: Carlyle himself writes: "I felt well enough how it was crushing +down her existence, as it was crushing down my own; and the thought that +she had not been at the choosing of it, and yet must suffer so for it, was +occasionally bitter to me. But the practical conclusion always was, Get +done with it, get done with it! For the saving of us both that is the one +outlook. And sure enough, I did stand by that dismal task with all my time +and all my means; day and night wrestling with it, as with the ugliest +dragon, which blotted out the daylight and the rest of the world to me +till I should get it slain."] + +But these notices recall the fact familiar to every writer, that while +the assailants of a book sometimes read it, favourable reviewers hardly +ever do; these latter save their time by payment of generally superficial +praise, and a few random quotations. + +Carlyle scarcely enjoyed his brief respite on being discharged of the +first instalment of his book: the remainder lay upon him like a menacing +nightmare; he never ceased to feel that the work must be completed ere he +could be free, and that to accomplish this he must be alone. Never absent +from his wife without regrets, lamentations, contrite messages, and +childlike entreaties for her to "come and protect him," when she came +it was to find that they were better apart; for his temper was never +softened by success. "Living beside him," she writes in 1858, is "the +life of a weathercock in high wind." During a brief residence together +in a hired house near Aberdour in Fifeshire, she compares herself to a +keeper in a madhouse; and writes later from Sunny bank to her husband, +"If you could fancy me in some part of the house out of sight, my absence +would make little difference to you, considering how little I do see of +you, and how preoccupied you are when I do see you." Carlyle answers in +his touching strain, "We have had a sore life pilgrimage together, much +bad road. Oh, forgive me!" and sends her beautiful descriptions; but her +disposition, not wholly forgiving, received them somewhat sceptically. +"Byron," said Lady Byron, "can write anything, but he does not feel it"; +and Mrs. Carlyle on one occasion told her "harsh spouse" that his fine +passages were very well written for the sake of future biographers: +a charge he almost indignantly repudiates. He was then, August 1860, +staying at Thurso Castle, the guest of Sir George Sinclair; a visit that +terminated in an unfortunate careless mistake about a sudden change of +plans, resulting in his wife, then with the Stanleys at Alderley, +being driven back to Chelsea and deprived of her promised pleasure and +requisite rest with her friends in the north. + +The frequency of such incidents,--each apart capable of being palliated +by the same fallacy of division that has attempted in vain to justify the +domestic career of Henry VIII.,--points to the conclusion of Miss Gully +that Carlyle, though often nervous on the subject, acted to his wife as +if he were "totally inconsiderate of her health," so much so that she +received medical advice not to be much at home when he was in the stress +of writing. In January 1858 he writes to his brother John an anxious +letter in reference to a pain about a hand-breadth below the heart, of +which she had begun to complain, the premonitory symptom of the disease +which ultimately proved fatal; but he was not sufficiently impressed +to give due heed to the warning; nor was it possible, with his +long-engrained habits, to remove the Marah spring that lay under all the +wearisome bickerings, repentances, and renewals of offence. The "very +little herring" who declined to be made a part of Lady Ashburton's +luggage now suffered more than ever from her inanimate rival. The +highly-endowed wife of one of the most eminent philanthropists of +America, whose life was devoted to the awakening of defective intellects, +thirty-five years ago murmured, "If I were only an idiot!" Similarly Mrs. +Carlyle might have remonstrated, "Why was I not born a book!" Her letters +and journal teem to tiresomeness with the refrain, "I feel myself +extremely neglected for unborn generations." Her once considerable +ambitions had been submerged, and her own vivid personality overshadowed +by a man she was afraid to meet at breakfast, and glad to avoid at +dinner. A woman of immense talent and a spark of genius linked to a man +of vast genius and imperious will, she had no choice but to adopt his +judgments, intensify his dislikes, and give a sharper edge to his sneers. + +Mr. Froude, who for many years lived too near the sun to see the sun, +and inconsistently defends many of the inconsistencies he has himself +inherited from his master, yet admits that Carlyle treated the Broad +Church party in the English Church with some injustice. His recorded +estimates of the leading theologians of the age, and personal relation to +them, are hopelessly bewildering. His lifelong friendship for Erskine of +Linlathen is intelligible, though he did not extend the same charity to +what he regarded as the muddle-headedness of Maurice (Erskine's spiritual +son), and keenly ridiculed the reconciliation pamphlet entitled +"Subscription no Bondage." The Essayists and Reviewers, "Septem contra +Christum," "should," he said, "be shot for deserting their posts"; even +Dean Stanley, their _amicus curioe,_ whom he liked, came in for a share +of his sarcasm; "there he goes," he said to Froude, "boring holes in the +bottom of the Church of England." Of Colenso, who was doing as much as +any one for the "Exodus from Houndsditch," he spoke with open contempt, +saying, "he mistakes for fame an extended pillory that he is standing +on"; and was echoed by his wife, "Colenso isn't worth talking about for +five minutes, except for the absurdity of a man making arithmetical +onslaughts on the Pentateuch with a bishop's little black silk apron on." +This is not the place to discuss the controversy involved; but we +are bound to note the fact that Carlyle was, by an inverted Scotch +intolerance, led to revile men rowing in the same boat as himself, but +with a different stroke. To another broad Churchman, Charles Kingsley, +partly from sympathy with this writer's imaginative power, he was more +considerate; and one of the still deeply religious freethinkers of the +time was among his closest friends. The death of Arthur Clough in 1861 +left another blank in Carlyle's life: we have had in this century to +lament the comparatively early loss of few men of finer genius. Clough +had not, perhaps, the practical force of Sterling, but his work is of a +higher order than any of the fragments of the earlier favourite. Among +High Churchmen Carlyle commended Dr. Pusey as "solid and judicious," and +fraternised with the Bishop of Oxford; but he called Keble "an ape," +and said of Cardinal Newman that he had "no more brains than an +ordinary-sized rabbit." + +These years are otherwise marked by his most glaring political blunder. +The Civil War, then raging in America, brought, with its close, the +abolition of Slavery throughout the States, a consummation for which he +cared little, for he had never professed to regard the negroes as fit for +freedom; but this result, though inevitable, was incidental. As is known +to every one who has the remotest knowledge of Transatlantic history, +the war was in great measure a struggle for the preservation of National +Unity: but it was essentially more; it was the vindication of Law and +Order against the lawless and disorderly violence of those who, when +defeated at the polling-booth, flew to the bowie knife; an assertion of +Right as Might for which Carlyle cared everything: yet all he had to +say of it was his "Ilias Americana in nuce," published in _Macmillan's +Magazine_, August 1863. + + _Peter of the North_ (to Paul of the South): "Paul, you + unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for + life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going + straight to Hell, you----" + + _Paul_: "Good words, Peter. The risk is my own. I am + willing to take the risk. Hire you your servants by the + month or the day, and get straight to Heaven; leave me to my + own method." + + _Peter_: "No, I won't. I will beat your brains out + first!" [And is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet + manage it.] + +This, except the _Prinzenraub_, a dramatic presentation of a dramatic +incident in old German history, was his only side publication during the +writing of _Friedrich_. + +After the war ended and Emerson's letters of remonstrance had proved +prophetic, Carlyle is said to have confessed to Mr. Moncure Conway as +well as to Mr. Froude that he "had not seen to the bottom of the matter." +But his republication of this nadir of his nonsense was an offence, +emphasising the fact that, however inspiring, he is not always a safe +guide, even to those content to abide by his own criterion of success. + +There remains of this period the record of a triumph and of a tragedy. +After seven years more of rarely intermitted toil, broken only by a few +visits, trips to the sea-shore, etc., and the distress of the terrible +accident to his wife,--her fall on a curbstone and dislocation of a +limb,--which has been often sufficiently detailed, he had finished his +last great work. The third volume of _Friedrich_ was published in May +1862, the fourth appeared in February 1864, the fifth and sixth in March +1865. Carlyle had at last slain his Minotaur, and stood before the +world as a victorious Theseus, everywhere courted and acclaimed, his +hard-earned rest only disturbed by a shower of honours. His position +as the foremost prose writer of his day was as firmly established in +Germany, where his book was at once translated and read by all readers of +history, as in England. Scotland, now fully awake to her reflected fame, +made haste to make amends. Even the leaders of the sects, bond and +"free," who had denounced him, were now eager to proclaim that he had +been intrinsically all along, though sometimes in disguise, a champion of +their faith. No men knew better how to patronise, or even seem to lead, +what they had failed to quell. The Universities made haste with their +burnt-offerings. In 1856 a body of Edinburgh students had prematurely +repeated the attempt of their forerunners in Glasgow to confer on him +their Lord Rectorship, and failed. In 1865 he was elected, in opposition +again to Mr. Disraeli, to succeed Mr. Gladstone, the genius of elections +being in a jesting mood. He was prevailed on to accept the honour, and, +later, consented to deliver in the spring of 1866 the customary Inaugural +Address. Mrs. Carlyle's anxiety on this occasion as to his success and +his health is a tribute to her constant and intense fidelity. He went +north to his Installation, under the kind care of encouraging friends, +imprimis of Professor Tyndall, one of his truest; they stopped on the road +at Fryston, with Lord Houghton, and there met Professor Huxley, who +accompanied them to Edinburgh. Carlyle, having resolved to speak and not +merely to read what he had to say, was oppressed with nervousness; and of +the event itself he writes: "My speech was delivered in a mood of defiant +despair, and under the pressure of nightmare. Some feeling that I was not +speaking lies alone sustained me. The applause, etc., I took for empty +noise, which it really was not altogether." The address, nominally on the +"Reading of Books," really a rapid autobiography of his own intellectual +career, with references to history, literature, religion, and the conduct +of life, was, as Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs. Carlyle,--save for some +difficulty the speaker had in making himself audible--"a perfect triumph." +His reception by one of the most enthusiastic audiences ever similarly +assembled marked the climax of a steadily-increasing fame. It may be +compared to the late welcome given to Wordsworth in the Oxford Theatre. +After four days spent with Erskine and his own brother James in Edinburgh, +he went for a week's quiet to Scotsbrig, and was kept there, lingering +longer than he had intended, by a sprained ankle, "blessed in the country +stillness, the purity of sky and earth, and the absence of all babble." On +April 20th he wrote his last letter to his wife, a letter which she never +read. On the evening of Saturday the 21st, when staying on the way south +at his sister's house at Dumfries, he received a telegram informing him +that the close companionship of forty years--companionship of struggle and +victory, of sad and sweet so strangely blent--was for ever at an end. Mrs. +Carlyle had been found dead in her carriage when driving round Hyde Park +on the afternoon of that day, her death (from heart-disease) being +accelerated by an accident to a favourite little dog. Carlyle felt as "one +who hath been stunned," hardly able to realise his loss. "They took me out +next day ... to wander in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and +anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation, 'My poor little +woman,' but no full gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come." On +the following Monday he set off with his brother for London. "Never for a +thousand years shall I forget that arrival hero of ours, my first +unwelcomed by her. She lay in her coffin, lovely in death. Pale death Hid +things not mine or ours had possession of our poor darling." On Wednesday +they returned, and on Thursday the 26th she was buried in the nave of the +old Abbey Kirk at Haddington, in the grave of her father The now desolate +old man, who had walked with her over many a stony road, paid the first of +his many regretful tributes in the epitaph inscribed over her tomb: in +which follows, after the name and date of birth:-- + +IN HER BRIGHT EXISTENCE SHE HAD MORE SORROWS THAN ARE COMMON, BUT ALSO +A SOFT INVINCIBILITY, A CAPACITY OF DISCERNMENT, AND A NOBLE LOYALTY OF +HEART WHICH ARE RARE. FOR 40 YEARS SHE WAS THE TRUE AND LOVING HELP-MATE +OF HER HUSBAND, AND BY ACT AND WORD UNWEARIEDLY FORWARDED HIM AS NONE +ELSE COULD IN ALL OF WORTHY THAT HE DID OR ATTEMPTED. SHE DIED AT +LONDON, 21ST APRIL 1866, SUDDENLY SNATCHED FROM HIM, AND THE LIGHT OF HIS +LIFE AS IF GONE OUT. + +[Footnote: For the most interesting, loyally sympathetic, and +characteristic account of Carlyle's journey north on this occasion, and of +the incidents which followed, we may refer to _New fragments_, by John +Tyndall, just published.] + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +DECADENCE + +[1866-1881] + +After this shock of bereavement Carlyle's days went by "on broken wing," +never brightening, slowly saddening to the close; but lit up at intervals +by flashes of the indomitable energy that, starting from no vantage, +had conquered a world of thought, and established in it, if not a new +dynasty, at least an intellectual throne. Expressions of sympathy came +to him from all directions, from the Queen herself downwards, and he +received them with the grateful acknowledgment that he had, after all, +been loved by his contemporaries. When the question arose as to his +future life, it seemed a natural arrangement that he and his brother +John, then a childless widower who had retired from his profession with a +competence, should take up house together. The experiment was made, but, +to the discredit of neither, it proved a failure. They were in some +respects too much alike. John would not surrender himself wholly to the +will or whims even of one whom he revered, and the attempt was by mutual +consent abandoned; but their affectionate correspondence lasted through +the period of their joint lives. Carlyle, being left to himself in his +"gaunt and lonesome home," after a short visit to Miss Bromley, an +intimate friend of his wife, at her residence in Kent, accepted the +invitation of the second Lady Ashburton to spend the winter in her house +at Mentone. There he arrived on Christmas Eve 1866, under the kind convoy +of Professor Tyndall, and remained breathing the balmy air and gazing on +the violet sea till March of the following year. During the interval he +occupied himself in writing his _Reminiscences,_ drawing pen-and-ink +pictures of the country, steeped in beauty fit to soothe any sorrow save +such as his, and taking notes of some of the passers-by. Of the greatest +celebrity then encountered, Mr. Gladstone, he writes in his journal, in a +tone intensified as time went on: "Talk copious, ingenious,... a man +of ardent faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons +shape.... Man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed +by the Prince, or many Princes, of the Air." Back in Chelsea, he was +harassed by heaps of letters, most of which, we are told, he answered, +and spent a large portion of his time and means in charities. + +Amid Carlyle's irreconcilable inconsistencies of theory, and sometimes +of conduct, he was through life consistent in practical benevolence. The +interest in the welfare of the working classes that in part inspired his +_Sartor, Chartism,_ and _Past and Present_ never failed him. He was +among the foremost in all national movements to relieve and solace their +estate. He was, further, with an amiable disregard of his own maxims, +over lenient towards the waifs and strays of humanity, in some instances +careless to inquire too closely into the causes of their misfortune or +the degree of their demerits. In his latter days this disposition grew +upon him: the gray of his own evening skies made him fuller of compassion +to all who lived in the shade. Sad himself, he mourned with those who +mourned; afflicted, he held out hands to all in affliction. Consequently +"the poor were always with him," writing, entreating, and personally +soliciting all sorts of alms, from advice and help to ready money. His +biographer informs us that he rarely gave an absolute refusal to any +of these various classes of beggars. He answered a letter which is a +manifest parody of his own surface misanthropy; he gave a guinea to a +ticket-of-leave-convict, pretending to be a decayed tradesman; and a +shilling to a blind man, whose dog took him over the crossing to a gin +shop. Froude remonstrated; "Poor fellow," was the answer, "I daresay he +is cold and thirsty." The memory of Wordsworth is less warmly cherished +among the dales of Westmoreland than that of Carlyle in the lanes of +Chelsea, where "his one expensive luxury was charity." + +His attitude on political questions, in which for ten years he still took +a more or less prominent part, represents him on his sterner side. The +first of these was the controversy about Governor Eyre, who, having +suppressed the Jamaica rebellion by the violent and, as alleged, cruel +use of martial law, and hung a quadroon preacher called Gordon--the man +whether honest or not being an undoubted incendiary--without any law at +all, was by the force of popular indignation dismissed in disgrace, and +then arraigned for mis-government and illegality. In the movement, which +resulted in the governor's recall and impeachment, there was doubtless +the usual amount of exaggeration--represented by the violent language +of one of Carlyle's minor biographers: "There were more innocent people +slain than at Jeffreys' Bloody Assize"; "The massacre of Glencoe was +nothing to it"; "Members of Christian Churches were flogged," etc. +etc.--but among its leaders there were so many men of mark and celebrity, +men like John S. Mill, T. Hughes, John Bright, Fawcett, Cairnes, Goldwin +Smith, Herbert Spencer, and Frederick Harrison, that it could not be set +aside as a mere unreasoning clamour. It was a hard test of Carlyle's +theory of strong government; and he stood to his colours. Years before, +on John Sterling suggesting that the negroes themselves should be +consulted as to making a permanent engagement with their masters, he had +said, "I never thought the rights of the negroes worth much discussing +in any form. Quashee will get himself made a slave again, and with +beneficent whip will be compelled to work." On this occasion he regarded +the black rebellion in the same light as the Sepoy revolt. He organised +and took the chair of a "Defence Committee," joined or backed by Ruskin, +Henry Kingsley, Tyndall, Sir R. Murchison, Sir T. Gladstone, and others. +"I never," says Mr. Froude, "knew Carlyle more anxious about anything." +He drew up a petition to Government and exerted himself heart and soul +for the "brave, gentle, chivalrous, and clear man," who when the ship was +on fire "had been called to account for having flung a bucket or two of +water into the hold beyond what was necessary." He had damaged some of +the cargo perhaps, but he had saved the ship, and deserved to be made +"dictator of Jamaica for the next twenty-five years," to govern after +the model of Dr. Francia in Paraguay. The committee failed to get +Eyre reinstalled or his pension restored; but the impeachment was +unsuccessful. + +The next great event was the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, by the +Tories, educated by Mr. Disraeli to this method of "dishing the Whigs," +by outbidding them in the scramble for votes. This instigated the famous +tract called _Shooting Niagara_, written in the spirit of the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_--Carlyle's final and unqualified denunciation of this +concession to Democracy and all its works. But the upper classes in +England seemed indifferent to the warning. "Niagara, or what you like," +the author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, "we will +at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when Church and State have +gone." A _mot_ emphatically of the decadence. + +Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions being a means of +bringing the Irish question within the range of practical politics. + + I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of + those Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house + had decided to expel and extirpate the human inhabitants, + which latter seemed to have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor + arsenic, and are trying to prevail by the method of love. + +Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland for text and Cromwell's +storm of Drogheda for example, or Otto von Bismarck, would have been, in +his view, in place at Dublin Castle. + +In the next great event of the century, the close of the greatest +European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which pleased Cato pleased +also the gods. Carlyle, especially in his later days, had a deepening +confidence in the Teutonic, a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He +regarded the contest between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, and +wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with exultation. When +a feeling spread in this country, naming itself sympathy for the +fallen,--really half that, the other half, as in the American war, being +jealousy of the victor,--and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a +decisive letter to the _Times_, November 11th 1870, tracing the sources +of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV., and ridiculing the +prevailing sentiment about the recaptured provinces of Lothringen and +Elsass. With a possible reference to Victor Hugo and his clients, he +remarks-- + + They believe that they are the "Christ of Nations."... I + wish they would inquire whether there might not be a + Cartouche of nations. Cartouche had many gallant + qualities--had many fine ladies begging locks of his hair + while the indispensable gibbet was preparing. Better he + should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, who has + him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part + of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and + try to become again a Chevalier Bayard. All Europe does + _not_ come to the rescue in gratitude for the heavenly + illumination it is getting from France: nor could all Europe + if it did prevent that awful Chancellor from having his own + way. Metz and the boundary fence, I reckon, will be + dreadfully hard to get out of that Chancellor's hands + again.... Considerable misconception as to Herr von Bismarck + is still prevalent in England. He, as I read him, is not a + person of Napoleonic ideas, but of ideas quite superior to + Napoleonic.... That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid + Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become + Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, + gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive + France, seems to me the hopefulest fact that has occurred in + my time. + +Carlyle seldom wrote with more force, or with more justice. Only, to be +complete, his paper should have ended with a warning. He has done more +than any other writer to perpetuate in England the memories of the great +thinkers and actors--Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Koerner, Stein, Goethe,--who +taught their countrymen how to endure defeat and retrieve adversity. Who +will celebrate their yet undefined successors, who will train Germany +gracefully to bear the burden of prosperity? Two years later Carlyle +wrote or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to shake, his +historical sketch of the _Early Kings of Norway_, showing no diminution +of power either of thought or expression, his estimates of the three +Hakons and of the three Olafs being especially notable; and a paper +on _The Portraits of John Knox_, the prevailing dull gray of which is +relieved by a radiant vision of Mary Stuart. + +He was incited to another public protest, when, in May 1877, towards the +close of the Russo-Turkish war, he had got, or imagined himself to have +got, reliable information that Lord Beaconsfield, then Prime Minister, +having sent our fleet to the Dardanelles, was planning to seize Gallipoli +and throw England into the struggle. Carlyle never seems to have +contemplated the possibility of a Sclavo-Gallic alliance against the +forces of civilised order in Europe, and he chose to think of the Czars +as the representatives of an enlightened autocracy. We are here mainly +interested in the letter he wrote to the _Times_, as "his last public act +in this world,"--the phrase of Mr. Froude, who does not give the letter, +and unaccountably says it "was brief, not more than three or four lines." +It is as follows:-- + + Sir--A rumour everywhere prevails that our miraculous + Premier, in spite of the Queen's Proclamation of Neutrality, + intends, under cover of care for "British interests," to + send the English fleet to the Baltic, or do some other feat + which shall compel Russia to declare war against England. + Latterly the rumour has shifted from the Baltic and become + still more sinister, on the eastern side of the scene, where + a feat is contemplated that will force, not Russia only, + but all Europe, to declare war against us. This latter I + have come to know as an indisputable fact; in our present + affairs and outlooks surely a grave one. + + As to "British interests" there is none visible or + conceivable to me, except taking strict charge of our route + to India by Suez and Egypt, and for the rest, resolutely + steering altogether clear of any copartnery with the Turk in + regard to this or any other "British interest" whatever. It + should be felt by England as a real ignominy to be connected + with such a Turk at all. Nay, if we still had, as we ought + to have, a wish to save him from perdition and annihilation + in God's world, the one future for him that has any hope in + it is even now that of being conquered by the Russians, and + gradually schooled and drilled into peaceable attempt at + learning to be himself governed. The newspaper outcry + against Russia is no more respectable to me than the howling + of Bedlam, proceeding as it does from the deepest ignorance, + egoism, and paltry national jealousy. + + These things I write, not on hearsay, but on accurate + knowledge, and to all friends of their country will + recommend immediate attention to them while there is yet + time, lest in a few weeks the maddest and most criminal + thing that a British government could do, should be done + and all Europe kindle into flames of war.--I am, etc. + + T. CARLYLE. + 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, + _May 4th._ + +Meanwhile honours without stint were being rendered to the great author +and venerable sage. In 1868 he had by request a personal interview with +the Queen, and has left, in a letter, a graphic account of the interview +at the Deanery of Westminster. Great artists as Millais, Watts, and +Boehm vied with one another, in painting or sculpture, to preserve his +lineaments; prominent reviews to record their impression of his work, +and disciples to show their gratitude. One of these, Professor Masson +of Edinburgh, in memory of Carlyle's own tribute to Goethe, started a +subscription for a medal, presented on his eightieth birthday; but he +valued more a communication of the same date from Prince Bismarck. Count +Bernstoff from Berlin wrote him (1871) a semi-official letter of thanks +for the services he had conferred on Germany, and in 1874 he was +prevailed on to accept the Prussian "Ordre pour le merite." In the same +year Mr. Disraeli proposed, in courteous oblivion of bygone hostilities, +to confer on him a pension and the "Order of the Grand Cross of Bath," an +emolument and distinction which Carlyle, with equal courtesy, declined. +To the Countess of Derby, whom he believed to be the originator of the +scheme, he (December 30th) expressed his sense of the generosity of the +Premier's letter: "It reveals to me, after all the hard things I have +said of him, a now and unexpected stratum of genial dignity and manliness +of character." To his brother John he wrote: "I do, however, truly admire +the magnanimity of Dizzy in regard to me. He is the only man I almost +never spoke of without contempt ... and yet see here he comes with a +pan of hot coals for my guilty head." That he was by no means gagged by +personal feeling or seduced in matters of policy is evident from the +above-quoted letter to the _Times_; but he liked Disraeli better than +he did his great rival; the one may have bewildered his followers, the +other, according to his critic's view, deceived himself--the lie, in +Platonic phrase, had got into the soul, till, to borrow an epigram, "he +made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice." "Carlyle," says +Mr. Froude, "did not regard Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who, +knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into +specious sentiments, but as the representative of the numerous cants of +the age ... differing from others in that the cant seemed true to him. +He in fact believed him to be one of those fatal figures created by +England's evil genius to work irreparable mischief." It must be admitted +that Carlyle's censures are so broadcast as to lose half their sting. +In uncontroversial writing, it is enough to note that his methods of +reforming the world and Mr. Gladstone's were as far as the poles asunder; +and the admirers of the latter may console themselves with the reflection +that the censor was, at the same time, talking with equal disdain of the +scientific discoverers of the age--conspicuously of Mr. Darwin, whom he +describes as "evolving man's soul from frog spawn," adding, "I have +no patience with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other +criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose _Adam Bede_ he pronounced +"simply dull," display a curious limitation or obtuseness of mind. + +One of the pleasantest features of his declining years is the ardour of +his attachment to the few staunch friends who helped to cheer and console +them. He had a sincere regard for Fitzjames Stephen, "an honest man with +heavy strokes"; for Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he said in effect, "Your +duty one day will be to take away that bauble and close the doors of +the House of Discord"; for Tyndall always; for Lecky, despite their +differences; for Moncure Conway, athwart the question of "nigger" +philanthropies; for Kingsley and Tennyson and Browning, the last of whom +was a frequent visitor till near the end. Froude he had bound to his soul +by hoops of steel; and a more faithful disciple and apostle, in intention +always, in practice in the main (despite the most perplexing errors of +judgment), no professed prophet ever had. But Carlyle's highest praise +is reserved for Ruskin, whom he regarded as no mere art critic, but as a +moral power worthy to receive and carry onward his own "cross of fire." +The relationship between the two great writers is unchequered by any +shade of patronage on the one hand, of jealousy or adulation on the +other. The elder recognised in the younger an intellect as keen, a spirit +as fearless as his own, who in the Eyre controversy had "plunged his +rapier to the hilt in the entrails of the Blatant Beast," _i.e._ Popular +Opinion. He admired all Ruskin's books; the _Stones of Venice,_ the most +solid structure of the group, he named "Sermons in Stones"; he resented +an attack on _Sesame and Lilies_ as if the book had been his own; and +passages of the _Queen of the Air_ went into his heart "like arrows." The +_Order of the Rose_ has attempted a practical embodiment of the review +contemplated by Carlyle, as a counteractive to the money making practice +and expediency-worships of the day. + +Meanwhile he had been putting his financial affairs in order. In 1867, +on return from Mentone, he had recorded his bequest of the revenues of +Graigenputtock for the endowment of three John Welsh bursaries in the +University of Edinburgh. In 1873 he made his will, leaving John Forster +and Froude his literary executors: a legacy of trust which, on the death +of the former, fell to the latter, to whose discretion, by various later +bequests, less and less limited, there was confided the choice--at +last almost made a duty--of editing and publishing the manuscripts and +journals of himself and his wife. + +Early in his seventy-third year (December 1867) Carlyle quotes, "Youth is +a garland of roses," adding, "I did not find it such. 'Age is a crown of +thorns.' Neither is this altogether true for me. If sadness and sorrow +tend to loosen us from life, they make the place of rest more desirable." +The talk of Socrates in the _Republic_, and the fine phrases in Cicero's +_De Senectute_, hardly touch on the great grief, apart from physical +infirmities, of old age--its increasing solitariness. After sixty, a man +may make disciples and converts, but few new friends, while the old ones +die daily; the "familiar faces" vanish in the night to which there is no +morning, and leave nothing in their stead. + +During these years Carlyle's former intimates were falling round him like +the leaves from an autumn tree, and the kind care of the few survivors, +the solicitous attention of his niece, nurse, and amanuensis, Mary +Aitken, yet left him desolate. Clough had died, and Thomas Erskine, and +John Forster, and Wilberforce, with whom he thought he agreed, and Mill, +his old champion and ally, with whom he so disagreed that he +almost maligned his memory--calling one of the most interesting of +autobiographies "the life of a logic-chopping machine." In March 1876 he +attended the funeral of Lady Augusta Stanley; in the following month his +brother Aleck died in Canada; and in 1878 his brother John at Dumfries. +He seemed destined to be left alone; his physical powers were waning. As +early as 1868 he and his last horse had their last ride together; later, +his right hand failed, and he had to write by dictation. In the gathering +gloom he began to look on death as a release from the shreds of life, and +to envy the old Roman mode of shuffling off the coil. His thoughts turned +more and more to Hamlet's question of the possible dreams hereafter, and +his longing for his lost Jeannie made him beat at the iron gates of the +"Undiscovered Country" with a yearning cry; but he could get no answer +from reason, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, least +of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven "by way of mesmeric and +spiritualistic trances." His question and answer are always-- + + Strength quite a stranger to me.... Life is verily a + weariness on those terms. Oftenest I feel willing to go, were + my time come. Sweet to rejoin, were it only in eternal sleep, + those that are away. That ... is now and then the whisper + of my worn-out heart, and a kind of solace to me. "But why + annihilation or eternal sleep?" I ask too. They and I are + alike in the will of the Highest. + +"When," says Mr. Froude, "he spoke of the future and its uncertainties, +he fell back invariably on the last words of his favourite hymn-- + + Wir heissen euch hoffen." + +His favourite quotations in those days were Macbeth's "To-morrow and +to-morrow and to-morrow"; Burns's line, "Had we never lo'ed sae +kindly,"--thinking of the tomb which he was wont to kiss in the gloamin' +in Haddington Church,--the lines from "The Tempest" ending, "our little +life is rounded with a sleep," and the dirge in "Cymbeline." He lived on +during the last years, save for his quiet walks with his biographer about +the banks of the Thames, like a ghost among ghosts, his physical life +slowly ebbing till, on February 4th 1881, it ebbed away. His remains +were, by his own desire, conveyed to Ecclefechan and laid under the +snow-clad soil of the rural churchyard, beside the dust of his kin. He +had objected to be buried, should the request be made (as it was by Dean +Stanley), in Westminster Abbey:[greek: andron gar epiphanon pasa gae +taphos.] + +Of no man whose life has been so laid bare to us is it more difficult to +estimate the character than that of Thomas Carlyle; regarding no one of +equal eminence, with the possible exception of Byron, has opinion been +so divided. After his death there was a carnival of applause from his +countrymen in all parts of the globe, from Canton to San Francisco. Their +hot zeal, only equalled by that of their revelries over the memory of +Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer +than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one +perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist": +"Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, +will be heard no more": the _Scotsman_ newspaper writes of him as +"probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the volcanic +glare of his _French Revolution_ all Epics, ancient and modern, grow pale +and shadowy,... his like is not now left in the world." More recently a +stalwart Aberdonian, on helping to put a bust into a monument, exclaims +in a strain of genuine ardour, "I knew Carlyle, and I aver to you that +his heart was as large and generous as his brain was powerful; that +he was essentially a most lovable man, and that there were depths of +tenderness, kindliness, benevolence, and most delicate courtesy in him, +with all his seeming ruggedness and sternness, such as I have found +throughout my life rarely in any human being." + +On the other side, a little later, after the publication of the +_Reminiscences_, _Blackwood_ denounced the "old man eloquent" as "a +blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were the only person who knew good +from bad. ... Every one and every thing dealt with in his _History_ is +treated in the tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The _World_ +remarks that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthumous +depreciation for a factitious fame; "but the game of venomous +recrimination was begun by himself.... There is little that is +extraordinary, still less that is heroic in his character. He had no +magnanimity about him ... he was full of littleness and weakness, of +shallow dogmatism and of blustering conceit." The _Quarterly_, +after alluding to Carlyle's style "as the eccentric expression of +eccentricity," denounces his choice of "heroes" as reckless of morality. +According to the same authority, he "was not a deep thinker, but he was a +great word-painter ... he has the inspiration as well as the contortions +of the Sibyl, the strength as well as the nodosities of the oak. ... In +the _French Revolution_ he rarely condescends to plain narrative ... it +resembles a drama at the Porte St. Martin, in so many acts and tableaux. +... The raisers of busts and statues in his honour are winging and +pointing new arrows aimed at the reputation of their most distinguished +contemporaries, and doing their best to perpetuate a baneful influence." +_Fraser_, no longer edited by Mr. Froude, swells the chorus of dissent: +"Money, for which he cared little, only came in quantity after the death +of his wife, when everything became indifferent to an old and life-weary +man. Who would be great at such a price? Who would buy so much misery +with so much labour? Most men like their work. In his Carlyle seems to +have found the curse imposed upon Adam.... He cultivated contempt of the +kindly race of men." + +Ample texts for these and similar censures are to be found in the pages +of Mr. Froude, and he has been accused by Carlyle's devotees of having +supplied this material of malice prepense. No accusation was over more +ridiculously unjust. To the mind of every impartial reader, Froude +appears as one of the loyallest if one of the most infatuated of friends. +Living towards the close in almost daily communion with his master, and +in inevitable contact with his numerous frailties, he seems to have +revered him with a love that passeth understanding, and attributed to him +in good faith, as Dryden did in jest to the objects of his mock heroics, +every mental as well as every moral power, _e.g.,_ "Had Carlyle turned +his mind to it he would have been a great philologer." "A great +diplomatist was lost in Carlyle." "He would have done better as a man of +action than a man of words." By kicking the other diplomatists into the +sea, as he threatened to do with the urchins of Kirkcaldy! Froude's +panegyrics are in style and tone worthy of that put into the mouth of +Pericles by Thucydides, with which the modern biographer closes his +only too faithful record. But his claims for his hero--amounting to the +assertions that he was never seriously wrong; that he was as good as he +was great; that "in the weightier matters of the law his life had been +without speck or flaw"; that "such faults as he had were but as the +vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the +man"; that he never, in their intercourse, uttered a "trivial word, nor +one which he had better have left unuttered"--these claims will never be +honoured, for they are refuted in every third page after that on which +they appear:--_e.g._ in the Biography, vol. iv. p. 258, we are told that +Carlyle's "knowledge was not in points or lines but complete and solid": +facing the remark we read, "He liked _ill_ men like Humboldt, Laplace, +or the author of the _Vestiges_. He refused Darwin's transmutation of +species as unproved: he fought against it, though I could see he dreaded +that it might turn out true." The statement that "he always spoke +respectfully of Macaulay" is soon followed by criticisms that make us +exclaim, "Save us from such respect." The extraordinary assertion that +Carlyle was "always just in speaking of living men" is safeguarded by the +quotation of large utterances of injustice and contempt for Coleridge, +Byron, Shelley, Keats, Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and +disparaging patronage of Scott, of Jeffrey, of Mazzini, and of Mill. The +dog-like fidelity of Boswell and Eckermann was fitting to their attitude +and capacity; but the spectacle of one great writer surrendering himself +to another is a new testimony to the glamour of conversational genius. + +[Footnote: This patronage of men, some quite, others nearly on his own +level, whom he delights in calling "small," "thin," and "poor," as if he +were the only big, fat, and rich, is more offensive than spurts of merely +dyspeptic abuse. As regards the libels on Lamb, Dr. Ireland has +endeavoured to establish that they were written in ignorance of the noble +tragedy of "Elia's" life; but this contention cannot be made good as +regards the later attacks.] + +Carlyle was a great man, but a great man spoiled, that is, largely +soured. He was never a Timon; but, while at best a Stoic, he was at worst +a Cynic, emulous though disdainful, trying all men by his own standard, +and intolerant of a rival on the throne. To this result there contributed +the bleak though bracing environment of his early years, amid kindred +more noted for strength than for amenity, whom he loved, trusted, and +revered, but from whose grim creed, formally at least, he had to +tear himself with violent wrenches apart; his purgatory among the +border-ruffians of Annan school; his teaching drudgeries; his hermit +college days; ten years' struggle for a meagre competence; a lifelong +groaning under the Nessus shirt of the irritable yet stubborn +constitution to which genius is often heir; and above all his unusually +late recognition. There is a good deal of natural bitterness in reference +to the long refusal by the publishers of his first original work--an +idyll like Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_, and our finest prose poem in +philosophy. "Popularity," says Emerson, "is for dolls"; but it remains +to find the preacher, prophet, or poet wholly impervious to unjust +criticism. Neglect which crushes dwarfs only exasperates giants, but to +the latter also there is great harm done. Opposition affected Carlyle as +it affected Milton, it made him defiant, at times even fierce, to those +beyond his own inner circle. When he triumphed, he accepted his success +without a boast, but not without reproaches for the past. He was crowned; +but his coronation came too late, and the death of his wife paralysed his +later years. + +Let those who from the Clyde to the Isis, from the Dee to the Straits, +make it their pastime to sneer at living worth, compare Ben Jonson's +lines, + + Your praise and dispraise are to me alike, + One does not stroke me, nor the other strike, + +with Samuel Johnson's, "It has been delayed till most of those whom I +wished to please are sunk into the grave, and success and failure are +empty sounds," and then take to heart the following:-- + + The "recent return of popularity greater than ever," which + I hear of, seems due alone to that late Edinburgh affair; + especially to the Edinburgh "Address," and affords new proof + of the singularly dark and feeble condition of "public + judgment" at this time. No idea, or shadow of an idea, is in + that Address but what had been set forth by me tens of times + before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism + receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to + buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done + with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me + L10,000 a year and bray unanimously their hosannahs + heaven-high for the rest of my life, who now would there be + to get the smallest joy or profit from it? To me I feel as + if it would be a silent sorrow rather, and would bring me + painful retrospections, nothing else. + +We require no open-sesame, no clumsy confidence from attaches flaunting +their intimacy, to assure us that there were "depths of tenderness" in +Carlyle. His susceptibility to the softer influences of nature, of family +life, of his few chosen friends, is apparent in almost every page of his +biography, above all in the _Reminiscences_, those supreme records of +regret, remorse, and the inspiration of bereavement. There is no surge of +sorrow in our literature like that which is perpetually tossed up in +the second chapter of the second volume, with the never-to-be-forgotten +refrain-- + + Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait + not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, + think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death + sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of + the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and + beautiful, when it is too late! + +Were we asked to bring together the three most pathetic sentences in our +tongue since Lear asked the question, "And have his daughters brought him +to this pass?" we should select Swift's comment on the lock of Stella, +"Only a woman's hair"; the cry of Tennyson's Rizpah, "The bones had moved +in my side"; and Carlyle's wail, "Oh that I had you yet but for five +minutes beside me, to tell you all!" But in answer we hear only the +flapping of the folds of Isis, "strepitumque Acherontis avari." + + All of sunshine that remained in my life went out in that + sudden moment. All of strength too often seems to have + gone.... Were it permitted, I would pray, but to whom? I can + well understand the invocation of saints. One's prayer now + has to be voiceless, done with the heart still, but also + with the hands still more.... Her birthday. She not here--I + cannot keep it for her now, and send a gift to poor old + Betty, who next to myself remembers her in life-long love + and sacred sorrow. This is all I can do.... Time was to + bring relief, said everybody; but Time has not to any + extent, nor, in truth, did I much wish him + + Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua, + Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae. + +Carlyle's pathos, far from being confined to his own calamity, was ready +to awake at every touch. "I was walking with him," writes Froude, "one +Sunday afternoon in Battersea Park. In the open circle among the trees +was a blind man and his daughter, she singing hymns, he accompanying her +on some instrument. We stood listening. She sang Faber's 'Pilgrims of the +Night.' The words were trivial, but the air, though simple, had something +weird and unearthly about it. 'Take me away,' he said, after a few +minutes, 'I shall cry if I stay longer.'" + +The melancholy, "often as of deep misery frozen torpid," that runs +through his writing, that makes him forecast death in life and paint the +springs of nature in winter hue, the "hoarse sea," the "bleared skies," +the sunsets "beautiful and brief and wae," compels our compassion in a +manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne, and De Quincey, +and other colour dramatists, because we feel it is as genuine as the +melancholy of Burns. Both had the relief of humour, but Burns only of the +two was capable of gaiety. "Look up there," said Leigh Hunt, pointing to +the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony that sings with infinite +voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man." "Eh, it's a sair +sicht," was the reply. + +We have referred to a few out of a hundred instances of Carlyle's +practical benevolence. To all deserving persons in misfortune he was a +good Samaritan, and like all benefactors the dupe of some undeserving. +Charity may be, like maternal affection, a form of self-indulgence, but +it is so only to kind-hearted men. In all that relates to money Carlyle's +career is exemplary. He had too much common sense to affect to despise +it, and was restive when he was underpaid; he knew that the labourer was +worthy of his hire. But, after hacking for Brewster he cannot be said to +have ever worked for wages, his concern was rather with the quality of +his work, and, regardless of results, he always did his best. A more +unworldly man never lived; from his first savings he paid ample tributes +to filial piety and fraternal kindness, and to the end of his life +retained the simple habits in which he had been trained. He hated waste +of all kinds, save in words, and carried his home frugalities even to +excess. In writing to James Aitken, engaged to his sister, "the Craw," he +says, "remember in marriage you have undertaken to do to others as you +would wish they should do to you." But this rede he did not reck. + +"Carlyle," writes Longfellow, "was one of those men who sacrificed their +happiness to their work"; the misfortune is that the sacrifice did not +stop with himself. He seemed made to live with no one but himself. +Alternately courteous and cross-grained, all his dramatic power went into +his creations; he could not put himself into the place of those near him. +Essentially perhaps the bravest man of his age, he would not move an inch +for threat or flattery; centered in rectitude, conscience never made +him a coward. He bore great calamities with the serenity of a Marcus +Aurelius: his reception of the loss of his first volume of the _French +Revolution_ was worthy of Sidney or of Newton: his letters, when the +successive deaths of almost all that were dearest left him desolate, are +among the noblest, the most resigned, the most pathetic in biography. +Yet, says Mr. Froude, in a judgment which every careful reader must +endorse: "Of all men I have ever seen Carlyle was the least patient of +the common woes of humanity." "A positive Christian," says Mrs. Carlyle, +"in bearing others' pain, he was a roaring Thor when himself pricked by +a pin," and his biographer corroborates this: "If matters went well with +himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any +one else; and, on the other hand, if he were uncomfortable he required +all the world to be uncomfortable along with him." He did his work with +more than the tenacity of a Prescott or a Fawcett, but no man ever made +more noise over it than this apostle of silence. "Sins of passion he +could forgive, but those of insincerity never." Carlyle has no tinge of +insincerity; his writing, his conversation, his life, are absolutely, +dangerously, transparent. His utter genuineness was in the long run one +of the sources of his success. He always, if we allow for a habit of +rhetorical exaggeration, felt what he made others feel. + +Sullen moods, and "words at random sent," those judging him from a +distance can easily condone; the errors of a hot head are pardonable to +one who, in his calmer hours, was ready to confess them. "Your temptation +and mine," he writes to his brother Alexander, "is a tendency to +imperiousness and indignant self-help; and, if no wise theoretical, +yet, practical forgetfulness and tyrannical contempt of other men." His +nicknaming mania was the inheritance of a family failing, always fostered +by the mocking-bird at his side. Humour, doubtless, ought to discount +many of his criticisms. Dean Stanley, in his funeral sermon, charitably +says, that in pronouncing the population of England to be "thirty +millions, mostly fools," Carlyle merely meant that "few are chosen and +strait is the gate," generously adding--"There was that in him, in spite +of his contemptuous descriptions of the people, which endeared him to +those who knew him best. The idols of their market-place he trampled +under foot, but their joys and sorrows, their cares and hopes, were to +him revered things." Another critic pleads for his discontent that it had +in it a noble side, like that of Faust, and that his harsh judgments of +eminent men were based on the belief that they had allowed meaner to +triumph over higher impulses, or influences of society to injure their +moral fibre. This plea, however, fails to cover the whole case. Carlyle's +ignorance in treating men who moved in spheres apart from his own, as the +leaders of science, definite theological enlightenment, or even poetry +and arts, was an intellectual rather than a moral flaw; but in the +implied assertion, "what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to +regret the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous powers, +which, beginning with his student days, possessed him to the last. The +fame of Newton, Leibnitz, Gibbon, whose works he came to regard as the +spoon-meat of his "rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his +or of any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot career, as a +"rose-water imbecility," or maligned Mill's intrepid thought as that of a +mere machine, he was astray on more delicate ground, and alienated some +of his truest friends. Among the many curses of our nineteenth-century +literature denounced by its leading Censor, the worst, the want of +loyalty among literary men, he fails to denounce because he largely +shares in it. "No sadder proof," he declares, "can be given by a man of +his own littleness than disbelief in great men," and no one has done more +to retrieve from misconception the memories of heroes of the past; +but rarely does either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a good word for any +considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, +more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from _Sartor,_ of which +he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his +self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his +enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger +Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson +would he grant the privilege to hold his own. _Per contra,_ he +overestimated those who were content to be his echoes. + +Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he used +and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who had preceded him in +his lines of historical investigation, as if they had been poachers on +his premises, _e.g._ Heath, the royalist writer of the Commonwealth +time, is "carrion Heath": Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is "my +reverend imbecile friend": his predecessors in _Friedrich,_ as Schlosser, +Preuss, Ranke, Foerster, Vehse, are "dark chaotic dullards whose books +are mere blotches of printed stupor, tumbled mountains of marine stores +"--criticism valueless even when it raises the laughter due to a +pantomime. Carlyle assailed three sets of people:-- + +1. Real humbugs, or those who had behaved, or whom he believed to have +behaved, badly to him. + +2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could not understand--as +Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and the leaders of Physics and +Metaphysics. + +3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him an unrestricted +homage or an implicit following, as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc. + +The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his strictures been +always just,--so winged with humorous epigram,--they would have blasted a +score of reputations: as it is they have only served to mar his own. He +was a typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the *_oistros_ +of their ambitious competition and restless push, wanting in repose, +never like + + a gentleman at wise + With moral breadth of tomperament, + +too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call this man as +good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast +between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is +possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others +of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when +he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a +rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if +not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard at +Ecclefechan. + +Truth, in the sense of saying what he thought, was one of his ruling +passions. To one of his brothers on the birth of a daughter, he writes, +"Train her to this, as the cornerstone of all morality, to stand by the +truth, to abhor a lie as she does hell-fire." The "gates of hell" is the +phrase of Achilles; but Carlyle has no real point of contact with the +Greek love of abstract truth. He objects that "Socrates is terribly at +ease in Zion": he liked no one to be at ease anywhere. He is angry with +Walter Scott because he hunted with his friends over the breezy heath +instead of mooning alone over twilight moors. Read Scott's _Memoirs_ in +the morning, the _Reminiscences_ at night, and dispute if you like about +the greater genius, but never about the healthier, better, and larger +man. + +Hebraism, says Matthew Arnold, is the spirit which obeys the mandate, +"walk by your light"; Hellenism the spirit which remembers the other, +"have a care your light be not darkness." The former prefers doing to +thinking, the latter is bent on finding the truth it loves. Carlyle is +a Hebraist unrelieved and unretrieved by the Hellene. A man of +inconsistencies, egotisms, Alpine grandeurs and crevasses, let us take +from him what the gods or protoplasms have allowed. His way of life, +duly admired for its stern temperance, its rigidity of noble aim--eighty +years spent in contempt of favour, plaudit, or reward,--left him austere +to frailty other than his own, and wrapt him in the repellent isolation +which is the wrong side of uncompromising dignity. He was too great to +be, in the common sense, conceited. All his consciousness of power left +him with the feeling of Newton, "I am a child gathering shells on the +shore": but what sense he had of fallibility arose from his glimpse of +the infinite sea, never from any suspicion that, in any circumstances, he +might be wrong and another mortal right: Shelley's lines on Byron-- + + The sense that he was greater than his kind + Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind + By gazing on its own exceeding light. + +fit him, like Ruskin's verdict, "What can you say of Carlyle but that he +was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning?" which withers while +it immortalises. + +[Footnote: In the _Times_ of February 7th 1881, there appeared an +interesting account of Carlyle's daily routine. "No book hack could have +surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and late +in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties. +At ten o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he +took up his pen and laboured hard until three o'clock. Nothing, not even +the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then +came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends.... In the evening he +read and prepared for the work of the morrow."] + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN + +Carlyle was so essentially a Preacher that the choice of a profession +made for him by his parents was in some measure justified; but he was +also a keen Critic, unamenable to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of +the revolutionary spirit of the age, even while protesting against its +extremes: above all, he was a literary Artist. Various opinions will +continue to be held as to the value of his sermons; the excellence of his +best workmanship is universally acknowledged. He was endowed with few of +the qualities which secure a quick success--fluency, finish of style, +the art of giving graceful utterance to current thought; he had in +full measure the stronger if slower powers--sound knowledge, infinite +industry, and the sympathetic insight of penetrative imagination--that +ultimately hold the fastnesses of fame. His habit of startling his +hearers, which for a time restricted, at a later date widened their +circle. There is much, sometimes even tiresome, repetition in Carlyle's +work; the range of his ideas is limited, he plays on a few strings, with +wonderfully versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually +confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But, +after the perfunctory work for Brewster he wrote nothing wholly +commonplace; occasionally paradoxical to the verge of absurdity, he is +never dull. + +Setting aside his TRANSLATIONS, always in prose,--often in +verse,--masterpieces of their kind, he made his first mark in CRITICISM, +which may be regarded as a higher kind of translation: the great value of +his work in this direction is due to his so regarding it. Most criticism +has for its aim to show off the critic; good criticism interprets the +author. Fifty years ago, in allusion to methods of reviewing, not even +now wholly obsolete, Carlyle wrote:-- + + The first and most convenient is for the reviewer to perch + himself resolutely, as it were, on the shoulder of his + author, and therefrom to show as if he commanded him and + looked down upon him by natural superiority of stature. + Whatsoever the great man says or does the little man shall + treat with an air of knowingness and light condescending + mockery, professing with much covert sarcasm that this or + that is beyond _his_ comprehension, and cunningly + asking his readers if _they_ comprehend it. + +There is here perhaps some "covert sarcasm" directed against +contemporaries who forgot that their mission was to pronounce on the +merits of the books reviewed, and not to patronise their authors; it may +be set beside the objection to Jeffrey's fashion of saying, "I like this; +I do not like that," without giving the reason why. But in this instance +the writer did reck his own rede. The temptation of a smart critic is to +seek or select legitimate or illegitimate objects of attack; and that +Carlyle was well armed with the shafts of ridicule is apparent in his +essays as in his histories; superabundantly so in his letters and +conversation. His examination of the _German Playwrights_, of _Taylor's +German Literature_, and his inimitable sketch of Herr Doering, the hapless +biographer of Richter, are as amusing as is Macaulay's _coup de grace_ to +Robert Montgomery. But the graver critic would have us take to heart +these sentences of his essay on Voltaire:-- + + Far be it from us to say that solemnity is an essential of + greatness; that no great man can have other than a rigid + vinegar aspect of countenance, never to be thawed or warmed + by billows of mirth. There are things in this world to be + laughed at as well as things to be admired. Nevertheless, + contempt is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one if + we habitually live in it. The faculty of love, of admiration, + is to be regarded as a sign and the measure of high souls; + unwisely directed, it leads to many evils; but without it, + there cannot be any good. Ridicule, on the other hand, is + the smallest of all faculties that other men are at pains to + repay with any esteem.... Its nourishment and essence is + denial, which hovers only on the surface, while knowledge + dwells far below,... it cherishes nothing but our vanity, + which may in general be left safely enough to shift for + itself. + +[Footnote: As an estimate of Voltaire this brilliant essay is inadequate. +Carlyle's maxim, we want to be told "not what is _not_ true but what _is_ +true," prevented him from appreciating the great work of Encyclopaedists.] + +We may compare with this one of the writer's numerous warnings to young +men taking to literature, as to drinking, in despair of anything better +to do, ending with the exhortation, "Witty above all things, oh, be not +witty"; or turn to the passage in the review of Sir Walter Scott:-- + + Is it with ease or not with ease that a man shall do his + best in any shape; above all, in this shape justly named of + soul's travail, working in the deep places of thought?... Not + so, now nor at any time.... Virgil and Tacitus, were they + ready writers? The whole _Prophecies of Isaiah_ are not + equal in extent to this cobweb of a Review article. + Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity; but not till + he had thought with intensity,... no easy writer he. Neither + was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with case. + Goethe tells us he "had nothing sent to him in his sleep," no + page of his but he knew well how it came there. + Schiller--"konnte nie fertig werden"--never could get done. + Dante sees himself "growing lean" over his _Divine Comedy_; + in stern solitary death wrestle with it, to prevail over it + and do it, if his uttermost faculty may; hence too it is done + and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures for + evermore among men. No; creation, one would think, cannot be + easy; your Jove has severe pains and fire flames in the head, + out of which an armed Pallas is struggling! As for + manufacture, that is a different matter.... Write by steam + if thou canst contrive it and sell it, but hide it like + virtue. + +In these and frequent similar passages lies the secret of Carlyle's slow +recognition, long struggle, and ultimate success; also of his occasional +critical intolerance. Commander-in-chief of the "red artillery," he sets +too little store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of the +light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but contempt for the +banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and +salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with +the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he +deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt to +leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can +only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of +ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every +ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher. +Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been +inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no +amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in +"the chamber of little ease," Carlyle travestied Goethe's "worship of +sorrow" till it became a pride in pain. He forgot that rude energy +requires restraint. Hercules Furens and Orlando Furioso did more than cut +down trees; they tore them up; but to no useful end. His power is often +almost Miltonic; it is never Shakespearian; and his insistent earnestness +would run the risk of fatiguing us were it not redeemed by his +humour. But he errs on the better side; and his example is a salutary +counteractive in an age when the dust of so many skirmishers obscures the +air, and laughter is too readily accepted as the test of truth, his stern +conception of literature accounts for his exaltations of the ideal, and +denunciations of the actual, profession of letters in passages which, +from his habit of emphasising opposite sides of truth, instead of +striking a balance, appear almost side by side in contradiction. The +following condenses the ideal:-- + + If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the + high and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have + guidance, freedom, immortality? These two in all degrees + I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind + blow whither it listeth. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, + indignation, despair itself--all these like hell-hounds lie + beleaguering the souls of the poor day worker as of every + man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, + and all these are stifled--all these shrink murmuring far + off in their caves. + +Against this we have to set innumerable tirades on the crime of worthless +writing, _e.g._-- + + No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag + his pen, without saying something; he knows not what + mischief he does, past computation, scattering words without + meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease. + For thistle-down flies abroad on all winds and airs of + wind.... Ship-loads of fashionable novels, sentimental + rhymes, tragedies, farces ... tales by flood and field are + swallowed monthly into the bottomless pool; still does the + press toil,... and still in torrents rushes on the great + army of publications to their final home; and still oblivion, + like the grave, cries give! give! How is it that of all + these countless multitudes no one can ... produce ought that + shall endure longer than "snowflake on the river? Because + they are foam, because there is no reality in them. . . ." + Not by printing ink alone does man live. Literature, as + followed at present, is but a species of brewing or cooking, + where the cooks use poison and vend it by telling + innumerable lies. + +These passages owe their interest to the attestation of their sincerity +by the writer's own practice. "Do not," he counsels one of his unknown +correspondents, "take up a subject because it is singular and will get +you credit, but because you _love_ it;" and he himself acted on the +rule. Nothing more impresses the student of Carlyle's works than his +_thoroughness._ He never took a task in hand without the determination to +perform it to the utmost of his ability; consequently when he satisfied +himself that he was master of his subject he satisfied his readers; but +this mastery was only attained, as it is only attainable, by the most +rigorous research. He seems to have written down his results with +considerable fluency: the molten ore flowed freely forth, but the process +of smelting was arduous. The most painful part of literary work is not +the actual composition, but the accumulation of details, the wearisome +compilation of facts, weighing of previous criticisms, the sifting of the +grains of wheat from the bushels of chaff. This part of his task Carlyle +performed with an admirable conscientiousness. His numerous letters +applying for out-of-the-way books to buy or borrow, for every pamphlet +throwing light on his subject, bear testimony to the careful exactitude +which rarely permitted him to leave any record unread or any worthy +opinion untested about any event of which or any person of whom he +undertook to write. From Templand (1833) he applies for seven volumes of +Beaumarchais, three of Bassompierre, the Memoirs of Abbe Georgel, and +every attainable account of Cagliostro and the Countess de la Motte, to +fuse into _The Diamond Necklace._ To write the essay on _Werner_ and +the _German Playwrights_ he swam through seas of trash. He digested the +whole of _Diderot_ for one review article. He seems to have read through +_Jean Paul Richter,_ a feat to accomplish which Germans require a +special dictionary. When engaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole +shoal of obscure seventeenth-century papers from Yarmouth, the remnant of +a yet larger heap, "read hundredweights of dreary books," and endured +"a hundred Museum headaches." In grappling with _Friedrich_ he waded +through so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping +condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes and places of +which he meant to speak, from St. Ives to Prague, and explored the +battlefields. Work done after this fashion seldom brings a swift return; +but if it is utilised and made vivid by literary genius it has a claim to +permanence. Bating a few instances where his sense of proportion is +defective, or his eccentricity is in excess, Carlyle puts his ample +material to artistic use; seldom making ostentation of detail, but +skilfully concentrating, so that we read easily and readily recall what he +has written. Almost everything he has done has made a mark: his best work +in criticism is final, it does not require to be done again. He interests +us in the fortunes of his leading characters: _first_, because he feels +with them; _secondly_, because he knows how to distinguish the essence +from the accidents of their lives, what to forget and what to remember, +where to begin and where to stop. Hence, not only his set biographies, as +of Schiller and of Sterling, but the shorter notices in his Essays, are +intrinsically more complete and throw more real light on character than +whole volumes of ordinary memoirs. + +With the limitations above referred to, and in view of his antecedents, +the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation is wonderfully wide. Often +perversely unfair to the majority of his English contemporaries, the +scales seem to fall from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of +other nations. The charity expressed in the saying that we should judge +men, not by the number of their faults, but by the amount of their +deflection from the circle, great or small, that bounds their being, +enables him often to do justice to those most widely differing in creed, +sentiment, and lines of activity from one another and from himself. +When treating congenial themes he errs by overestimate rather than by +depreciation: among the qualities of his early work, which afterwards +suffered some eclipse in the growth of other powers, is its flexibility. +It was natural for Carlyle, his successor in genius in the Scotch +lowlands, to give an account of Robert Burns which throws all previous +criticism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong affinities +to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his so-called heroes: but he +is fair to the characters, if not always to the work, of Voltaire and +Diderot, slurs over or makes humorous the escapades of Mirabeau, is +undeterred by the mysticism of Novalis, and in the fervour of his worship +fails to see the gulf between himself and Goethe. + +Carlyle's ESSAYS mark an epoch, _i.e._ the beginning of a new era, in +the history of British criticism. The able and vigorous writers who +contributed to the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly +Reviews_ successfully applied their taste and judgment to such works as +fell within their sphere, and could be fairly tested by their canons; but +they passed an alien act on everything that lay beyond the range of their +insular view. In dealing with the efforts of a nation whose literature, +the most recent in Europe save that of Russia, had only begun to command +recognition, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous. If +the old formulas have been theoretically dismissed, and a conscientious +critic now endeavours to place himself in the position of his author, +the change is largely due to the influence of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._ +Previous to their appearance, the literature of Germany, to which half +of these papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir Walter +Scott's translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen,_ De Quincey's travesties, +and Taylor's renderings from Lessing) a sealed book to English readers, +save those who were willing to breathe in an atmosphere of Coleridgean +mist. Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because he was +the first fully to apprehend its meaning. The _Life of Schiller,_ which +the author himself depreciated, remains one of the best of comparatively +short biographies, it abounds in admirable passages (conspicuously the +contrast between the elder and the younger of the Dioscuri at Weimar) and +has the advantage to some readers of being written in classical English +prose. + +To the essays relating to Germany, which we may accept as the _disjecta +membra_ of the author's unpublished History, there is little to add. +In these volumes we have the best English account of the Nibelungen +Lied--the most graphic, and in the main most just analyses of the genius +of Heyne, Rchter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, who is +recorded to have said, "Carlyle is almost more at home in our literature +than ourselves." With the Germans he is on his chosen ground; but the +range of his sympathies is most apparent in the portrait gallery of +eighteenth-century Frenchmen that forms, as it were, a proscenium to his +first great History. Among other papers in the same collection the most +prominent are the _Signs of the Times_ and _Characteristics,_ in which +he first distinctly broaches some of his peculiar views on political +philosophy and life. + +The scope and some of the limitations of Carlyle's critical power are +exhibited in his second Series of Lectures, delivered in 1838, when (_aet_. +43) he had reached the maturity of his powers. The first three of these +lectures, treating of Ancient History and Literature, bring into strong +relief the speaker's inadequate view of Greek thought and civilisation:-- + + Greek transactions had never anything alive, no result for + us, they were dead entirely ... all left is a few ruined + towers, masses of stone and broken statuary.... The writings + of Socrates are made up of a few wire-drawn notions about + virtue; there is no conclusion, no word of life in him. + +[Footnote: Though a mere reproduction of the notes of Mr. Chisholm Anstey, +this posthumous publication is justified by its interest and obvious +authenticity. The appearance in a prominent periodical (while these sheets +are passing through the press) of _Wotton Reinfred_ is more open to +question. This fragment of a romance, partly based on the plan of _Wilhelm +Meister_, with shadowy love episodes recalling the manner of the "Minerva +Press," can add nothing to Carlyle's reputation.] + + +These and similar dogmatic utterances are comments of the Hebrew on the +Hellene. To the Romans, "the men of antiquity," he is more just, dwelling +on their agriculture and road-making as their "greatest work written +on the planet;" but the only Latin author he thoroughly appreciates is +Tacitus, "a Colossus on edge of dark night." Then follows an exaltation +of the Middle Ages, in which "we see belief getting the victory over +unbelief," in the strain of Newman's _Grammar of Assent_. On the +surrender of Henry to Hildebrand at Canossa his approving comment is, +"the clay that is about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its +rights; the danger is always the other way, that the spiritual part of +man will become overlaid with the bodily part." In the later struggle +between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens his sympathy is with Gregory and +Innocent. In the same vein is his praise of Peter the Hermit, whose motto +was not the "action, action" of Demosthenes, but, "belief, belief." In +the brief space of those suggestive though unequal discourses the speaker +allows awkward proximity to some of the self-contradictions which, even +when scattered farther apart, perplex his readers and render it impossible +to credit his philosophy with more than a few strains of consistent +thought. + + In one page "the judgments of the heart are of more value than those of + the head." In the next "morals in a man are the counterpart of the + intellect that is in him." The Middle Ages were "a healthy age," and + therefore there was next to no Literature. "The strong warrior disdained + to write." "Actions will be preserved when all writers are forgotten." + Two days later, apropos of Dante, he says, "The great thing which any + nation can do is to produce great men.... When the Vatican shall have + crumbled to dust, and St. Peter's and Strassburg Minster be no more; for + thousands of years to come Catholicism will survive in this sublime + relic of antiquity--the _Divina Commedia."_ + + [Footnote: It has been suggested that Carlyle may have been in this + instance a student of Vauvenargues, who in the early years of the much- + maligned eighteenth century wrote "Les graudes pensees viennent du + coeur."] + +Passing to Spain, Carlyle salutes Cervantes and the Cid,--calling Don +Quixote the "poetry of comedy," "the age of gold in self-mockery,"--pays +a more reserved tribute to Calderon, ventures on the assertion that +Cortes was "as great as Alexander," and gives a sketch, so graphic that +it might serve as a text for Motley's great work, of the way in which +the decayed Iberian chivalry, rotten through with the Inquisition, broke +itself on the Dutch dykes. After a brief outline of the rise of the +German power, which had three avatars--the overwhelming of Rome, the +Swiss resistance to Austria, and the Reformation--we have a rough +estimate of some of the Reformers. Luther is exalted even over Knox; +Erasmus is depreciated, while Calvin and Melanchthon are passed by. + +The chapter on the Saxons, in which the writer's love of the sea appears +in picturesque reference to the old rover kings, is followed by unusually +commonplace remarks on earlier English literature, interspersed with some +of Carlyle's refrains. + + The mind is one, and consists not of bundles of faculties at + all ... the same features appear in painting, singing, + fighting ... when I hear of the distinction between the poet + and the thinker, I really see no difference at all.... Bacon + sees, Shakespeare sees through,... Milton is altogether + sectarian--a Presbyterian one might say--he got his + knowledge out of Knox.... Eve is a cold statue. + +Coming to the well-belaboured eighteenth century--when much was done of +which the nineteenth talks, and massive books were written that we are +content to criticise--we have the inevitable denunciations of scepticism, +materialism, argumentation, logic; the quotation, (referred to a motto +"in the Swiss gardens"), "Speech is silvern, silence is golden," and a +loud assertion that all great things are silent. The age is commended +for Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's spinning jenny, and Whitfield's +preaching, but its policy and theories are alike belittled. The summaries +of the leading writers are interesting, some curious, and a few absurd. +On the threshold of the age Dryden is noted "as a great poet born in the +worst of times": Addison as "an instance of one formal man doing great +things": Swift is pronounced "by far the greatest man of that time, not +unfeeling," who "carried sarcasm to an epic pitch": Pope, we are told, +had "one of the finest heads ever known." Sterne is handled with a +tenderness that contrasts with the death sentence pronounced on him by +Thackeray, "much is forgiven him because he loved much,... a good simple +being after all." Johnson, the "much enduring," is treated as in the +_Heroes_ and the Essay. Hume, with "a far duller kind of sense," is +commended for "noble perseverance and Stoic endurance of failure; but his +eye was not open to faith," etc. On which follows a stupendous criticism +of Gibbon, whom Carlyle, returning to his earlier and juster view, ended +by admiring. + + With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more + futile account of human things than he has done of the + _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. + +The sketch of the Pre-Revolution period is slight, and marked by a +somewhat shallow reference to Rousseau. The last lecture on the recent +German writers is a mere _rechauffe_ of the Essays. Carlyle closes +with the famous passage from Richter, one of those which indicate the +influence in style as in thought of the German over the Scotch humorist. +"It is now the twelfth hour of the night, birds of darkness are on the +wing, the spectres uprear, the dead walk, the living dream. Thou, Eternal +Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn." The whole volume is a testimony +to the speaker's power of speech, to his often unsurpassed penetration, +and to the hopeless variance of the often rapidly shifting streams of his +thought. + +Detailed criticism of Carlyle's HISTORIES belongs to the sphere of +separate disquisitions. Here it is only possible to take note of their +general characteristics. His conception of what history should be is +shared with Macaulay. Both writers protest against its being made a mere +record of "court and camp," of royal intrigue and state rivalry, of +pageants of procession, or chivalric encounters. Both find the sources of +these outwardly obtrusive events in the underground current of national +sentiment, the conditions of the civilisation from which they were +evolved, the prosperity or misery of the masses of the people. + + The essence of history does not lie in laws, senate-houses, + or battle-fields, but in the tide of thought and action--the + world of existence that in gloom and brightness blossoms and + fades apart from these. + +But Carlyle differs from Macaulay in his passion for the concrete. The +latter presents us with pictures to illustrate his political theory; the +former leaves his pictures to speak for themselves. "Give him a fact," +says Emerson, "he loaded you with thanks; a theory, with ridicule or +even abuse." It has been said that with Carlyle History was philosophy +teaching by examples. He himself defines it as "the essence of +innumerable biographies." He individualises everything he meets; his +dislike of abstractions is everywhere extreme. Thus while other writers +have expanded biography into history, Carlyle condenses history into +biography. Even most biographies are too vague for him. He delights in +Boswell: he glides over their generalisations to pick out some previously +obscure record from Clarendon or Hume. Even in _The French Revolution,_ +where the author has mainly to deal with masses in tumult, he gives most +prominence to their leaders. They march past us, labelled with strange +names, in the foreground of the scene, on which is being enacted the +death wrestle of old Feudalism and young Democracy. This book is unique +among modern histories for a combination of force and insight only +rivalled by the most incisive passages of the seventh book of Thucydides, +of Tacitus, of Gibbon, and of Michelet. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ a comparison of Carlyle and Michelet in Dr. Oswald's +interesting and suggestive little volume of criticism and selection, +_Thomas Carlyle, ein Lebensbild und Goldkoerner aus seinen Werken._] + +_The French Revolution_ is open to the charge of being a comment and a +prophecy rather than a narrative: the reader's knowledge of the main +events of the period is too much assumed for the purpose of a school +book. Even Dryasdust will turn when trod on, and this book has been a +happy hunting field to aggressive antiquarians, to whom the mistake of a +day in date, the omission or insertion of a letter in a name, is of more +moment than the difference between vitalising or petrifying an era. The +lumber merchants of history are the born foes of historians who, like +Carlyle and Mr. Froude, have manifested their dramatic power of making +the past present and the distant near. That the excess of this power is +not always compatible with perfect impartiality may be admitted; for a +poetic capacity is generally attended by heats of enthusiasm, and is +liable to errors of detail; but without some share of it-- + + Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit + Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln. + +Mere research, the unearthing and arrangement of what Sir Philip Sidney +calls "old moth-eaten records," supplies material for the work of the +historian proper; and, occasionally to good purpose, corrects it, but, as +a rule, with too much flourish. Applying this minute criticism to _The +French Revolution,_ one reviewer has found that the author has given the +wrong number to a regiment: another esteemed scholar has discovered that +there are seven errors in the famous account of the flight to Varennes, +to wit:--the delay in the departure was due to Bouille, not to the Queen; +she did not lose her way and so delay the start; Ste. Menehould is too +big to be called a village; on the arrest, it was the Queen who asked for +hot water and eggs; the King only left the coach once; it went rather +faster than is stated; and, above all, _infandum!_ it was not painted +yellow, but green and black. This criticism does not in any degree +detract from the value of one of the most vivid and substantially +accurate narratives in the range of European literature. Carlyle's object +was to convey the soul of the Revolution, not to register its upholstery. +The annalist, be he dryasdust or gossip, is, in legal phrase, "the devil" +of the prose artist, whose work makes almost as great a demand on the +imaginative faculty as that of the poet. Historiography is related to +History as the Chronicles of Holinshed and the Voyages of Hakluyt to the +Plays of Shakespeare, plays which Marlborough confessed to have been +the main source of his knowledge of English history. Some men are born +philologists or antiquarians; but, as the former often fail to see the +books because of the words, so the latter cannot read the story for the +dates. The mass of readers require precisely what has been contemptuously +referred to as the "Romance of History," provided it leaves with them +an accurate impression, as well as an inspiring interest. Save in his +over-hasty acceptance of the French _blague_ version of "The Sinking of +the Vengeur," Carlyle has never laid himself open to the reproach of +essential inaccuracy. As far as possible for a man of genius, he was +a devotee of facts. He is never a careless, though occasionally +an impetuous writer; his graver errors are those of emotional +misinterpretation. It has been observed that, while contemning +Robespierre, he has extenuated the guilt of Danton as one of the main +authors of the September massacres, and, more generally, that "his +quickness and brilliancy made him impatient of systematic thought." But +his histories remain the best illuminations of fact in our language. _The +French Revolution_ is a series of flame-pictures; every page is on fire; +we read the whole as if listening to successive volleys of artillery: +nowhere has such a motley mass been endowed with equal life. This book +alone vindicates Lowell's panegyric: "the figures of most historians seem +like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs through any hole +that criticism may tear in them; but Carlyle's are so real that if you +prick them they bleed." + +When Carlyle generalises, as in the introductions to his Essays, he is +apt to thrust his own views on his subject and on his readers; but, +unlike De Quincey, who had a like love of excursus, he comes to the point +before the close. + +The one claimed the privilege, assumed by Coleridge, of starting from no +premises and arriving at no conclusion; the other, in his capacity as +a critic, arrives at a conclusion, though sometimes from questionable +premises. It is characteristic of his habit of concentrating, rather than +condensing, that Carlyle abandoned his design of a history of the Civil +Wars for _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches._ The events of the +period, whose issues the writer has firmly grasped, are brought into +prominence mainly as they elucidate the career of his hero; but the +"elucidations" have been accepted, with a few reservations, as final. No +other work has gone so far to reverse a traditional estimate. The old +current conceptions of the Protector are refuted out of his own mouth; +but it was left for his editor to restore life to the half-forgotten +records, and sweep away the clouds that obscured their revelations of a +great though rugged character. _Cromwell_ has been generally accepted +in Scotland as Carlyle's masterpiece--a judgment due to the fact of its +being, among the author's mature works, the least apparently opposed +to the theological views prevalent in the north of our island. In +reality--though containing some of his finest descriptions and +battle-pieces, conspicuously that of "Dunbar"--it is the least artistic +of his achievements, being overladen with detail and superabounding in +extract. A good critic has said that it was a labour of love, like +Spedding's _Bacon;_ but that the correspondence, lavishly reproduced in +both works, has "some of the defects of lovers' letters for those to whom +they are not addressed." + +[Footnote: In _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11th, 1881.] + +Carlyle has established that Oliver was not a hypocrite, "not a man of +falsehood, but a man of truth": he has thrown doubts on his being a +fanatic; but he has left it open to M. Guizot to establish that his later +rule was a practical despotism. + +In _Friedrich II._ he undertook a yet greater task; and his work +stretching over a wider arena, is, of necessity, more of a history, less +of a biography, than any of his others. In constructing and composing it +he was oppressed not only by the magnitude and complexity of his theme, +but, for the first time, by hesitancies as to his choice of a hero. +He himself confessed, "I never was admitted much to _Friedrich's_ +confidence, and I never cared very much about him." Yet he determined, +almost of malice prepense, to exalt the narrow though vivid Prussian +as "the last of the kings, the one genuine figure in the eighteenth +century," and though failing to prove his case, he has, like a loyal +lawyer, made the best of his brief. The book embodies and conveys the +most brilliant and the most readable account of a great part of the +century, and nothing he has written bears more ample testimony to the +writer's pictorial genius. It is sometimes garrulous with the fluency of +an old man eloquent; parts of the third volume, with its diffuse extracts +from the king's survey of his realm, are hard if not weary reading; but +the rest is a masterpiece of historic restoration. The introductory +portion, leading us through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy +and political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the procession +of the half-forgotten host of German worthies,--St. Adalbert and his +mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth; +Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret with the mouth; Sigismund +_supra grammaticam_; Augustus the physically strong; Albert Achilles and +Albert Alcibiades; Anne of Cleves; Mr. John Kepler,--who move on the +pages, more brightly "pictured" than those of Livy, like marionettes +inspired with life. In the main body of the book the men and women of the +Prussian court are brought before us in fuller light and shade. Friedrich +himself, at Sans Souci, with his cocked-hat, walking-stick and wonderful +gray eyes; Sophia Charlotte's grace, wit, and music; Wilhelmina and her +book; the old Hyperborean; the black artists Seckendorf and Grumkow; +George I. and his blue-beard chamber; the little drummer; the Old +Dessaner; the cabinet Venus; Graevenitz Hecate; Algarotti; Goetz in his +tower; the tragedy of Katte; the immeasurable comedy of Maupertuis, the +flattener of the earth, and Voltaire; all these and a hundred more are +summoned by a wizard's wand from the land of shadows, to march by +the central figures of these volumes; to dance, flutter, love, hate, +intrigue, and die before our eyes. It is the largest and most varied +showbox in all history; a prelude to a series of battle-pieces--Rossbach, +Leuthen, Molwitz, Zorndorf--nowhere else, save in the author's own pages, +approached in prose, and rarely rivalled out of Homer's verse. + +Carlyle's style, in the chiar-oscuro of which his Histories and +three-fourths of his Essays are set, has naturally provoked much +criticism and some objurgation. M. Taine says it is "exaggerated and +demoniacal." Hallam could not read _The French Revolution_ because of its +"abominable" style, and Wordsworth, whose own prose was perfectly limpid, +is reported to have said, "No Scotchman can write English. C---- is a pest +to the language." + +[Footnote: Carlyle with equal unfairness disparaged Hallam's _Middle +Ages:--"Eh, the poor miserable skeleton of a book," and regarded the +_Literature of Europe_ as a valley of dry bones.] + +Carlyle's style is not that of Addison, of Berkeley, or of Helps; its +peculiarities are due to the eccentricity of an always eccentric being; +but it is neither affected nor deliberately imitated. It has been +plausibly asserted that his earlier manner of writing, as in _Schiller,_ +under the influence of Jeffrey, was not in his natural voice. "They +forget," he said, referring to his critics, "that the style is the skin +of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old woman." Erratic, +metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and therefore a dangerous model, +"the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and +angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the _Birthmark_ +in Hawthorne's romance. To recast a chapter of the _Revolution_ in the +form of a chapter of Macaulay would be like rewriting Tacitus in the +form of Cicero, or Browning in the form of Pope. Carlyle is seldom +obscure, the energy of his manner is part of his matter; its abruptness +corresponds to the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often as +it were by a series of electric shocks, that threaten to break through +the formal restraints of an ordinary sentence. He writes like one who +must, under the spell of his own winged words; at all hazards, +determined to convey his meaning; willing, like Montaigne, to "despise +no phrase of those that run in the streets," to speak in strange tongues, +and even to coin new words for the expression of a new emotion. It is +his fashion to care as little for rounded phrase as for logical argument: +and he rather convinces and persuades by calling up a succession of +feelings than by a train of reasoning. He repeats himself like a +preacher, instead of condensing like an essayist. The American Thoreau +writes in the course of an incisive survey:-- + + Carlyle's ... mastery over the language is unrivalled; it + is with him a keen, resistless weapon; his power of words + is endless. All nature, human and external, is ransacked to + serve and run his errands. The bright cutlery, after all the + dross of Birmingham has been thrown aside, is his style.... + He has "broken the ice, and the torrent streams forth." He + drives six-in-hand over ruts and streams and never upsets.... + With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all + his moods and experiences, and crashes his way through + shoals of dilettante opinions. It is not in man to determine + what his style shall be, if it is to be his own. + +But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a careless or ready +writer. He weighed every sentence: if in all his works, from _Sartor_ to +the _Reminiscences_, you pencil-mark the most suggestive passages you +disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and +fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though +a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a +great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping +his pencil "in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse," now etching his +scenes with the tender touch of a Millet. + +Emerson, in one of his early letters to Carlyle, wrote, "Nothing seems +hid from those wonderful eyes of yours; those devouring eyes; those +thirsty eyes; those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine." +Men of genius, whether expressing themselves in prose or verse, on canvas +or in harmony, are, save when smitten, like Beethoven, by some malignity +of Nature, endowed with keener physical senses than other men. They +actually, not metaphorically, see more and hear more than their fellows. +Carlyle's super-sensitive ear was to him, through life, mainly a torment; +but the intensity of his vision was that of a born artist, and to' it we +owe the finest descriptive passages, if we except those of Mr. Ruskin, in +English prose. None of our poets, from Chaucer and Dunbar to Burns and +Tennyson, has been more alive to the influences of external nature. His +early letters abound in passages like the following, on the view from +Arthur's Seat:-- + + The blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills + swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags + and rude precipices at our feet (where not a hillock rears + its head unsung) with Edinburgh at their base clustering + proudly over her rugged foundations and covering with a + vapoury mantle the jagged black masses of stonework that + stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Faeryland.... + I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and + the moon's fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as + it is, was riding quietly above me. + +Compare with this the picture, in a letter to Sterling, of Middlebie +burn, "leaping into its cauldron, singing a song better than Pasta's"; or +that of the Scaur Water, that may be compared with Tennyson's verses in +the valley of Cauteretz; or the sketches of the Flemish cities in the +tour of 1842, with the photograph of the lace-girl, recalling Sterne at +his purest; or the account of the "atmosphere like silk" over the moor, +with the phrase, "it was as if Pan slept"; or the few lines written at +Thurso, where "the sea is always one's friend"; or the later memories of +Mentone, old and new, in the _Reminiscences_ (vol. ii. pp. 335-340). + +The most striking of those descriptions are, however, those in which the +interests of some thrilling event or crisis of human life or history +steal upon the scene, and give it a further meaning, as in the dim streak +of dawn rising over St. Abb's Head on the morning of Dunbar, or in the +following famous apostrophe:-- + + O evening sun of July, how at this hour thy beams fall slant + on reapers amid peaceful, woody fields; on old women + spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; + on balls at the Orangerie at Versailles, where high-rouged + dames of the palace are even now dancing with + double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring + Hell-porch of an Hotel-de-Ville. + +Carlyle is, here and there, led astray by the love of contrast; but not +even Heinrich Heine has employed antithesis with more effect than in the +familiar passage on the sleeping city in _Sartor_, beginning, "Ach mein +Lieber ... it is a true sublimity to dwell here," and ending, "But I, +mein Werther, sit above it all. I am alone with the stars." His thought, +seldom quite original, is often a resuscitation or survival, and owes +much of its celebrity to its splendid brocade. _Sartor Resartus_ itself +escaped the failure that was at first threatened by its eccentricity +partly from its noble passion, partly because of the truth of the +"clothes philosophy," applied to literature as to life. + +His descriptions, too often caricatures, of men are equally vivid. They +set the whole great mass of _Friedrich_ in a glow; they lighten the +tedium of _Cromwell's_ lumbering despatches; they give a heart of fire +to _The French Revolution_. Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_ attempts +and fulfils on a smaller what Carlyle achieved on a greater scale. The +historian makes us sympathise with the real actors, even more than the +novelist does with the imaginary characters on the same stage. From the +account of the dying Louis XV. to the "whiff of grapeshot" which closed +the last scene of the great drama, there is not a dull page. Theroigne +de Mericourt, Marat, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Robespierre, +Talleyrand, Mdme. Roland, above all Marie Antoinette--for whom Carlyle +has a strong affection--and Buonaparte, so kindle and colour the scene +that we cannot pause to feel weary of the phrases with which they are +labelled. The author's letters show the same power of baptizing, which he +used often to unfair excess. We can no more forget Count d'Orsay as the +"Phoebus Apollo of Dandyism," Daniel Webster's "brows like cliffs and +huge black eyes," or Wordsworth "munching raisins" and recognising no +poet but himself, or Maurice "attacked by a paroxysm of mental cramp," +than we can dismiss from our memories "The Glass Coachman" or "The +Tobacco Parliament." + +Carlyle quotes a saying of Richter, that Luther's words were half +battles; he himself compares those of Burns to cannon-balls; much of his +own writing is a fusilade. All three were vehement in abuse of things +and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not +sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are, +by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his +humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining +over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as +finely quaint as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's. There is in +it, as in all the highest humour, a sense of apparent contrast, even of +contradiction, in life, of matter for laughter in sorrow and tears in +joy. He seems to check himself, and as if afraid of wearing his heart +in his sleeve, throws in absurd illustrations of serious propositions, +partly to show their universal range, partly in obedience to an instinct +of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermonising and to cut the story +short. Carlyle's grotesque is a mode of his golden silence, a sort of +Socratic irony, in the indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and +at himself. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, ridicule of +his own and other ages, now in droll reference or mock heroic detail, +in an odd conception, a character sketch, an event in parody, in an +antithesis or simile,--sometimes it lurks in a word, and again in a +sentence. In direct pathos--the other side of humour--he is equally +effective. His denunciations of sentiment remind us of Plato attacking +the poets, for he is at heart the most emotional of writers, the greatest +of the prose poets of England; and his dramatic sympathy extends alike to +the actors in real events and to his ideal creations. Few more pathetic +passages occur in literature than his "stories of the deaths of kings." +The following among the less known of his eloquent passages is an +apotheosis of their burials:-- + + In this manner did the men of the Eastern Counties take up + the slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in + the village of Hoxne; seek out the severed head and + reverently reunite the same. They embalmed him with myrrh + and sweet spices, with love, pity, and all high and awful + thoughts; consecrating him with a very storm of melodious, + adoring admiration, and sun-dried showers of tears; joyfully, + yet with awe (as all deep joy has something of the awful in + it), commemorating his noble deeds and godlike walk and + conversation while on Earth. Till, at length, the very Pope + and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear of it; and they, + summing up as correctly as they well could, with _Advocatus + Diaboli_ pleadings and other forms of process, the + general verdict of mankind, declared that he had in very + fact led a hero's life in this world: and, being now gone, + was gone, as they conceived, to God above and reaping his + reward there. Such, they said, was the best judgment they + could form of the case, and truly not a bad judgment. + +Carlyle's reverence for the past makes him even more apt to be touched by +its sorrows than amused by its follies. With a sense of brotherhood he +holds out hands to all that were weary; he feels even for the pedlars +climbing the Hohenzollern valley, and pities the solitude of soul on the +frozen Schreckhorn of power, whether in a dictator of Paraguay or in +a Prussian prince. He leads us to the death chamber of Louis XV., of +Mirabeau, of Cromwell, of Sterling, his own lost friend; and we feel with +him in the presence of a solemnising mystery. Constantly, amid the din of +arms or words, and the sarcasms by which he satirises and contemns old +follies and idle strifes, a gentler feeling wells up in his pages like +the sound of the Angelus. Such pauses of pathos are the records of real +or fanciful situations, as of Teufelsdroeckh "left alone with the night" +when Blumine and Herr Towgood ride down the valley; of Oliver recalling +the old days at St. Ives; of the Electress Louisa bidding adieu to her +Elector. + +At the moment of her death, it is said, when speech had fled, he felt +from her hand, which lay in his, three slight slight pressures--farewell +thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easily to forget in this world. + +There is nothing more pathetic in the range of his works, if in that of +our literature, than the account of the relations of father and son in +the domestic history of the Prussian Court, from the first estrangement +between them--the young Friedrich in his prison at Cuestrin, the old +Friedrich gliding about seeking shelter from ghosts, mourning for +Absalom--to the reconciliation, the end, and the afterthoughts:-- + + The last breath of Friedrich Wilhelm having fled, Friedrich + hurried to a private room; sat there all in tears; looking + back through the gulfs of the Past, upon such a Father now + rapt away for ever. Sad all and soft in the moonlight of + memory--the lost Loved One all in the right as we now see, + we all in the wrong!--This, it appears, was the Son's fixed + opinion. Sever, years hence here is how Friedrich concludes + the _History_ of his Father, written with a loyal + admiration throughout: "We have left under silence the + domestic chagrins of this great Prince; readers must have + some indulgence for the faults of the children, in + consideration of the virtues of such a Father." All in + tears he sits at present, meditating these sad things. In a + little while the Old Dessauer, about to leave for Dessau, + ventures in to the Crown Prince, Crown Prince no longer; + "embraces his knees," offers weeping his condolence, his + congratulation; hopes withal that his sons and he will be + continued in their old posts, and that he the Old Dessauer + "will have the same authority as in the late reign." + Friedrich's eyes, at this last clause, flash out tearless, + strangely Olympian. "In your posts I have no thought of + making change; in your posts yes; and as to authority I + know of none there can be but what resides in the king that + is sovereign," which, as it were, struck the breath out of + the Old Dessauer; and sent him home with a painful + miscellany of feelings, astonishment not wanting among them. + At an after hour the same night Friedrich went to Berlin, + met by acclamation enough. He slept there not without + tumult of dreams, one may fancy; and on awakening next + morning the first sound he heard was that of the regiment + Glasenap under his windows, swearing fealty to the new King. + He sprang out of bed in a tempest of emotion; bustled + distractedly to and fro, wildly weeping. Poellnitz, who came + into the anteroom, found him in this state, "half-dressed, + with dishevelled hair, in tears, and as if beside himself." + "These huzzahings only tell me what I have lost," said the + new King. "He was in great suffering," suggested Poellnitz; + "he is now at rest." True, he suffered; but he was here with + us; and now----! + +Carlyle has said of Dante's _Francesco_ "that it is a thing woven as of +rainbows on a ground of eternal black." The phrase, well applied to the +_Inferno_, is a perhaps half-conscious verdict on his own tenderness as +exhibited in his life and in his works. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY + +One of the subtlest of Robert Browning's critics, in the opening sentence +of his work, quotes a saying of Hegel's, "A great man condemns the world +to the task of explaining him"; adding, "The condemnation is a double one, +and it generally falls heaviest on the great man himself who has to submit +to explanation." Cousin, the graceful Eclectic, is reported to have said +to the great Philosopher, "will you oblige me by stating the results of +your teaching in a few sentences?" and to have received the reply, "It is +not easy, especially in French." + +[Footnote: _Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher,_ by +Professor Henry Jones, of St. Andrews.] + +The retort applies, with severity, to those who attempt to systematise +Carlyle; for he himself was, as we have seen, intolerant of system. His +mathematical attainment and his antipathy to logical methods beyond +the lines of square and circle, his love of concise fact and his often +sweeping assertions are characteristic of the same contradictions in +his nature as his almost tyrannical premises and his practically +tender-hearted conclusions. A hard thinker, he was never a close +reasoner; in all that relates to human affairs he relies on nobility of +feeling rather than on continuity of thought. Claiming the full latitude +of the prophet to warn, exhort, even to command, he declines either to +preach or to accept the rubric of the partisan or of the priest. + +In praise of German literature, he remarks, "One of its chief qualities +is that it has no particular theory at all on the front of it;" and of +its leaders, "I can only speak of the revelations these men have made to +me. As to their doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be +said"; yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him "out +of the blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that +his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their +discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings, +inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of +credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or mountain air, +and found in them the key of the perennial riddle and the solution of the +insoluble mystery. But in later years the curtain to many of them became +the picture. + +When Carlyle was first recognised in London as a rising author, curiosity +was rife as to his "opinions"; was he a Chartist at heart or an +Absolutist, a Calvinist like Knox, a Deist like Hume, a Feudalist with +Scott, or a Democrat with Burns--inquisitions mostly vain. He had come +from the Scotch moors and his German studies, a strange element, into the +midst of an almost foreign society, not so much to promulgate a new set +of opinions as to infuse a new life into those already existing. He +claimed to have a "mission," but it was less to controvert any form of +creed than to denounce the insufficiency of shallow modes of belief. He +raised the tone of literature by referring to higher standards than those +currently accepted; he tried to elevate men's minds to the contemplation +of something better than themselves, and impress upon them the vacuity +of lip-services; he insisted that the matter of most consequence was the +grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to +sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty +to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only +barren but obstructive; that it is only + + When half-gods go, the gods arrive. + +But his manner of reading these important lessons admitted the retort +that he himself was content rather to dwell on what is _not_ than to +discover what _is_ true. Belief, he reiterates, is the cure for all the +worst of human ills; but belief in what or in whom? In "the eternities +and immensities," as an answer, requires definition. It means that we are +not entitled to regard ourselves as the centres of the universe; that +we are but atoms of space and time, with relations infinite beyond our +personalities; that the first step to a real recognition of our duties is +the sense of our inferiority to those above us, our realisation of the +continuity of history and life, our faith and acquiescence in some +universal law. This truth, often set forth + + By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet, + +no one has enforced with more eloquence than Carlyle; but though he +founded a dynasty of ideas, they are comparatively few; like a group of +strolling players, each with a well-filled wardrobe, and ready for many +parts. + +The difficulty of defining Carlyle results not merely from his frequent +golden nebulosity, but from his love of contradicting even himself. Dr. +Johnson confessed to Boswell that when arguing in his dreams he was often +worsted and took credit for the resignation with which he bore these +defeats, forgetting that the victor and the vanquished were one and the +same. Similarly his successor took liberties with himself which he would +allow to no one else, and in doing so he has taken liberties with his +reader. His praise and blame of the profession of letters, as the highest +priesthood and the meanest trade; his early exaltation of "the writers of +newspapers, pamphlets, books," as "the real effective working church of a +modern country"; and his later expressed contempt for journalism as +"mean and demoralising"--"we must destroy the faith in newspapers"; +his alternate faith and unfaith in Individualism; the teaching of the +_Characteristics_ and the _Signs of the Times_ that all healthy genius is +unconscious, and the censure of Sir Walter Scott for troubling himself +too little with mysteries; his commendation of "the strong warrior" for +writing no books, and his taking sides with the mediaeval monks against +the kings--there is no reconciliation of such contradictories. They are +the expression of diverse moods and emphatically of different stages of +mental progress, the later, as a rule, more negative than the earlier. + +This change is most marked in the sphere of politics. At the close of his +student days Carlyle was to all intents a Radical, and believed in +Democracy; he saw hungry masses around him, and, justly attributing some +of their suffering to misgovernment, vented his sympathetic zeal for the +oppressed in denunciation of the oppressors. + +[Footnote: Passage quoted (Chap. II.) about the Glasgow Radical rising in +1819.] + +He began not only by sympathising with the people, but by believing in +their capacity to manage best their own affairs: a belief that steadily +waned as he grew older until he denied to them even the right to choose +their rulers. As late, however, as 1830, he argued against Irving's +conservatism in terms recalled in the _Reminiscences_. "He objected +clearly to my Reform Bill notions, found Democracy a thing forbidden, +leading even to outer darkness: I a thing inevitable and obliged to lead +whithersoever it could." During the same period he clenched his theory by +taking a definite side in the controversy of the age. "This," he writes to +Macvey Napier, "this is the day when the lords are to reject the Reform +Bill. The poor lords can only accelerate (by perhaps a century) their own +otherwise inevitable enough abolition." + +The political part of _Sartor Resartus_, shadowing forth some scheme of +well-organised socialism, yet anticipates, especially in the chapter on +_Organic Filaments_, the writer's later strain of belief in dukes, earls, +and marshals of men: but this work, religious, ethical, and idyllic, +contains mere vague suggestions in the sphere of practical life. About +this time Carlyle writes of liberty: "What art thou to the valiant and +the brave when thou art thus to the weak and timid, dearer than life, +stronger than death, higher than purest love?" and agrees with the +verdict, "The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive +struggles of anarchy." But he soon passed from the mood represented +by Emily Bronte to that of the famous apostrophe of Madame Roland. He +proclaimed that liberty to do as we like is a fatal license, that the +only true liberty is that of doing what is right, which he interprets +living under the laws enacted by the wise. Mrs. Austin in 1832 wrote to +Mrs. Carlyle, "I am that monster made up of all the Whigs hate--a Radical +and an Absolutist." The expression, at the time, accurately defined +Carlyle's own political position: but he shifted from it, till the +Absolutist, in a spirit made of various elements, devoured the Radical. +The leading counsel against the aristocracy changed his brief and became +chief advocate on their side, declaring "we must recognise the hereditary +principle if there is to be any fixity in things." In 1835, he says to +Emerson:-- + + I believe literature to be as good as dead ... and nothing + but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps + three generations.... I suffer also terribly from the + solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a + kind of passion with me to feel myself among my brothers. + And then How? Alas I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay, I + feel it to be a wretched necessity unfit for me; + Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet + these two are the grand categories under which all English + spiritual activity, that so much as thinks remuneration + possible, must range itself. + +And somewhat later-- + + People accuse me, not of being an incendiary Sansculotte, + but of being a Tory, thank Heaven! + +Some one has written with a big brush, "He who is not a radical in his +youth is a knave, he who is not a conservative in his age is a fool." The +rough, if not rude, generalisation has been plausibly supported by +the changes in the mental careers of Burke, Coleridge, Southey, and +Wordsworth. But Carlyle was "a spirit of another sort," of more mixed +yarn; and, as there is a vein of Conservatism in his early Radicalism, +so there is, as also in the cases of Landor and even of Goethe, still +a revolutionary streak in his later Conservatism. Consequently, in his +instance, there is a plea in favour of the prepossession (especially +strong in Scotland) which leads the political or religious party that a +distinguished man has left still to persist in claiming him; while +that which he has joined accepts him, if at all, with distrust. Scotch +Liberals will not give up Carlyle, one of his biographers keenly +asseverating that he was to the last "a democrat at heart"; while +the representative organ of northern Conservatism on the same ground +continues to assail him--"mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst +vergebens." On all questions directly bearing on the physical welfare of +the masses of the people, his speech and action remained consistent with +his declaration that he had "never heard an argument for the corn laws +which might not make angels weep." From first to last he was an advocate +of Free Trade--though under the constant protest that the greatness of +a nation depended in a very minor degree on the abundance of its +possessions--and of free, unsectarian, and compulsory Education. while, +in theology, though remote from either, he was more tolerant of the +dogmatic narrowness of the Low Church of the lower, than of the Ritualism +of the upper, classes. His unwavering interest in the poor and his belief +that legislation should keep them in constant view, was in accord with +the spirit of Bentham's standard: but Carlyle, rightly or wrongly, +came to regard the bulk of men as children requiring not only help and +guidance but control. + +On the question of "the Suffrage" he completely revolved. It appears, +from the testimony of Mr. Froude, that the result of the Reform Bill of +1832 disappointed him in merely shifting power from the owners of land to +the owners of shops, and leaving the handicraftsmen and his own peasant +class no better off. Before a further extension became a point +of practical politics he had arrived at the conviction that the +ascertainment of truth and the election of the fittest did not lie with +majorities. These sentences of 1835 represent a transition stage:-- + + Conservatism I cannot attempt to conserve, believing it to + be a portentous embodied sham.... Whether the Tories stay + out or in, it will be all for the advance of Radicalism, + which means revolt, dissolution, and confusion and a + darkness which no man can see through. + +No one had less faith in the paean chanted by Macaulay and others on the +progress of the nation or of the race, a progress which, without faith +in great men, was to him inevitably downward; no one protested with more +emphasis against the levelling doctrines of the French Revolution. It has +been observed that Carlyle's _Chartism_ was "his first practical step in +politics"; it is more true to say that it first embodied, with more than +his usual precision, the convictions he had for some time held of the +dangers of our social system; with an indication of some of the means to +ward them off, based on the realisation of the interdependence of all +classes in the State. This book is remarkable as containing his last, +very partial, concessions to the democratic creed, the last in which he +is willing to regard a wide suffrage as a possible, though by no means +the best, expedient. Subsequently, in _Past and Present_ and the +_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, he came to hold "that with every extension of the +Franchise those whom the voters would elect would be steadily inferior +and more unfit." Every stage in his political progress is marked by a +growing distrust in the judgment of the multitude, a distrust set forth, +with every variety of metaphor, in such sentences as the following:-- + + There is a divine message or eternal regulation of the + Universe. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count + heads, ask Universal Suffrage by the ballot-box and that + will tell!" From Adam's time till now the Universe was wont + to be of a somewhat abstruse nature, partially disclosing + itself to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was + not the majority. Of what use towards the general result of + finding out what it is wise to do, can the fools be? ... If + of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common + calculation, how in the name of wonder will you ever get a + ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these + ten men? ... Only by reducing to zero nine of these votes can + wisdom ever issue from your ten. The mass of men consulted at + the hustings upon any high matter whatsoever, is as ugly an + exhibition of human stupidity as this world sees.... If the + question be asked and the answer given, I will generally + consider in any case of importance, that the said answer is + likely to be wrong, and that I have to go and do the reverse + of the same ... for how should I follow a multitude to do + evil? Cease to brag to me of America and its model + institutions.... On this side of the Atlantic or on that, + Democracy is for ever impossible! The Universe is a monarchy + and a hierarchy, the noble in the high places, the ignoble in + the low; this is in all times and in all places the Almighty + Maker's law. Democracy, take it where you will, is found a + regulated method of rebellion, it abrogates the old + arrangement of things, and leaves zero and vacuity. It is the + consummation of no-government and _laissez faire_. + +Alongside of this train of thought there runs a constant protest against +the spirit of revolt. In _Sartor_ we find: "Whoso cannot obey cannot be +free, still less bear rule; he that is the inferior of nothing can be the +superior of nothing"; and in _Chartism_-- + + Men who rebel and urge the lower classes to rebel ought to + have other than formulas to go upon, ... those to whom + millions of suffering fellow-creatures are "masses," mere + explosive masses for blowing down Bastiles with, for voting + at hustings for us--such men are of the questionable + species.... Obedience ... is the primary duty of man.... + Of all "rights of men" this right of the ignorant to be + guided by the wiser, gently or forcibly--is the + indisputablest.... Cannot one discern, across all democratic + turbulence, clattering of ballot-boxes, and infinite + sorrowful jangle, that this is at bottom the wish and prayer + of all human hearts everywhere, "Give me a leader"? + +The last sentence indicates the transition from the merely negative +aspect of Carlyle's political philosophy to the positive, which is +his HERO-WORSHIP, based on the excessive admiration for individual +greatness,--an admiration common to almost all imaginative writers, +whether in prose or verse; on his notions of order and fealty, and on a +reverence for the past, which is also a common property of poets. The +Old and Middle Ages, according to his view, had their chiefs, captains, +kings, and waxed or waned with the increase or decrease of their +Loyality. Democracy, the new force of our times, must in its turn be +dominated by leaders. Raised to independence over the arbitrary will of a +multitude, these are to be trusted and followed, if need be, to death. + + Your noblest men at the summit of affairs is the ideal world + of poets.... Other aim in this earth we have none. That + we all reverence "great men" is to me the living rock amid + all rushings down whatsoever. All that democracy ever meant + lies there, the attainment of a truer Aristocracy or + Government of the Best. Make search for the Able man. How to + get him is the question of questions. + +It is precisely the question to which Carlyle never gives, and hardly +attempts, a reply; and his failure to answer it invalidates the +larger half of his Politics. Plato has at least detailed a scheme for +eliminating his philosopher guardians, though it somewhat pedantically +suggests a series of Chinese examinations: his political, though probably +unconscious disciple has only a few negative tests. The warrior or sage +who is to rule is _not_ to be chosen by the majority, especially in our +era, when they would choose the Orators who seduce and "traduce the +State"; nor are we ever told that the election is to rest with either +Under or Upper House: the practical conclusion is that when we find a man +of great force of character, whether representing our own opinions or the +reverse, we should take him on trust. This brings us to the central maxim +of Carlyle's political philosophy, to which we must, even in our space, +give some consideration, as its true meaning has been the theme of so +much dispute. + +It is a misfortune of original thought that it is hardly ever put +in practice by the original thinker. When his rank as a teacher is +recognised, his words have already lost half their value by repetition. +His manner is aped by those who find an easy path to notoriety in +imitation; the belief he held near his heart is worn as a creed like a +badge; the truth he promulgated is distorted in a room of mirrors, half +of it is a truism, the other half a falsism. That which began as a +denunciation of tea-table morality, is itself the tea-table morality of +the next generation: an outcry against cant may become the quintessence +of cant; a revolt from tyranny the basis of a new tyranny; the +condemnation of sects the foundation of a new sect; the proclamation of +peace a bone of contention. There is an ambiguity in most general maxims, +and a seed of error which assumes preponderance over the truth when the +interpreters of the maxim are men easily led by formulae. Nowhere is this +degeneracy more strikingly manifested than in the history of some of +the maxims which Carlyle either first promulgated or enforced by his +adoption. When he said, or quoted, "Silence is better than speech," he +meant to inculcate patience and reserve. Always think before you speak: +rather lose fluency than waste words: never speak for the sake of +speaking. It is the best advice, but they who need it most are the last +to take it; those who speak and write not because they have something to +say, but because they wish to say or must say something, will continue to +write and speak as long as they can spell or articulate. Thoughtful men +are apt to misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit +still and leave the "war of words to those who like it." When Carlyle +condemned self-consciousness, a constant introspection and comparison of +self with others, he theoretically struck at the root of the morbid moods +of himself and other mental analysts; he had no intention to over-exalt +mere muscularity or to deify athletic sports. It were easy to multiply +instances of truths clearly conceived at first and parodied in their +promulgation; but when we have the distinct authority of the discoverer +himself for their correct interpretation, we can at once appeal to it. +A yet graver, not uncommon, source of error arises when a great writer +misapplies the maxims of his own philosophy, or states them in such a +manner that they are sure to be misapplied. + +Carlyle has laid down the doctrine that MIGHT IS RIGHT at various times +and in such various forms, with and without modification or caveat, that +the real meaning can only be ascertained from his own application of it. +He has made clear, what goes without saying, that by "might" he does not +intend mere physical strength. + + Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute + force; conquest of that kind does not endure. The strong man, + what is he? The wise man. His muscles and bones are not + stronger than ours; but his soul is stronger, clearer, + nobler.... Late in man's history, yet clearly at length, it + becomes manifest to the dullest that mind is stronger than + matter, that not brute Force, but only Persuasion and Faith, + is the king of this world.... Intellect has to govern this + world and will do it. + +There are sentences which indicate that he means something more than even +mental force; as in his Diary (Froude, iv. 422), "I shall have to tell +Lecky, Right is the eternal symbol of Might"; and again in _Chartism_, +"Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them +centuries to try it, and they are found to be identical. The strong thing +is the just thing. In kings we have either a divine right or a diabolic +wrong." On the other hand, we read in _Past and Present_:-- + + Savage fighting Heptarchies: their lighting is an + ascertainment who has the right to rule over them. + +And again-- + + Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: _either_ of + these, once ascertained, puts an end to battle. + +And elsewhere-- + + Rights men have none save to be governed justly.... + + Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere correctly + articulated mights.... All goes by wager of battle in this + world, and it is, well understood, the measure of all + worth.... By right divine the strong and capable govern the + weak and foolish.... Strength we may say is Justice itself. + +It is not left for us to balance those somewhat indefinite definitions. +Carlyle has himself in his Histories illustrated and enforced his own +interpretations of the summary views of his political treatises. There +he has demonstrated that his doctrine, "Might is Right," is no mere +unguarded expression of the truism that moral might is right. In his +hands it implies that virtue is in all cases a property of strength, that +strength is everywhere a property of virtue; that power of whatever sort +having any considerable endurance, carries with it the seal and signal of +its claim to respect, that whatever has established itself has, in the +very act, established its right to be established. He is never careful +enough to keep before his readers what he must himself have dimly +perceived, that victory _by right_ belongs not to the force of will +alone, apart from clear and just conceptions of worthy ends. Even in its +crude form, the maxim errs not so much in what it openly asserts as +in what it implicitly denies. Aristotle (the first among ancients to +_question_ the institution of slavery, as Carlyle has been one of the +last of moderns to defend it) more guardedly admits that strength is +in itself _a_ good,--[Greek: kai estin aei to kratoun en uperochae +agathoutinos],--but leaves it to be maintained that there are forms of +good which do not show themselves in excess of strength. Several of +Carlyle's conclusions and verdicts seem to show that he only acknowledges +those types of excellence that have already manifested themselves as +powers; and this doctrine (which, if adopted in earlier ages, would +practically have left possession with physical strength) colours all his +History and much of his Biography. Energy of any sort compels his homage. +Himself a Titan, he shakes hands with all Titans, Gothic gods, Knox, +Columbus, the fuliginous Mirabeau, burly Danton dying with "no weakness" +on his lips. The fulness of his charity is for the errors of Mohammed, +Cromwell, Burns, Napoleon I.,--whose mere belief in his own star he +calls sincerity,--the atrocious Francia, the Norman kings, the Jacobins, +Brandenburg despots; the fulness of his contempt for the conscientious +indecision of Necker, the Girondists, the Moderates of our own +Commonwealth. He condones all that ordinary judgments regard as the +tyranny of conquest, and has for the conquered only a _vae victis._ In +this spirit, he writes :-- + + M. Thierry celebrates with considerable pathos the fate of + the Saxons; the fate of the Welsh, too, moves him; of the + Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into + the mountains, whither they were not worth following. What + can we say, but that the cause which pleased the gods had in + the end to please Cato also? + +When all is said, Carlyle's inconsistent optimism throws no more light +than others have done on the apparent relapses of history, as the +overthrow of Greek civilisation, the long night of the Dark Ages, the +spread of the Russian power during the last century, or of continental +Militarism in the present. In applying the tests of success or failure we +must bear in mind that success is from its very nature conspicuous. We +only know that brave men have failed when they have had a "sacred bard." +The good that is lost is, _ipso facto_, forgotten. We can rarely tell of +greatness unrecognised, for the very fact of our being able to tell of it +would imply a former recognition. The might of evil walks in darkness: +we remember the martyrs who, by their deaths, ultimately drove the +Inquisition from England; not those whose courage quailed. "It was their +fate," as a recent writer remarks, "that was the tragedy." Reading +Carlyle's maxim between the lines of his chapter on the Reformation, +and noting that the Inquisition triumphed in Spain, while in Austria, +Bavaria, and Bohemia Protestantism was stifled by stratagem or by force; +that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was successful; and that the +revocation of the Edict of Nantes killed the France of Henry IV., we see +its limitations even in the long perspective of the past. Let us, +however, grant that in the ultimate issue the Platonic creed, +"Justice is stronger than injustice," holds good. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Mill's _Liberty_, chap. ii. pp. 52-54] + +It is when Carlyle turns to politics and regards them as history +accomplished instead of history in progress that his principle leads to +the most serious error. No one has a more withering contempt for evil as +meanness and imbecility; but he cannot see it in the strong hand. Of two +views, equally correct, "evil is weakness," such evil as sloth, and +"corruptio optimi pessima," such evil as tyranny--he only recognises the +first. Despising the palpable anarchies of passion, he has no word of +censure for the more settled form of anarchy which announced, "Order +reigns at Warsaw." He refuses his sympathy to all unsuccessful efforts, +and holds that if races are trodden under foot, they are [Greek: phusei +doulo dunamenoi allou einai] they who have allowed themselves to be +subjugated deserve their fate. The cry of "oppressed nationalities" was to +him mere cant. His Providence is on the side of the big battalions, and +forgives very violent means to an orderly end. To his credit he declined +to acknowledge the right of Louis Napoleon to rule France; but he accepted +the Czars, and ridiculed Mazzini till forced to admit, almost with +chagrin, that he had, "after all," substantially succeeded. + + Treason never prospers, what's the reason? + That when it prospers, none dare call it treason. + +Apprehending, on the whole more keenly than any of his contemporaries, +the foundations of past greatness, his invectives and teaching lay +athwart much that is best as well as much that is most hazardous in the +new ideas of the age. Because mental strength, endurance, and industry +do not appear prominently in the Negro race, he looks forward with +satisfaction to the day when a band of white buccaneers shall undo +Toussaint l'Ouverture's work of liberation in Hayti, advises the English +to revoke the Emancipation Act in Jamaica, and counsels the Americans +to lash their slaves--better, he admits, made serfs and not saleable by +auction--not more than is necessary to get from them an amount of work +satisfactory to the Anglo-Saxon mind. Similarly he derides all movements +based on a recognition of the claims of weakness to consideration and +aid. + + Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, + Doing or suffering. + +The application of the maxim, "Might is Right," to a theory of government +is obvious; the strongest government must be the best, _i.e._ that in +which Power, in the last resort supreme, is concentrated in the hands of +a single ruler; the weakest, that in which it is most widely diffused, +is the worst. Carlyle in his Address to the Edinburgh students commends +Machiavelli for insight in attributing the preservation of Rome to +the institution of the Dictatorship. In his _Friedrich_ this view is +developed in the lessons he directs the reader to draw from Prussian +history. The following conveys his final comparative estimate of an +absolute and a limited monarchy:-- + + This is the first triumph of the constitutional Principle + which has since gone to such sublime heights among + us--heights which we begin at last to suspect may be depths + leading down, all men now ask whitherwards. A much-admired + invention in its time, that of letting go the rudder or + setting a wooden figure expensively to take care of it, and + discovering that the ship would sail of itself so much the + more easily. Of all things a nation needs first to be + drilled, and a nation that has not been governed by + so-called tyrants never came to much in the world. + +Among the currents of thought contending in our age, two are +conspicuously opposed. The one says: Liberty is an end not a mere means +in itself; apart from practical results the crown of life. Freedom of +thought and its expression, and freedom of action, bounded only by +the equal claim of our fellows, are desirable for their own sakes as +constituting national vitality: and even when, as is sometimes the case, +Liberty sets itself against improvements for a time, it ultimately +accomplishes more than any reforms could accomplish without it. The fewer +restraints that are imposed from without on human beings the better: the +province of law is only to restrain men from violently or fraudulently +invading the province of other men. This view is maintained and in great +measure sustained by J.S. Mill in his _Liberty_, the _Areopagitica_ of +the nineteenth century, and more elaborately if not more philosophically +set forth in the comprehensive treatise of Wilhelm von Humboldt on _The +Sphere and Duties of Government_. These writers are followed with various +reserves by Grote, Buckle, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and by Mr. Lecky. Mill +writes:-- + + The idea of rational Democracy is not that the people + themselves govern; but that they have security for good + government. This security they can only have by retaining in + their own hands the ultimate control. The people ought to be + masters employing servants more skilful than themselves. + + [Footnote: It should be noted that Mill lays as great + stress on Individualism as Carlyle does, and a more + practical stress. He has the same belief in the essential + mediocrity of the masses of men whose "think ing is done for + them ... through the newspapers," and the same scorn for + "the present low state of society." He writes, "The + initiation of all wise and noble things comes and must come + from individuals: generally at first from some one + individual"; but adds, "I am not countenancing the sort of + 'hero-worship' which applauds the strong man of genius for + forcibly seizing on the government of the world.... All he + can claim is freedom to point out the way."] + +To this Carlyle, with at least the general assent of Mr. Froude, Mr. +Ruskin, and Sir James Stephen, substantially replies:-- + + In freedom for itself there is nothing to raise a man above + a fly; the value of a human life is that of its work done; + the prime province of law is to get from its subjects the + most of the best work. The first duty of a people is to + find--which means to accept--their chief; their second and + last to obey him. We see to what men have been brought by + "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," by the dreams of + idealogues, and the purchase of votes. + +This, the main drift of Carlyle's political teaching, rests on his +absolute belief in strength (which always grows by concentration), on his +unqualified admiration of order, and on his utter disbelief in what his +adverse friend Mazzini was wont, with over-confidence, to appeal to as +"collective wisdom." Theoretically there is much to be said for this +view: but, in practice, it involves another idealism as aerial as that of +any "idealogue" on the side of Liberty. It points to the establishment of +an Absolutism which must continue to exist, whether wisdom survives in +the absolute rulers or ceases to survive. [Greek: Kratein d' esti kai mae +dikios.] The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have been beneficent in +times of revolution; but their right to rule is apt to pass before their +power, and when the latter descends by inheritance, as from M. Aurelius +to Commodus, it commonly degenerates. It is well to learn, from a safe +distance, the amount of good that may be associated with despotism: its +worst evil is lawlessness, it not only suffocates freedom and induces +inertia, but it renders wholly uncertain the life of those under its +control. Most men would rather endure the "slings and arrows" of an +irresponsible press, the bustle and jargon of many elections, the delay +of many reforms, the narrowness of many streets, than have lived from +1814 to 1840, with the noose around all necks, in Paraguay, or even +precariously prospered under the paternal shield of the great Fritz's +extraordinary father, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. + +Carlyle's doctrine of the ultimate identity of "might and right" never +leads, with him, to its worst consequence, a fatalistic or indolent +repose; the withdrawal from the world's affairs of the soul "holding no +form of creed but contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent +optimist nor a consistent pessimist is apparent from his faith in man's +partial ability to mould his fate. Not "belief, belief," but "action, +action," is his working motto. On the title-page of the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_ he quotes from Rushworth on a colloquy of Sir David Ramsay and +Lord Reay in 1638: "Then said his Lordship, 'Well, God mend all!'--'Nay, +by God, Donald; we must help Him to mend it,' said the other." + +"I am not a Tory," he exclaimed, after the clamour on the publication of +_Chartism_, "no, but one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest of +Radicals." With the Toryism which merely says "stand to your guns" and, +for the rest, "let well alone," he had no sympathy. There was nothing +selfish in his theories. He felt for and was willing to fight for +mankind, though he could not trust them; even his "king" he defines to +be a minister or servant of the State. "The love of power," he says, "if +thou understand what to the manful heart power signifies, is a very noble +and indispensable love"; that is, the power to raise men above the "Pig +Philosophy," the worship of clothes, the acquiescence in wrong. "The +world is not here for me, but I for it." "Thou shalt is written upon life +in characters as terrible as thou shalt not"; are protests against the +mere negative virtues which religionists are wont unduly to exalt. + +Carlyle's so-called Mysticism is a part of his German poetry; in the +sphere of common life and politics he made use of plain prose, and often +proved himself as shrewd as any of his northern race. An excessively +"good hater," his pet antipathies are generally bad things. In the +abstract they are always so; but about the abstract there is no +dispute. Every one dislikes or professes to dislike shams, hypocrisies, +phantoms,--by whatever tiresomely reiterated epithet he may be pleased to +address things that are not what they pretend to be. Diogenes's toil with +the lantern alone distinguished the cynic Greek, in admiration of an +honest man. Similarly the genuine zeal of his successor appears in +painstaking search; his discrimination in the detection, his eloquence in +his handling of humbugs. Occasional blunders in the choice of objects +of contempt and of worship--between which extremes he seldom +halts,--demonstrate his fallibility, but outside the sphere of literary +and purely personal criticism he seldom attacks any one, or anything, +without a show of reason. To all gospels there are two sides; and a great +teacher who, by reason of the very fire that makes him great, disdains to +halt and hesitate and consider the _juste milieu,_ seldom guards himself +against misinterpretation or excess. Mazzini writes, "He weaves and +unweaves his web like Penelope, preaches by turns life and nothingness, +and wearies out the patience of his readers by continually carrying them +from heaven to hell." Carlyle, like Ruskin, keeps himself right not by +caveats but by contradictions of himself, and sometimes in a way least to +be expected. Much of his writing is a blast of war, or a protest against +the philanthropy that sets charity before justice. Yet in a letter to the +London Peace Congress of 1851, dated 18th July, we find:-- + + I altogether approve of your object. Clearly the less war + and cutting of throats we have among us, it will be the + better for us all. As men no longer wear swords in the + streets, so neither by and by will nations.... How many + meetings would one expedition to Russia cover the cost of? + +He denounced the Americans, in apparent ignorance of their +"Constitution," for having no Government; and yet admitted that what he +called their anarchy had done perhaps more than anything else could have +done to subdue the wilderness. He spoke with scorn of the "rights of +women," their demand for the suffrage, and the _cohue_ of female authors, +expressing himself in terms of ridiculous disparagement of writers so +eminent as George Sand and George Eliot; but he strenuously advocated +the claim of women to a recognised medical education. He reviled "Model +Prisons" as pampering institutes of "a universal sluggard and scoundrel +amalgamation society," and yet seldom passed on the streets one of the +"Devil's elect" without giving him a penny. He set himself against every +law or custom that tended to make harder the hard life of the poor: there +was no more consistent advocate of the abolition of the "Game Laws." +Emerson says of the mediaeval architects, "they builded better than they +knew." Carlyle felt more softly than he said, and could not have been +trusted to execute one of his own Rhadamanthine decrees. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ a remarkable instance of this in the best short _Life of +Carlyle_, that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147.] + +Scratch the skin of the Tartar and you find beneath the despised +humanitarian. Everything that he has written on "The Condition of England +Question" has a practical bearing, and many of his suggestions have found +a place on our code, vindicating the assertion of the _Times_ of the day +after his death, that "the novelties and paradoxes of 1846 are to a large +extent nothing but the good sense of 1881." Such are:--his insistence on +affording every facility for merit to rise from the ranks, embodied in +measures against promotion by Purchase; his advocacy of State-aided +Emigration, of administrative and civil service Reform,--the abolition of +"the circumlocution office" in Downing Street,--of the institution of a +Minister of Education; his dwelling on the duties as well as the rights +of landowners,--the theme of so many Land Acts; his enlarging on the +superintendence of labour,--made practical in Factory and Limited Hours +Bills--on care of the really destitute, on the better housing of the +poor, on the regulation of weights and measures; his general contention +for fixing more exactly the province of the legislative and the executive +bodies. Carlyle's view that we should find a way to public life for +men of eminence who will not cringe to mobs, has made a step towards +realisation in further enfranchisement of Universities. Other of his +proposals, as the employment of our army and navy in time of peace, and +the forcing of able-bodied paupers into "industrial regiments," have +become matter of debate which may pave the way to legislation. One of +his desiderata, a practical veto on "puffing," it has not yet been found +feasible, by the passing of an almost prohibitive duty on advertisements, +to realise. + +Besides these specific recommendations, three ideas are dominant in +Carlyle's political treatises. _First_--a vehement protest against +the doctrine of _Laissez faire_; which, he says, "on the part of the +governing classes will, we repeat again and again, have to cease; pacific +mutual divisions of the spoil and a would-let-well-alone will no longer +suffice":--a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the Trades Union +wars, of which he failed to see the issue. He is so strongly in favour of +_Free-trade_ between nations that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared +to make it _compulsory_. "All men," he writes in _Past and Present_, +"trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do +it. Our friends of China, who refused to trade, had we not to argue with, +them, in cannon-shot at last?" But in Free-trade between class and class, +man and man, within the bounds of the same kingdom, he has no trust: he +will not leave "supply and demand" to adjust their relations. The +result of doing so is, he holds, the scramble between Capital for larger +interest and Labour for higher wage, in which the rich if unchecked will +grind the poor to starvation, or drive them to revolt. + +_Second_.--As a corollary to the abolition of _Laissez faire_, he +advocates the _Organisation of Labour_, "the problem of the whole future +to all who will pretend to govern men." The phrase from its vagueness +has naturally provoked much discussion. Carlyle's bigoted dislike of +Political Economists withheld him from studying their works; and he seems +ignorant of the advances that have been made by the "dismal science," +or of what it has proved and disproved. Consequently, while brought in +evidence by most of our modern Social idealists, Comtists and Communists +alike, all they can say is that he has given to their protest against the +existing state of the commercial world a more eloquent expression than +their own. He has no compact scheme,--as that of St. Simon or Fourier, or +Owen--few such definite proposals as those of Karl Marx, Bellamy, Hertzka +or Gronlund, or even William Morris. He seems to share with Mill the view +that "the restraints of communism are weak in comparison with those of +capitalists," and with Morris to look far forward to some golden age; he +has given emphatic support to a copartnership of employers and employed, +in which the profits of labour shall be apportioned by some rule of +equity, and insisted on the duty of the State to employ those who are out +of work in public undertakings. + + Enlist, stand drill, and become from banditti soldiers of + industry. I will lead you to the Irish bogs ... English + foxcovers ... New Forest, Salisbury Plains, and Scotch + hill-sides which as yet feed only sheep ... thousands of + square miles ... destined yet to grow green crops and fresh + butter and milk and beef without limit:-- + +an estimate with the usual exaggeration. But Carlyle's later work +generally advances on his earlier, in its higher appreciation of +Industrialism. He looks forward to the boon of "one big railway right +across America," a prophecy since three times fulfilled; and admits that +"the new omnipotence of the steam engine is hewing aside quite other +mountains than the physical," _i.e._ bridging the gulf between races +and binding men to men. He had found, since writing _Sartor_, that dear +cotton and slow trains do not help one nearer to God, freedom, and +immortality. + +Carlyle's _third_ practical point is his advocacy of _Emigration,_ or +rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy for Over-population. +He writes of "Malthusianism" with his constant contempt of convictions +other than his own:-- + + A full formed man is worth more than a horse.... One + man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him + earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded + indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and + delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your + population in the Pampas and Savannahs--in the Curragh of + Kildare? Let there be an _Emigration Service,_ ... so + that every honest willing workman who found England too + strait, and the organisation of labour incomplete, might + find a bridge to carry him to western lands.... Our little + isle has grown too narrow for us, but the world + is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.... If + this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not + everywhere else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to + us "Come and till me, come and reap me"? + +On this follows an eloquent passage about our friendly Colonies, +"overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas." Carlyle +would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans, +and Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; but the +problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines +to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to +overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps. + +In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is +ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of +Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite +tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's +leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public +life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive +to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day +demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of +_laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to +become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one, +of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule +for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample +without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common +good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's +blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many +respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits +of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity with an +eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with equal force put to scorn the +superstition of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts, +some of which may find a mark the archer little meant. + +[Footnote: _Vide passim_ the chapter in _Liberty_ entitled "Limits to the +Authority of Society over the Individual," where Mill denounces the idea +of "the majority of operatives in many branches of industry ... that bad +workmen ought to receive the same wages as good."] + + + + +CHAPTER X + +CARLYLE'S RELIGION AND ETHICS--RELATION TO PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE + +The same advance or retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is +traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages +of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the +widest sense--faith in some supreme Power above us yet acting for us--was +the great factor of his inner life. But when we further question his +Creed, he is either bewilderingly inconsistent or designedly vague. The +answer he gives is that of Schiller: "Welche der Religionen? Keine +von allen. Warum? Aus Religion." In 1870 he writes: "I begin to think +religion again possible for whoever will piously struggle upwards and +sacredly refuse to tell lies: which indeed will mostly mean refusal to +speak at all on that topic." This and other implied protests against +intrusive inquisition are valid in the case of those who keep their own +secrets: it is impertinence to peer and "interview" among the sanctuaries +of a poet or politician or historian who does not himself open their +doors. But Carlyle has done this in all his books. A reticent writer may +veil his convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. An +avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interrogation as to his text. + +With all the evidence before us--his collected works, his friendly +confidences, his journals, his fragmentary papers, as the interesting +series of jottings entitled "Spiritual Optics," and the partial accounts +to Emerson and others of the design of the "Exodus from Hounds-ditch"--it +remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We know that he +abandoned the ministry, for which he was destined, because, at an early +date, he found himself at irreconcilable variance, not on matters of +detail but on essentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism. +We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; that he went, as +continuously as possible for a mind so liable to fits and starts, further +and further from the faith of his fathers; but that he remained to the +last so much affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early +associations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist without +dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a Puritan who had lost +his creed." We know that he revered the character of Christ, and +theoretically accepted the ideal of self-sacrifice: the injunction +to return good for evil he never professed to accept; and vicarious +sacrifice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught that every +man must "dree his weird." We know that he not only believed in God as +revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but +that he threatened, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point +to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in +free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the +greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we +desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of +exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did _not_ believe. +This process is simplified by the fact that he assailed all convictions +other than his own. + +Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all +forms of _Materialism_ and _Hedonism,_ which he brands as "worships of +Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may +lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain. +Similarly he denounces _Atheism,_ never more vehemently than in his +Journals of 1868-1869:-- + + Had no God made this world it were an insupportable place. Laws without + a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. All that is good, + generous, wise, right ... who or what could by any possibility have + given it to me, but One who first had it to give! This is not logic, it + is axiom.... Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic specialities."... + Canst _thou_ by searching find out God? I am not surprised thou canst + not, vain fool. If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered + hearts, there will be seen such a world as few are dreaming of. + +Carlyle calls evidence from all quarters, appealing to Napoleon's +question, "Who made all that?" and to Friedrich's belief that intellect +"could not have been put into him by an entity that had none of its own," +in support of what he calls the Eternal Fact of Facts, to which he clings +as to the Rock of Ages, the sole foundation of hope and of morality to +one having at root little confidence in his fellow-men. + +If people are only driven upon virtuous conduct ... by association of +ideas, and there is no "Infinite Nature of Duty," the world, I should +say, had better count its spoons to begin with, and look out for +hurricanes and earthquakes to end with. + +Carlyle hazardously confessed that as regards the foundations of his +faith and morals, with Napoleon and Friedrich II. on his side, he had +against him the advancing tide of modern _Science._ He did not attempt +to disprove its facts, or, as Emerson, to sublimate them into a new +idealism; he scoffed at and made light of them, _e.g._-- + + Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very + sublime achievement either. I often think ... it is pretty + much all that science in this age has done. ... Protoplasm + (unpleasant doctrine that we are all, soul and body, made of + a kind of blubber, found in nettles among other organisms) + appears to be delightful to many.... Yesterday there came a + pamphlet published at Lewes, a hallelujah on the advent of + Atheism.... The real joy of Julian (the author) was what + surprised me, like the shout of a hyaena on finding that the + whole universe was actually carrion. In about seven minutes + my great Julian was torn in two and lying in the place fit + for him.... Descended from Gorillas! Then where is the place + for a Creator? Man is only a little higher than the tadpoles, + says our new Evangelist.... Nobody need argue with these + people. Logic never will decide the matter, or will seem to + decide it their way. He who traces nothing of God in his own + soul, will never find God in the world of matter--mere + circlings of force there, of iron regulation, of universal + death and merciless indifference.... Matter itself is either + Nothing or else a product due to man's _mind_. ... The + fast-increasing flood of Atheism on me takes no hold--does + not even wet the soles of my feet. + + [Footnote: Cf. Othello, "Not a jot, not a jot." Carlyle writes + on this question with the agitation of one himself not quite at + ease, with none of the calmness of a faith perfectly secure.] + +"Carlyle," says one of his intimates, "speaks as if Darwin wished to rob +or to insult him." _Scepticism_ proper fares as hardly in his hands as +definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in +the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as +intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole +soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal +to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace +of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of life as "a +most melancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean Paul, +"heaven becomes a gas, God a force, and the second world a grave." He +fails to see that all such appeals are beside the question; and deserts +the ground of his answer to John Sterling's expostulation, "that is +downright Pantheism": "What if it were Pot-theism if it is _true_?" It is +the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sympathy for suffering +to override his Stoic theories; but it vitiated his reasoning, and made +it impossible for him to appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional, +religiosity of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called +_Orthodoxy_--whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High or Low; he +abhorred Puseyism, Jesuitry, spoke of the "Free Kirk and other rubbish," +and recorded his definite disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation +and in Miracles. "It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing has +ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation of God's will and +justice, and the stars in their courses are a perpetual miracle, is +his refrain. _This is not what Orthodoxy means_, and no one was more +intolerant than Carlyle of all shifts and devices to slur the difference +between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his own "Exodus from +Houndsditch" might only open the way to the wilderness, he would allow +no one else to take in hand his uncompleted task; and disliked Strauss +and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. "He spoke to me once," says +Mr. Froude, "with loathing of the _Vie de Jesus_." I asked if a true life +could be written. He said, "Yes, certainly, if it were right to do so; +but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to Emerson:-- + + You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom + I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen + were all a kind of half-way-house characters, who I thought + should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in + unbelief, in faint possible _Theism_; which I like + considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, + deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed + among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat. + +What then is left for Carlyle's Creed? Logically little, emotionally +much. If it must be defined, it was that of a Theist with a difference. A +spirit of flame from the empyrean, he found no food in the cold _Deism_ +of the eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image from its +pedestal, as by the music of the "Winter's Tale," to live among men and +inspire them. He inherited and _coute que coute_ determined to persist in +the belief that there was a personal God--"a Maker, voiceless, formless, +within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, "My belief in a +special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable"; and +later, "Some strange belief in a special Providence was always in me at +intervals." Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as good +as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days. + +"To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew +prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the God +on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is +He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's God is not a mere +"tendency that makes for righteousness"; He is a guardian and a guide, to +be addressed in the words of Pope's _Universal Prayer_, which he adopted +as his own. A personal God does not mean a great Figure Head of the +Universe,--Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before he became "a +knight" of the Holy Ghost,--it means a Supreme Power, Love, or Justice +having relations to the individual man: in this sense Carlyle believed in +Him, though more as Justice, exacting "the terriblest penalties," than +as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives. He never entered into +controversies about the efficacy of prayer; but, far from deriding, he +recommended it as "a turning of one's soul to the Highest." In 1869 he +writes:-- + + I occasionally feel able to wish, with my whole softened + heart--it is my only form of prayer--"Great Father, oh, if + Thou canst, have pity on her and on me and on all such!" In + this at least there is no harm. + +And about the same date to Erskine:-- + + "Our Father;" in my sleepless tossings, these words, that + brief and grand prayer, came strangely into my mind with an + altogether new emphasis; as if written and shining for me + in mild pure splendour on the black bosom of the night there; + when I as it were read them word by word, with a sudden + check to my imperfect wanderings, with a sudden softness of + composure which was much unexpected. Not for perhaps thirty + or forty years had I once formally repeated that prayer: nay, + I never felt before how intensely the voice of man's soul it + is, the inmost inspiration of all that is high and pious in + poor human nature, right worthy to be recommended with an + "After this manner pray ye." + +Carlyle holds that if we do our duty--the best work we can--and +faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, God will do the best +for us in this life. As regards the next we have seen that he ended with +Goethe's hope. At an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his +father's death (_Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 65) he wrote:-- + + Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told: + yet under time does there not lie eternity? ... Perhaps my + father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near + me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so + please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one + another, recognise one another. ... The possibility, nay (in + some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows + plainer to me. + +On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife: "We shall yet go to her. +God is great. God is good": and earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the +loss of his brother:-- + + "What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead. + + Your brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both + you and I are.... Perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and + the tears be wiped from all eyes. One thing is no perhaps: + surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of + us. If it be not His will, then is it not better so?" + +After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immortality came +uppermost in his mind; but his conclusions are, like those of Burns, +never dogmatic:-- + + The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us. + "In my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are + God you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do + you know more than I, or any of us? + +And later-- + + What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor + mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted + to go farther"? + +To Emerson in 1867 he writes:-- + + I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily + serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final + chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and + Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to + discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their + sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring + nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger + to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my + door against. + +There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's conviction that +he had to make war on credulity and to assail the pretences of a _formal +Belief_ (which he regards as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple +with real Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, the +Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the miracle of miracles; +sight and knowledge leave us no "less forlorn," and beneath all the +soundings of science there is a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind +that qualified him to be the exponent of the religious epochs in history. +"By this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, "he has done so much to vindicate +and bring to light the Augustan age of Christianity in England," adding +that it is the secret also of the great writer's appreciation of the +higher Teutonic literature. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of +"God in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to constrain +unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good and evil are absolute +opposites, are his links with the Puritans, whom he habitually exalts in +variations of the following strain:-- + + The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest + purpose awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts. + Not the body of heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to + die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been, + and yet shall be immortal, has, for the present, passed away. + +Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he regarded with a feeling +akin to worship, was in all essentials the reverse of a Puritan. + +To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, may be applied +the phrase made use of in reference to the greatest of all the series of +ancient books-- + + Hic liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata quaerit, + Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua. + +From passages like those above quoted--his complaints of the falling +off of old Scotch faith; his references to the kingdom of a God who has +written "in plain letters on the human conscience a Law that all may +read"; his insistence that the great soul of the world is just; his +belief in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the divine +depths of sorrow--from all these many of his Scotch disciples persist in +maintaining that their master was to the end essentially a Christian. The +question between them and other critics who assert that "he had renounced +Christianity" is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomenclature; it +is hard exactly to decide it in the case of a man who so constantly found +again in feeling what he had abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was +to the last an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's and +of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies; he attempts in vain to tear +off the husk that cannot be separated from its kernel. He believes in no +historical Resurrection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts +for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the +Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is +withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards +of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives +way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out," +and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity +Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Masson says that "Carlyle had +abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its +Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain on the other side: +but the _Metaphysic_ of Calvinism is precisely what he retained; the +alleged _Facts_ of Revelation he discarded; of the _Ethic_ of the Gospels +he accepted perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard +the teaching of Christ as final. + +[Footnote: A passage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life and Letters of Robert +Browning_, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic for +general quotation.] + +His doctrine of Renunciation (suggested by the Three Reverences in +_Wilhelm Meister's Travels_) is Carlyle's transmutation, if not +transfiguration, of Puritanism; but it took neither in him nor in Goethe +any very consistent form, save that it meant Temperance, keeping the +body well under the control of the head, the will strong, and striving, +through all the lures of sense, to attain to some ideal life. + +Both write of Christianity as "a thing of beauty," a perennial power, +a spreading tree, a fountain of youth; but Goethe was too much of a +Greek--though, as has been said, "a very German Greek"--to be, in any +proper sense of the word, a Christian; Carlyle too much of a Goth. His +Mythology is Norse; his Ethics, despite his prejudice against the race, +are largely Jewish. He proclaimed his code with the thunders of Sinai, +not in the reconciling voice of the Beatitudes. He gives or forces on us +world-old truths splendidly set, with a leaning to strength and endurance +rather than to advancing thought. He did not, says a fine critic of +morals, recognise that "morality also has passed through the straits." He +did not really believe in Content, which has been called the Catholic, +nor in Progress, more questionably styled the Protestant virtue. His +often excellent practical rule to "do the duty nearest to hand" may be +used to gag the intellect in its search after the goal; so that even his +Everlasting Yea, as a predetermined affirmation, may ultimately result in +a deeper negation. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Professor Jones's _Browning as a Philosophical and +Religious, Teacher_, pp. 66-90.] + +"Duty," to him as to Wordsworth, "stern daughter of the voice of God," +has two aspects, on each of which he dwells with a persistent iteration. +The _first_ is _Surrender_ to something higher and wider than ourselves. +That he has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the +self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly means that correct +theories of our complex life are impossible; but Matthew Arnold's +criticism, that his Ethics "are made paradoxical by his attack on +Happiness, which he should rather have referred to as the result of +Labour and of Truth," can only be rebutted by the assertion that the +pursuit of pleasure as an end defeats itself. The _second_ aspect of his +"Duty" is _Work_. His master Goethe is to him as Apollo to Hercules, as +Shakespeare to Luther; the one entire as the chrysolite, the other like +the Schreckhorn rent and riven; the words of the former are oracles, of +the latter battles; the one contemplates and beautifies truth, the other +wrestles and fights for it. Carlyle has a limited love of abstract truth; +of action his love is unlimited. His lyre is not that of Orpheus, but +that of Amphion which built the walls of Thebes. _Laborare est orare._ He +alone is honourable who does his day's work by sword or plough or pen. +Strength is the crown of toil. Action converts the ring of necessity that +girds us into a ring of duty, frees us from dreams, and makes us men. + + The midnight phantoms feel the spell, + The shadows sweep away. + +There are few grander passages in literature than some of those litanies +of labour. They have the roll of music that makes armies march, and if +they have been made so familiar as to cease to seem new, it is largely +owing to the power of the writer which has compelled them to become +common property. + +Carlyle's practical Ethics, though too little indulgent to the light and +play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the +relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his +conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical +imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in +flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite +above and around, but not _in_ the finite. He insisted on the community +of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am I my brother's +keeper?" + + All things, the minutest that man does, influence all men, + the very look of his face blesses or curses.... It is a + mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my + hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe. + +But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and so failed to +attain to the Optimism after which he often strove. He held, with +Browning, that "God's in His heaven," but not that "All's right with the +world." His view was the Zoroastrian _*athanatos machae*_, "in God's +world presided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a "divine +infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who said "The world is a +lie, but God is truth," landed him in an _impasse_; he could not answer +the obvious retort,--Did then God make and love a lie, or make it hating +it? There must have been some other power _to eteron_, or, as Mill in +his Apologia for _Theism_ puts it, a limit to the assumed Omnipotence. +Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, inconsequently halts between them; +and his prevailing view of mankind adds to his dilemma. + +[Footnote: Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist +Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer," +ejaculated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er Remit nicht diese +verdarnmte Basse."] + +He imposes an "infinite duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an +infinite punishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind sets +its hardest tasks to itself; or that, as Emerson declares, "the assertion +of our weakness and deficiency is the fine innuendo by which the soul +makes its enormous claim." Hence, according to Mazzini, "He stands between +the individual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes the +human being by comparing him with God. From, his lips, so daring, we seem +to hear every instant the cry of the Breton mariner, 'My God, protect me; +my bark is so small and Thy ocean so vast.'" Similarly, the critic of +Browning above referred to concludes of the great prose writer, whom he +has called the poet's twin: + +"He has let loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight of the +future: he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there and was +denied the view from Pisgah." + +Carlyle's Theism is defective because it is not sufficiently Pantheistic; +but, in his view of the succession of events in the "roaring loom of +time," of the diorama of majesty girt by mystery, he has found a +cosmic Pantheism and given expression to it in a passage which is the +culmination of the English prose eloquence, as surely as Wordsworth's +great Ode is the high-tide [A phrase applied by Emerson to the +Ode.] mark of the English verse, of this century:-- + + Are we not sprite shaped into a body, into an Appearance; + and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is + no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of + Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us as + round the veriest spectre is Eternity, and to Eternity + minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love + and Faith as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of + beatified Souls? And again do we not squeak and gibber and + glide, bodeful and feeble and fearful, and revel in our mad + dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the morning air + summons us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake + and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon; does the steel + host that yelled in fierce battle shouts at Issus and + Arbela remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, + even as perturbed goblins must? Napoleon, too, with his + Moscow retreats and Austerlitz campaigns, was it all other + than the veriest spectre hunt; which has now with its + howling tumult that made night hideous flitted away? + Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the + earth openly at noontide; some half hundred have vanished + from it, some half hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch + ticks once. O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider + that we not only carry each a future ghost within him, but are + in very deed ghosts. + + [Footnote: _Cf._ "Tempest," "We are such stuff as dreams are + made of."] + + These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life- + blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow; a + shadow system gathered round our _me_, wherein through some + moments or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the + Flesh. So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the + end. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a + body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night on Heaven's mission + appears. What force and fire there is in each he expends, one + grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the + giddy Alpine heights of science; one madly dashed in pieces on + the rocks of Strife in war with his fellow, and then the heaven- + sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even + to sense becomes a vanished shadow. Thus, like some wild naming, + wild thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this + mysterious Mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick- + succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God- + created fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge from the Inane, + haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again + into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas + filled up. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is + stamped; the rear of the host read traces of the earliest van. + But whence, O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not. Faith knows not; + only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. + +Volumes might be written on Carlyle's relations, of sentiment, belief, +opinion, method of thought, and manner of expression, to other thinkers. +His fierce independence, and sense of his own prophetic mission to the +exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often +unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who +impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to +acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been +wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which +exercised so marked an influence on his New England disciples. He never +realised the part played by the philosophers of Greece in moulding the +speculations of modern Europe. He knew Plato mainly through the Socratic +dialogues. There is, however, a passage in a letter to Emerson (March 13th +1853) which indicates that he had read, comparatively late in life, some +portions of _The Republic_. "I was much struck with Plato last year, and +his notions about Democracy--mere _Latter-Day Pamphlets, saxa et faces_ +... refined into empyrean radiance and the lightning of the gods." The +tribute conveyed in the comparison is just; for there is nothing but +community of political view between the bitter acorns dropped from the +gnarled border oak and the rich fruit of the finest olive in Athene's +garden. But the coincidences of opinion between the ancient and the modern +writer are among the most remarkable in literary history. We can only +refer, without comments, to a few of the points of contact in this strange +conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both +possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they +attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:--_Laissez faire_; the growth +of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, +education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian +spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, +which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of +the ages and circumstances admit. They propose the same remedies:-- +a return to simpler manners, and stricter laws, with the best men in the +State to regulate and administer them. Philosophers, says Plato, are to be +made guardians, and they are to govern, not for gain or glory, but for the +common weal. They need not be happy in the ordinary sense, for there is a +higher than selfish happiness, the love of the good. To this love they +must be _systematically educated_ till they are fit to be kings and +priests in the ideal state; if they refuse they _must_, when their turn +comes, be _made to govern_. Compare the following declarations of +Carlyle:-- + + Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teaching + class--these two sometimes combined in one, a Pontiff + King--there did not society exist without those two vital + elements, there will none exist. Whenever there are born + Kings of men you had better seek them out and _breed them + to the work_.... The few wise will have to take command + of the innumerable foolish, they _must be got to do it_. + +The Ancient and the Modern, the Greek and the Teuton, are further +curiously at one:--in their dislike of physical or mental +Valetudinarianism (cf. _Rep._ Bs. ii. and iii. and _Characteristics_); +in their protests against the morality of consequences, of rewards and +punishments as motives for the highest life (the just man, says Plato, +crucified is better than the unjust man crowned); in their contempt for +the excesses of philanthropy and the pampering of criminals (cf. +_Rep._ B. viii.); in their strange conjunctions of free-thinking and +intolerance. Plato in the Laws enacts that he who speaks against the gods +shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and at last, if he persists in his +impiety, put to death; yet he had as little belief in the national +religion as Carlyle. + +[Footnote: Rousseau, in the "Contrat Social," also assumes this position; +allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows +disrespect to the State Religion.] + +They both accept Destiny,--the Parcae or the Norns spin the threads of +life,--and yet both admit a sphere of human choice. In the Republic the +souls select their lots: with Carlyle man can modify his fate. The +juxtaposition in each of Humour and Pathos (cf. Plato's account of the +dogs in a Democracy, and Carlyle's "Nigger gone masterless among the +pumpkins," and, for pathos, the image of the soul encrusted by the world +as the marine Glaucus, or the Vision of Er and Natural Supernaturalism) is +another contact. Both held that philosophers and heroes were few, and yet +both leant to a sort of Socialism, under State control; they both assail +Poetry and deride the Stage (cf. _Rep._ B. ii. and B. x. with Carlyle on +"The Opera"), while each is the greatest prose poet of his race; they are +united in hatred of orators, who "would circumvent the gods," and in +exalting action and character over "the most sweet voices"--the one +enforcing his thesis in the "language of the gods," the other preaching +silence in forty volumes of eloquent English speech. + +Carlyle seems to have known little of Aristotle. His Stoicism was +indigenous; but he always alludes with deference to the teaching of the +Porch. Marcus Aurelius, the nearest type of the Philosophic King, must +have riveted his regard as an instance of the combination of thought and +action; and some interesting parallels have been drawn between their +views of life as an arena on which there is much to be done and little +to be known, a passage from time to a vague eternity. They have the same +mystical vein, alongside of similar precepts of self-forgetfulness, +abnegation, and the waiving of desire, the same confidence in the power +of the spirit to defy or disdain vicissitudes, ideas which brought both +in touch with the ethical side of Christianity; but their tempers and +manner are as far as possible apart. Carlyle speaks of no one with more +admiration than of Dante, recognising in the Italian his own intensity +of love and hate and his own tenacity; but beyond this there is little +evidence of the "Divina Commedia" having seriously attuned his thought: +nor does he seem to have been much affected by any of the elder English +poets. He scarcely refers to Chaucer; he alludes to Spenser here and +there with some homage, but hardly ever, excepting Shakespeare, to the +Elizabethan dramatists. + +Among writers of the seventeenth century, he may have found in Hobbes +some support of his advocacy of a strong government; but his views on +this theme came rather from a study of the history of that age. Milton +he appreciates inadequately. To Dryden and Swift he is just; the latter, +whether consciously to Carlyle or not, was in some respects his English +master, and the points of resemblance in their characters suggest +detailed examination. Their styles are utterly opposed, that of the one +resting almost wholly on its Saxon base, that of the other being a +coat of many colours; but both are, in the front rank of masters of +prose-satire, inspired by the same audacity of "noble rage." Swift's +humour has a subtler touch and yet more scathing scorn; his contempt of +mankind was more real; his pathos equally genuine but more withdrawn; +and if a worse foe he was a better friend. The comparisons already +made between Johnson and Carlyle have exhausted the theme; they remain +associated by their similar struggle and final victory, and sometimes by +their tyrannous use of power; they are dissociated by the divergence of +their intellectual and in some respects even their moral natures; both +were forces of character rather than discoverers, both rulers of debate; +but the one was of sense, the other of imagination, "all compact." The +one blew "the blast of doom" of the old patronage; the other, against +heavier odds, contended against the later tyranny of uninformed and +insolent popular opinion. Carlyle did not escape wholly from the +influence of the most infectious, if the most morbid, of French writers, +J.J. Rousseau. They are alike in setting Emotion over Reason: in +referring to the Past as a model; in subordinating mere criticism to +ethical, religious or irreligious purpose; in being avowed propagandists; +in their "deep unrest"; and in the diverse conclusions that have been +drawn from their teaching. + +Carlyle's enthusiasm for the leaders of the new German literature was, in +some measure, inspired by the pride in a treasure-trove, the regard of a +foster-father or _chaperon_ who first substantially took it by the hand +and introduced it to English society: but it was also due to the feeling +that he had found in it the fullest expression of his own perplexities, +and at least their partial solution. His choice of its representatives is +easily explained. In Schiller he found intellectually a younger brother, +who had fought a part of his own fight and was animated by his own +aspirations; in dealing with his career and works there is a shade +of patronage. Goethe, on the other hand, he recognised across many +divergencies as his master. The attachment of the belated Scotch Puritan +to the greater German has provoked endless comment; but the former has +himself solved the riddle. The contrasts between the teacher and pupil +remain, but they have been exaggerated by those who only knew Goethe as +one who had attained, and ignored the struggle of his hot youth on the +way to attainment. Carlyle justly commends him, not for his artistic +mastery alone, but for his sense of the reality and earnestness of life, +which lifts him to a higher grade among the rulers of human thought +than such more perfect artists and more passionate lyrists as Heine. He +admires above all his conquest over the world, without concession to it, +saying:-- + + With him Anarchy has now become Peace ... the once + perturbed spirit is serene and rich in good fruits.... + Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been + attained by a surrender to Necessity, or any compact with + Delusion--a seeming blessing, such as years and dispiritment + will of themselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no + blessing, since ever-continued battle is better than + captivity. Many gird on the harness, few bear it + warrior-like, still fewer put it off with triumph. Euphorion + still asserts, "To die in strife is the end of life." + +Goethe ceased to fight only when he had won; his want of sympathy with +the so-called Apostles of Freedom, the stump orators of his day, was +genuine and shared by + +Carlyle. In the apologue of the _Three Reverences_ in _Meister_ the +master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike his pupil, verges +on sentimental paradox, declaring through the lips of the Chief in that +imaginary pedagogic province--which here and there closely recalls the +_New Atlantis_--that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery and +despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine--nay, even on sin and crime to +look not as hindrances, but to honour them, as furtherances of what is +holy." In answer to Emerson's Puritanic criticisms Carlyle replies:-- + + Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than + I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John + Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable + _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty + was infinite,--Knox would have passed on wondering, not + reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like + Goethe. His is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, + that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it + was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold + even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when + all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that + man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you + love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is + not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse + to bear than bad, and on the whole whether the glorious + serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane--as + Light, the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning. + +Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in accord with Carlyle +was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of sayings--as "There is but one temple +in the universe, and that is the body of man," "Who touches a human hand +touches God"--that especially commended themselves to his commentator. +Among philosophers proper, Fichte, in his assertion of the Will as a +greater factor of human life and a nearer indication of personality than +pure Thought, was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The _Vocation of the Scholar_ +and _The Way to a Blessed Life_ anticipated and probably suggested much +of the more speculative part of _Sartor_. But to show their relation +would involve a course of Metaphysics. + +We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life +and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man +with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter--_Jean Paul +der einzige_, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted +on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of +humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a +lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have +influenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of queer +titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, and endless +digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream in the first _Flower Piece_ +from the life of Siebenkaes, and that on _New Year's Eve_, are like +pre-visions of _Sartor_, and we find in the fantasies of both authors +much of the same machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of +_Schmelzle's Journey to Flaetz_ might pass current for Carlyle's own; and +it is evident that the latter was saturated with _Quintus Fixlein_. The +following can hardly be a mere coincidence. Richter writes of a dead +brother, "For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself +among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him, +melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sank his heart of fire +amid the ice and waves"; while in _Cui Bono_ we have-- + + What is life? a thawing ice-board + On a sea with sunny shore. + +Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of _Fixlein_, especially the +passage, "Then begun the AEolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest +pathos of _Sartor_. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common +"reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness, +and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the _Foreign +Quarterly_ of 1830 might be taken for a criticism of himself. + +Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magnanimity in estimating +his English contemporaries; but the deliberate judgments of his essays +were often more genial than those of his letters and conversation; and +perhaps his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew round +him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful than his severity; it is +good for no man to live with satellites. His practical severance from +Mazzini was mainly a personal loss: the widening of the gulf between +him and Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been better +qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other. Carlyle was the +greater genius; but the question which was the greater mind must be +decided by the conflict between logic and emotion. They were related +proximately as Plato to Aristotle, the one saw what the other missed, and +their hold on the future has been divided. Mill had "the dry light," and +his meaning is always clear; he is occasionally open to the charge +of being a formalist, allowing too little for the "infusion of the +affections," save when touched, as Carlyle was, by a personal loss; yet +the critical range indicated by his essay on "Coleridge" on the one side, +that on "Bentham" on the other, is as wide as that of his friend; and +while neither said anything base, Mill alone is clear from the charge of +having ever said anything absurd. His influence, though more indirect, +may prove, save artistically, more lasting. The two teachers, in their +assaults on _laissez faire,_ curiously combine in giving sometimes +undesigned support to social movements with which the elder at least had +no sympathy. + +Carlyle's best, because his most independent, friend lived beyond the +sea. He has been almost to weariness compared with Emerson, initial +pupil later ally, but their contrasts are more instructive than their +resemblances. They have both at heart a revolutionary spirit, marked +originality, uncompromising aversion to illusions, disdain of traditional +methods of thought and stereotyped modes of expression; but in Carlyle +this is tempered by greater veneration for the past, in which he holds +out models for our imitation; while Emerson sees in it only fingerposts +for the future, and exhorts his readers to stay at home lest they should +wander from themselves. The one loves detail, hates abstraction, delights +to dwell on the minutiae of biography, and waxes eloquent even on dates. +The other, a brilliant though not always a profound generaliser, tells +us that we must "leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and +study the sentiment as it appeared in hope not in history ... with the +ideal is the rose of joy. But grief cleaves to names and persons, and +the partial interests of to-day and yesterday." The one is bent under a +burden, and pores over the riddle of the earth, till, when he looks up at +the firmament of the unanswering stars, he can but exclaim, "It is a sad +sight." The other is blown upon by the fresh breezes of the new world; +his vision ranges over her clear horizons, and he leaps up elastic under +her light atmosphere, exclaiming, "Give me health and a day and I will +make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a half-Germanised +Scotchman, living near the roar of the metropolis, with thoughts of +Weimar and reminiscences of the Covenanting hills. Emerson studies +Swedenborg and reads the _Phaedo_ in his garden, far enough from the din +of cities to enable him in calm weather to forget them. "Boston, London, +are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke; so is society, so is the world." +The one is strong where the other is weak. Carlyle keeps his abode in +the murk of clouds illumined by bolts of fire; he has never seen the sun +unveiled. Emerson's "Threnody" shows that he has known the shadow; but he +has fought with no Apollyons, reached the Celestial City without crossing +the dark river, and won the immortal garland "without the dust and heat." +Self-sacrifice, inconsistently maintained, is the watchword of the one: +self-reliance, more consistently, of the other. The art of the two +writers is in strong contrast. The charm of Emerson's style is its +precision; his sentences are like medals each hung on its own string; the +fields of his thought are combed rather than ploughed: he draws outlines, +as Flaxman, clear and colourless. Carlyle's paragraphs are like streams +from Pactolus, that roll nuggets from their source on their turbid way. +His expressions are often grotesque, but rarely offensive. Both writers +are essentially ascetic,--though the one swallows Mirabeau, and the other +says that Jane Eyre should have accepted Eochester and "left the world in +a minority." But Emerson is never coarse, which Carlyle occasionally is; +and Carlyle is never flippant, as Emerson often is. In condemning the +hurry and noise of mobs the American keeps his temper, and insists on +justice without vindictiveness: wars and revolutions take nothing from +his tranquillity, and he sets Hafiz and Shakespeare against Luther and +Knox. Careless of formal consistency--"the hobgoblin of little minds"--he +balances his aristocratic reserve with a belief in democracy, in +progression by antagonism, and in collective wisdom as a limit to +collective folly. Leaving his intellectual throne as the spokesman of a +practical liberty, Emerson's wisdom was justified by the fact that he was +always at first on the unpopular, and ultimately on the winning, side. +Casting his rote for the diffusion of popular literature, a wide +suffrage, a mild penal code, he yet endorsed the saying of an old +American author, "A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will +sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is +a raft that will never sink, but then your feet are always in water." + +[Footnote: Carlyle, on the other hand, holds "that," as has been said, "we +are entitled to deal with criminals as relics of barbarism in the midst of +civilisation." His protest, though exuberated, against leniency in dealing +with atrocities, emphatically requisite in an age apt to ignore the rigour +of justice, has been so far salutary, and may be more so.] + +Maintaining that the State exists for its members, he holds that the +enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular +governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law +need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men, +"to educate whom the State exists"; but he regards them as inspired +mouthpieces rather than controlling forces: their prime mission is to +"fortify our hopes," their indirect services are their best. The career +of a great man should rouse us to a like assertion of ourselves. We ought +not to obey, but to follow, sometimes by not obeying, him. "It is the +imbecility not the wisdom of men that is always inviting the impudence of +power." + +It is obvious that many of these views are in essential opposition to the +teaching of Carlyle; and it is remarkable that two conspicuous men so +differing and expressing their differences with perfect candour should +have lived so long on such good terms. Their correspondence, ranging +over thirty-eight years (begun in 1834, after Emerson's visit to +Craigenputtock, and ending in 1872, before his final trip to England), +is on the whole one of the most edifying in literary history. The +fundamental accord, unshaken by the ruffle of the visit in 1847, is a +testimony to the fact that the common preservation of high sentiments +amid the irksome discharge of ordinary duties may survive and override +the most distinct antagonisms of opinion. Matthew Arnold has gone so far +as to say that he "would not wonder if Carlyle lived in the long run by +such an invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson +and not by his works." This is paradoxical; but the volumes containing +it are in some respects more interesting than the letters of Goethe and +Schiller, as being records of "two noble kinsmen" of nearer intellectual +claims. The practical part of the relationship on the part of Emerson is +very beautiful; he is the more unselfish, and on the whole appears the +better man, especially in the almost unlimited tolerance that passes with +a smile even such violences as the "Ilias in nuce"; but Carlyle shows +himself to be the stronger. Their mutual criticisms were of real benefit. +Emerson succeeded in convincing his friend that so-called anarchy might +be more effective in subduing the wilderness than any despotism; while +the advice to descend from "Himalaya peaks and indigo skies" to concrete +life is accepted and adopted in the later works of the American, _Society +and Solitude_ and the _Conduct of Life,_ which Carlyle praises without +stint. Keeping their poles apart they often meet half-way; and in matters +of style as well as judgment tinge and tend to be transfused into each +other, so that in some pages we have to look to the signature to be sure +of the writer. Towards the close of the correspondence Carlyle in this +instance admits his debt. + + I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can + speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him. + Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes + to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world + there were still but this one voice that responded + intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all + hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive. + My blessings on you, good Ralph Waldo. + +Emerson answers in 1872, on receipt of the completed edition of his +friend's work: "You shall wear the crown at the Pan-Saxon games, with no +competitor in sight ... well earned by genius and exhaustive labour, and +with nations for your pupils and praisers." + +The general verdict on Carlyle's literary career assigns to him the first +place among the British authors of his time. No writer of our generation, +in England, has combined such abundance with such power. Regarding his +rank as a writer there is little or no dispute: it is admitted that the +irregularities and eccentricities of his style are bound up with its +richness. In estimating the value of his thought we must discriminate +between instruction and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has +taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answer must be, +"few." This is a perhaps inevitable result of the manner of his writing, +or rather of the nature of his mind. Aside from political parties, he +helped to check their exaggerations by his own; seeing deeply into the +under-current evils of the time, even when vague in his remedies he +was of use in his protest against leaving these evils to adjust +themselves--what has been called "the policy of drifting"--or of dealing +with them only by catchwords. No one set a more incisive brand on the +meanness that often marks the unrestrained competition of great cities; +no one was more effective in his insistence that the mere accumulation +of wealth may mean the ruin of true prosperity; no one has assailed with +such force the mammon-worship and the frivolity of his age. Everything he +writes comes home to the individual conscience: his claim to be regarded +as a moral exemplar has been diminished, his hold on us as an ethical +teacher remains unrelaxed. It has been justly observed that he helped +to modify "the thought rather than the opinion of two generations." His +message, as that of Emerson, was that "life must be pitched on a higher +plane." Goethe said to Eckermann in 1827 that Carlyle was a moral force +so great that he could not tell what he might produce. His influence has +been, though not continuously progressive, more marked than that of any +of his compeers, among whom he was, if not the greatest, certainly the +most imposing personality. It had two culminations; shortly after the +appearance of _The French Revolution,_ and again towards the close of the +seventh decade of the author's life. To the enthusiastic reception of his +works in the Universities, Mr. Froude has borne eloquent testimony, and +the more reserved Matthew Arnold admits that "the voice of Carlyle, +overstrained and misused since, sounded then in Oxford fresh and +comparatively sound," though, he adds, "The friends of one's youth cannot +always support a return to them." In the striking article in the _St. +James' Gazette_ of the date of the great author's death we read: "One who +had seen much of the world and knew a large proportion of the remarkable +men of the last thirty years declared that Mr. Carlyle was by far the +most impressive person he had ever known, the man who conveyed most +forcibly to those who approached him [best on resistance principles] +that general impression of genius and force of character which it is +impossible either to mistake or to define." Thackeray, as well as Ruskin +and Froude, acknowledged him as, beyond the range of his own _metier_, +his master, and the American Lowell, penitent for past disparagement, +confesses that "all modern Literature has felt his influence in the right +direction"; while the Emersonian hermit Thoreau, a man of more +intense though more restricted genius than the poet politician, +declares--"Carlyle alone with his wide humanity has, since Coleridge, +kept to us the promise of England. His wisdom provokes rather than +informs. He blows down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light, +like the Joethuns, to throw the old woman Time; in his work there is too +much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay-making under the sun. He +makes us act rather than think: he does not say, know thyself, which is +impossible, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, no clear +goal, but an endless Atlantic horizon. He exaggerates. Yes; but he makes +the hour great, the picture bright, the reverence and admiration strong; +while mere precise fact is a coil of lead." Our leading journal on the +morning after Carlyle's death wrote of him in a tone of well-tempered +appreciation: "We have had no such individuality since Johnson. Whether +men agreed or not, he was a touchstone to which truth and falsehood were +brought to be tried. A preacher of Doric thought, always in his pulpit +and audible, he denounced wealth without sympathy, equality without +respect, mobs without leaders, and life without aim." To this we may add +the testimony of another high authority in English letters, politically +at the opposite pole: "Carlyle's influence in kindling enthusiasm for +virtues worthy of it, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one +hand and the unreality on the other, of all that men can do and suffer, +has not been surpassed by any teacher now living. Whatever later teachers +may have done in definitely shaping opinion ... here is the friendly +fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark; here the prophet who +first smote the rock." Carlyle, writes one of his oldest friends, "may +be likened to a fugleman; he stood up in the front of Life's Battle and +showed in word and action his notion of the proper attitude and action of +men. He was, in truth, a prophet, and he has left his gospels." To those +who contest that these gospels are for the most part negative, we may +reply that to be taught what not to do is to be far advanced on the way +to do. + +In nothing is the generation after him so prone to be unjust to a fresh +thinker as with regard to his originality. A physical discovery, as +Newton's, remains to ninety-nine out of a hundred a mental miracle; but a +great moral teacher "labours to make himself forgotten." When he begins +to speak he is suspected of insanity; when he has won his way he receives +a Royal Commission to appoint the judges; as a veteran he is shelved for +platitude. So Horace is regarded as a mere jewelry store of the Latin, +Bacon in his _Essays_, of the English, wisdom, which they each in +fact helped to create. Carlyle's paradoxes have been exaggerated, his +partialities intensified, in his followers; his critical readers, not his +disciples, have learnt most from him; he has helped across the Slough of +Despond only those who have also helped themselves. When all is said of +his dogmatism, his petulance, his "evil behaviour," he remains the master +spirit of his time, its Censor, as Macaulay is its Panegyrist, and +Tennyson its Mirror. He has saturated his nation with a wholesome tonic, +and the practice of any one of his precepts for the conduct of life is +ennobling. More intense than Wordsworth, more intelligible than Browning, +more fervid than Mill, he has indicated the pitfalls in our civilisation. +His works have done much to mould the best thinkers in two continents, +in both of which he has been the Greatheart to many pilgrims. Not a +few could speak in the words of the friend whose memory he has so +affectionately preserved, "Towards me it is still more true than towards +England that no one has been and done like you." A champion of ancient +virtue, he appeared in his own phrase applied to Fichte, as "a Cato Major +among degenerate men." Carlyle had more than the shortcomings of a Cato; +he had all the inconsistent vehemence of an imperfectly balanced mind; +but he had a far wider range and deeper sympathies. The message of the +modern preacher transcended all mere applications of the text _delenda +est._ He denounced, but at the same time nobly exhorted, his age. A +storm-tossed spirit, "tempest-buffeted," he was "citadel-crowned" in his +unflinching purpose and the might of an invincible will. + + + + +APPENDIX + +CARLYLE'S RELIGION + +The _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11, 1881, writes:-- + +"It is obvious that from an early age he entirely ceased to believe, in +its only true sense, the creed he had been taught. He never affected +to believe it in any other sense, for he was far too manly and +simple-hearted to care to frame any of those semi-honest transmutations +of the old doctrines into new-fangled mysticism which had so great a +charm for many of his weaker contemporaries. On the other hand, it is +equally true that he never plainly avowed his unbelief. The line he took +up was that Christianity, though not true in fact, had a right to be +regarded as the noblest aspiration after a theory of the Universe and of +human life ever formed: and that the Calvinistic version of Christianity +was on the whole the best it ever assumed; and the one which represented +the largest proportion of truth and the least amount of error. He also +thought that the truths which Calvinism tried to express, and succeeded +in expressing in an imperfect or partially mistaken manner, were the +ultimate governing principles of morals and politics, of whose systematic +neglect in this age nothing but evil could come. + +"Unwilling to take up the position of a rebel or revolutionist by stating +his views plainly--indeed if he had done so sixty years ago he might have +starved--the only resource left to him was that of approaching all the +great subjects of life from the point of view of grim humour, irony, and +pathos. This was the real origin of his unique style; though no doubt its +special peculiarities were due to the wonderful power of his imagination, +and to some extent--to a less extent we think than has been usually +supposed--to his familiarity with German. + +"What then was his creed? What were the doctrines which in his view +Calvinism shadowed forth and which were so infinitely true, so ennobling +to human life? First, he believed in God; secondly, he believed in an +absolute opposition between good and evil; thirdly, he believed that +all men do, in fact, take sides more or less decisively in this great +struggle, and ultimately turn out to be either good or bad; fourthly, he +believed that good is stronger than evil, and by infinitely slow degrees +gets the better of it, but that this process is so slow as to be +continually obscured and thrown back by evil influences of various +kinds--one of which he believed to be specially powerful in the present +day. + +"God in his view was not indeed a personal Being, like the Christian +God--still less was He in any sense identified with Jesus Christ; who, +though always spoken of with rather conventional reverence in his +writings, does not appear to have specially influenced him. The God in +which Mr. Carlyle believed is, as far as can be ascertained, a +Being possessing in some sense or other will and consciousness, and +personifying the elementary principles of morals--Justice, Benevolence +(towards good people), Fortitude, and Temperance--to such a pitch that +they may be regarded, so to speak, as forming collectively the will of +God.... That there is some one who--whether by the earthquake, or +the fire, or the still small voice--is continually saying to +mankind--'_Discite justitiam moniti'_; and that this Being is the +ultimate fact at which we can arrive ... is what Mr. Carlyle seems to +have meant by believing in God. And if any one will take the trouble to +refer to the first few sentences of the Westminster Confession, and to +divest them of their references to Christianity and to the Bible, he will +find that between the God of Calvin and of Carlyle there is the closest +possible similarity.... The great fact about each particular man is the +relation, whether of friendship or enmity, in which he stands to God. In +the one case he is on the side which must ultimately prevail, ... in the +other ... he will, in due time, be crushed and destroyed.... Our relation +to the universe can be ascertained only by experiment. We all have to +live out our lives.... One man is a Cromwell, another a Frederick, a +third a Goethe, a fourth a Louis XV. God hates Louis XV. and loves +Cromwell. Why, if so, He made Louis XV., and indeed whether He made him +or not, are idle questions which cannot be answered and should not be +asked. There are good men and bad men, all pass alike through this +mysterious hall of doom called life: most show themselves in their true +colours under pressure. The good are blessed here and hereafter; the bad +are accursed. Let us bring out as far as may be possible such good as a +man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the +hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr. +Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and +morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in +either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might +regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the +inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival of +the fittest has much in common with the doctrine of election, and +philosophical necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution, +comes practically to much the same result as predestination." + + + + INDEX + + Aberdour + Addiscombe + Addison + AEschylus + Ailsa Craig + Airy (the astronomer) + Aitken, James + Aitken, Mary + Aitken, Mrs. + Aix-la-Chapelle + Albert, Prince + Alison + Alma + America + Annan + Annandale + Annual Register + Antoinette, Marie + Aristotle + Arndt + Arnold, Dr. + Arnold, Matthew + Ashburton, Lord and Lady + Assaye + Atheism + _Athenaeum_ + Augustenburg + Austerlitz + Austin + Austin, Mrs. + Azeglio + + Bacon + Badams + Badcort + Balaclava + Balzac + Bamford, Samuel + Barbarossa + Baring, see Ashburton + Bassompierre + Beaconsfield, Lord + Beaumarchais + Beethoven + Belgium + Bellamy + Bentham + Berkeley + Berlin + Bernstoff, Count + Biography (by Froude) + Birmingham + Bismarck + _Blackwood,_ + Boehm + Bohemia + Bolingbroke + Bonn + Boston + Boswell + Breslau + Brewster, Sir David + Bright + Brocken, spectre of the + Bromley, Miss + Bronte, Emily + Brougham + Brown, Prof. + Browne, Sir Thomas + Browning + Bryant _note_ + Buckle + Buller, Charles + Buller, Mrs. + Bunsen + Burke + Burness, William + Burns + Byron + + Caesar + _Cagliostro, Count_ + Cairnes + Calderon + Calvin + Campbell, Macleod + Campbell, Thomas + Carleton + Carlyle (family) + Carlyle, Alexander + Carlyle, James (brother) + Carlyle, James (father) + Carlyle, John, Dr. + Carlyle, Margaret (mother) + Carlyle, Margaret (sister) + Carlyle, Mrs. (Jane Welsh)(wife) + Carlyle, Thomas (grandfather) + Carlyle, Thomas, + birth; + education; + studies German; + lives in Edinburgh and takes pupils; + studies law; + tutor to the Bullers; + goes to London; + at Hoddam Hill; + marriage; + Edinburgh life; + married life; + life at Craigenputtock; + second visit to London; + publishes _Sartor_; + takes house in Chelsea; + life and work in London; + loss of first volume of _French Revolution_; + rewrites first volume of _French Revolution_; + lectures; + founds London Library; + publishes _Chartism_; + writes _Past and Present_; + writes _Life of Cromwell_; + visits Ireland; + visits Paris; + writes _History of Friedrich II._; + excursions to Germany; + nominated Lord Rector of Glasgow; + success of _Friedrich II._; + Lord Rector of Edinburgh; + death of his wife; + writes his _Reminiscences_; + defends Governor Eyre; + writes on Franco-German War; + writes on Russo-Turkish War; + honours; + declining years; + death; + Appreciation of; + authorities for his life; + complaints; + contemporary history; + conversation; + critic, as; + descriptive passages; + domestic troubles; + dreams; + dyspepsia; + elements of his character; + estimates (his) of contemporaries; + ethics; + financial affairs; + friends; + genius; historian, as; + ignorance; + influence; + journal; + jury, serves on a; + letters; + literary artist + mission + nicknaming + mania + noises + opinions + paradoxes + polities + popularity and praise + preacher, as, + rank as a writer + relations to other thinkers + religion + routine + scepticism + sound-proof room, + style + teaching + translations + travels, and visits + truth + verses + views, change of + walks + worker, as + Cassel + Castlebar + Cato + Cavaignac, General + Cervantes + Chalmers, Dr. + Changarnier, General + _Characteristics,_ + Charlemagne + _Chartism,_ + Chatham + Chaucer + Chelsea + Cheyne Row + China + Chotusitz + Christianity + Church, English + Cicero + Cid, the + Civil War + Civil War (American) + Clare, Lady + Clarendon + Clerkenwell explosions + Clough, Arthur + Cobden + Coblenz + Cockburn + Colenso, Bishop + Coleridge + Colonies + Columbus + Comte + Conservatism + Conway, Moncure + Cooper, Thomas + Cornelius + _Correspondence,_ + Cortes + Cousin + Craigcrook + Craigenputtock + Crimean War + Cromwell + _Cromwell, Life and Letters of,_ + Crystal Palace Exhibition + Cushman, Miss + Cuestrin + Cuvier + Czars, the + + Dante + Danton + Dardanelles + Darwin + David II. + _Deism,_ + Democracy, + De Morgan + Demosthenes + De Quincey + Derby, Countess of + Desmoulins + _Dial, The,_ + _Diamond Necklace,_ + Dickens + Diderot + Diogenes + Disraeli. _See_ Beaconsfield + Dobell + _Don Quixote,_ + Doering, Herr + Dresden + Drogheda + Drumclog + Dryden + Duffy, Sir C. Gavan + Dumfries + Dunbar + Dunbar (poet) + Duty + + Ecclefechan + Eckermann + Edinburgh + _Edinburgh Encyclopaedia_ + _Edinburgh Review_ + Education + Eisenach + Eldin, Lord + Eliot, George + Emerson + _Emigration_ + Ems + England + _English Traits_ (Emerson's) + Erasmus + Erfurt + Erskine + _Essay on Proportion_ + _Essays_ (Carlyle's) + Everett, Alexander + _Examiner,_ + "Exodus from Houndsditch," + Eyre, Governor + Eyre, Jane + + Faber + Factory Acts + Faust + Fawcett + Fergusson, Dr. John + Fichte + FitzGerald, Edward + Flaxman + _Foreign Quarterly Preview_ + _Foreign Review_ + Foerster + Forster, John + Forster, W.E. + Fouque + Fourier + Foxton, Mr. + France + Franchise + Francia, Dr. + Frankenstein + Frankfort + _Fraser_ + Free Trade + French Directory + French literature + _French Revolution_ + Friedrich II. + _Friedrich II., History of_ + Fritz. _See_ Friedrich + Fritz (Carlyle's horse) + Froude, Mr. + Fryston + Fuchs, Reinecke + + Galileo + Gallipoli + Galway + Game Laws + Gavazzi, Father + Georgel, Abbe + German literature + German worthies + Germany + Gibbon + Gladstone, Sir T + Gladstone, W. E. + Glasgow + _Glasgow Herald_ + Goethe + Goldsmith + Gordon, Margaret + Gordon (quadroon preacher) + Gotha + Grant, J. + Greek thought + Grimm's law + Gronlund + Grote + Guizot + Gully, Dr. + Gully, Miss + Guntershausen + + Haddington + Hafiz + Hakluyt + Hallam + Hallam, Arthur + Hamburg + Hamilton, Sir William + Hare, Archdeacon + Harrison, Frederick + _Harvard Discourse_ (Emerson's) + Hawthorne + Hayti + Heath (royalist writer) + Hedonism + Hegel + Heine, Heinrich + _Helena_ + Helps + Henry VIII. + _Hero-Worship_ (and _On Heroes_} + Herrnhut + Hertzka + Heyne + Hildebrand + Hill, Lord George + _Histories_ (Carlyle's) + History, definition of + _History_ review of + Hobbes + Hochkirk + Hoddam Hill + Hoffmann + Holinshed + Homburg + Homer + Home Rule + Horace + Home, E.H. + Houghton, Lord + Hudson (Railway King) + Hughes, T. + Hugo, Victor + Humboldt + Hume + Hunef + Hunt, Leigh + Huxley, Professor + + "Ilias Americana in nuce" + Immortality + Inkermann + _In Memoriam_ (Tennyson's) + Inquisition + Ireland + Ireland, Mrs. + Irish Question + Irving, Edward + + Jamaica + Jeffrey + Jena + Jerrold, Douglas + Jewsbury, Geraldine + _Jocelin de Brakelond_ + Johnson + _Johnson_ Review of Boswell's + Johnston, James + Jomini + Jonson, Ben + Journalism, definition of + Judengasse + Junius + Juvenal + + Kant + Keats + Keble + Kingsley, Charles + Kingsley, Henry + Kinnaird + Kirkcakly + Knox + Kolin + Koerner + Kossuth + Kunersdorf + + Lamb + Landor + Landshut + Lanin, M. + Laplace + Larkin + _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ + Law, Carlyle's study of + Lawson, Mr., James Carlyle's estimate of + _Lectures_ + Legendre + Leibnitz + Leipzig + Leith + Leslie, Prof. + Leuthen + Leyden + "Liberal Association" + Liberalism + Liegnitz + Literature as a profession + Liverpool + Livy + Lobositz + Locke + "Locksley Hall" + London + London Library + _London Magazine_ + London Peace Congress + Longfellow + Longmans (the publisher) + Louis XIV. + Louis XV. + Louis XVIII. + Louisa, Electress + Lowell + Lucilius + Luichart, Loch + "Luria" + Luther + + Macaulay + Macbeth + Machiavelli + Mackenzie, Miss Stuart + Mahon, Lord + Mainhill + Mainz + Malthusianism + Malvern + Marat + Marburg + Marcus Aurelius + Marlborough + _Marseillaise_ + Marshall + Mavtineau, Miss H. + Marx, Carl + Massou, Prof. + _Materialism_ + Mathematics + Maurice, F. D. + Mazzini + M'Crie + _Meister, Wilhelm_ + Melanchthen + Mentone + Meredith, George + Mericourt + Merimee, Prosper + Metaphysics, Scotch + Michelet + Middle Ages + Mill, J.S. + Millais + Milman + Milton + Mirabeau + _Miscellanies_ + Mitchell, Robert + Mitchell (Young Ireland leader) + Model Prisons + Mohammed + Molesworth + Molwitz + Montague, Basil + Montaigne + Montgomery, Robert + More, Sir Thomas + Morris, William + Motley + Motte, Countess de la + Muirkirk + Murchison, Sir R. + Murray (the publisher) + Murray, Thomas + Musaeus + + Napier, Macvey + Napoleon I. + Napoleon III. + Naseby + Nassau + Necker + Negroes + Nelson + "Nero" (Mrs. Carlyle's dog) + Neuberg + New England + Newman, Cardinal + Newspapers + Newton + Nibelungen Lied + Nicholas the Czar + "Nigger Question" + Noble (biographer of Cromwell) + North, Christopher + Norton, Charles E. + _Norway, Early Kings of_ + Novalis + + O'Brien, Smith + O'Connell + Optimism + Orsay, Count d' + Orthodoxy vetoed + Ossoli, Countess (Margaret Fuller) + Owen + Oxford + Oxford, Bishop of + + Paraguay + Pardubitz + Paris + _Past and Present_ + Paton, Noel + Paulets, the + Peel + Pericles + Peter the Hermit + Philanthropy + Philip of Hesse + Plato + Playfair + Political economy + Political philosophy + Pope + Popes + Prague + Prayer + Prescott + Preuss + _Prinzenraub_ + Procter + Procter, Mrs. Anne + Puritanism + Pusey + Putbus + + _Quarterly Review_ + Queen Victoria + + Radicalism + Railways + Raleigh + Ranke + Ranch + "Reading of Books" + Redwood + Reform Bills + _Reminiscences_ + Renan + Rennie, George + Revolution years + Rhine + Ricardo + Richter + Riesen-Gebirge + Riquetti + Ritualism + Robertson + Robespierre + Roland, Madame + Rolandseck + Romans + Rome, cause of its preservation + Romilly, Sir Samuel + Rossbach + Rossetti, Dante + Rotterdam + Rousseau + Rugby + Ruegen + Rushworth + Ruskin + Russell, Lord John + Russell, Mrs., at Thornhill + Russia + Russo-Turkish War + + Sadowa + St. Andrews + St. Ives + _St. James's Gazette_ + St. Simon + Samson, Abbot + Sand, George + _Sartor Resartus_ + Saunders and Otley (publishers) + Saxons + Scepticism + Schiller + Schlosser + Science + Scotland + Scotsbrig + _Scotsman_ newspaper + Scott, W.B. + Scott, Sir Walter + Sedan + Sepoy rebellion + Seven Years' War + Shaftesbury, Lord + Shakespeare + Shelley + _Shooting Niagara_ + Sidney, Sir Philip + _Signs of the Times_ + Simon de Montfort + Sinclair, Sir George + Slavery + Sloane, Sir Hans + Smail, Tom + Smith, Adam + Smith, Goldwin + Smith, Sydney + Smollett + Snowdon + Socrates + Sophocles + Southey + Spain + Spedding + Spencer, Herbert + Spenser + Stanley, Dean + Stanley, Lady Augusta + Stanleys (of Alderley) + Steele + Stein + Stephen, Fitzjames + Stephen, Sir James + Sterling + _Sterling, Life of_ + Sterne + Stewart, Dugald + Stodart, Miss Eliza + Stonehenge + Strachey, Mr. + Strachey, Mrs. + Stralsund + Strauss + Stuart, Mary + Sturge + _Sun,_ newspaper + Swift + Swinburne + Switzerland + + Tacitus + Taine, M. + _Tale of a Tub_ (Swift's) + Talleyrand + Talma + Taylor, Henry + Taylor's _German Literature_ + Taylor, Mrs. + Tennyson + Teufelsdroeckh + Thackeray + Theism + Thierry, M. + Thiers + Thirlwall, Bishop + Thoreau + Thucydides + Tieck + _Times,_ the + Toplitz + Torgau + Trafalgar + Turgot + Turks + Turner + Tyndall + + _Unto this Last_ (Ruskin's) + Usedom, Baron + + Varennes + Vauvenargues + Vehse + Verses (Carlyle's) + Verses (Mrs. Carlyle's) + Virginia + Voltaire + + _Wanderjahre_ + Wartburg + Washington + Waterloo + Watts, G. F. + Webster, Daniel + Weimar + Weissenfels + Wellington (Duke of) + Welsh, Jane. _See_ Mrs. Carlyle + Welsh, Mrs. + _Werner_ + _Werther_ (Goethe's) + Westminster Abbey + Westminster Confession + _Westminster Review_ + Westport + Wilberforce (Bishop) + William the Conqueror + William the Silent + Willis's Rooms + Wilson + Wolseley + Worcester + Wordsworth + _Work_ + Working classes + _World_ (newspaper) + _Wotton Reinfred_ + + Yarmouth + + Zittau + Zorndorf + + + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thomas Carlyle, by John Nichol + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS CARLYLE *** + +***** This file should be named 9784.txt or 9784.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/9/7/8/9784/ + +Produced by Jayam Subramanian, Robert Connal, and PG +Distributed Proofreaders + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: Thomas Carlyle + Biography + +Author: John Nichol + +Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9784] +[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] +[This file was first posted on October 15, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS CARLYLE *** + + + + +Produced by Jayam Subramanian, Robert Connal +and PG Distributed Proofreaders + + + + +THOMAS CARLYLE + +BY + +JOHN NICHOL, LL. D, M.A., BALLIOL, OXON + + +1904 + + + +PREFATORY NOTE + +The following record of the leading events of Carlyle's life and attempt +to estimate his genius rely on frequently renewed study of his work, on +slight personal impressions--"vidi tantum"--and on information supplied +by previous narrators. Of these the great author's chosen literary +legatee is the most eminent and, in the main, the most reliable. Every +critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligations to Mr. Froude as +every critic of Byron to Moore or of Scott to Lockhart. The works of +these masters in biography remain the ample storehouses from which every +student will continue to draw. Each has, in a sense, made his subject his +own, and each has been similarly arraigned. + +I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the +persistent, often virulent, attacks directed against a loyal friend, +betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith and the defective reticence that +often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr. +Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on _Sir Walter Scott_ +requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with +explicit authority; that the restrictions under which he was at first +entrusted with the MSS. of the _Reminiscences_ and the _Letters and +Memorials_ (annotated by Carlyle himself, as if for publication) were +withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a +practical injunction to communicate the whole. The worst that can be said +is that, in the last years of Carlyle's career, his own judgment as to +what should be made public of the details of his domestic life may have +been somewhat obscured; but, if so, it was a weakness easily hidden from +a devotee. + +My acknowledgments are due to several of the Press comments which +appeared shortly after Carlyle's death, more especially that of the _St. +James's Gazette_, giving the most philosophical brief summary of his +religious views which I have seen; and to the kindness of Dr. Eugene +Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in supplying me with valuable +hints on matters relating to German History and Literature. I have also +to thank the Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_ for permitting me to +reproduce the substance of my article in its columns of February 1881. +That article was largely based on a contribution on the same subject, in +1859, to Mackenzie's _Imperial Dictionary of Biography_. + +I may add that in the distribution of material over the comparatively +short space at my command, I have endeavoured to give prominence to facts +less generally known, and passed over slightly the details of events +previously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs. Carlyle and the +incidents of her death. To her inner history I have only referred in so +far as it had a direct bearing on her husband's life. As regards the +itinerary of Carlyle's foreign journeys, it has seemed to me that it +might be of interest to those travelling in Germany to have a short +record of the places where the author sought his "studies" for his +greatest work. + + + +CONTENTS + +CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY + +CHAPTER II 1795-1826 ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH + +CHAPTER III 1826-1834 CRAIGENPUTTOCK (from Marriage to London) + +CHAPTER IV 1834-1842 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Mrs. Welsh) + +CHAPTER V 1842-1853 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Carlyle's Mother) + +CHAPTER VI 1853-1866 THE MINOTAUR--(To death of Mrs. Carlyle) + +CHAPTER VII 1866-1881 DECADENCE + +CHAPTER VIII CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN + +CHAPTER IX CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY + +CHAPTER X ETHICS--PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE + +APPENDIX ON CARLYLE'S RELIGION + +INDEX + + + + +THOMAS CARLYLE + + + + +CHAPTER I + +INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY + +Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all +in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the +spirit of four successive generations. They are leading links in an +intellectual chain. + +DAVID HUME (1711-1776) remains the most salient type in our island of the +scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary, +which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some +points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid +temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking +Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau. + +ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796), last of great lyrists inspired by a local +genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people, +spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge +between two eras. Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was +also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the +century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master +musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good +and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or +paralysing caution. + +WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), broadest and most generous, if not loftiest of +the group--"no sounder piece of British manhood," says Carlyle himself +in his inadequate review, "was put together in that century"--the great +revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with a magic +glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was also, like Burns, the +humorist of contemporary life. Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the +manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours, +the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von +Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany. + +THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from +the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening +to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams, +some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill +twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The +reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are +everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to +extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his +thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range. + +Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain +atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant +image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the +relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite +his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle +was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of +the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with +the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could +never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, +dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. +He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, +self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost +mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one +exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with +reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself, +violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation to the great poet, +in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent +inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord +Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other +was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than +Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely +different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge +Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the +other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society. +Both had hot hearts, big brains, and an exhaustless store of winged +and fiery words; both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made +constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of Optimism; +Carlylism is the prose rather than "the male of Byronism." The contrasts +are no less obvious: the author of _Sartor Resartus_, however vaguely, +defended the System of the Universe; the author of _Cain_, with an +audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it. +In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there +is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere," +in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous +incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering +belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the +citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient +name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and, +only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained it. His +career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth, +from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown. +Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence": at his death, in a +sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deafening was the +Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every original thinker is +accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells as it runs till it ends +in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from +America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching came home to +their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland, where, for good or ill, +passions are in extremes, he was long howled down, lampooned, preached +at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a +sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion; and was, often +by the very men who had tried and condemned him for blasphemy, as +senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the +builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the +pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists +whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism. +In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate +successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers +of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass +by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder +and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village +churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets +his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so honoured. + +Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events he celebrates in +his earliest History. In its opening pages, we are made to listen to the +feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace," +where Louis XV. and the _ancien regime_ lay dying; later to the ticking +of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the +steeples that roused the singers of the _Marseillaise_ to march from +"their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last +bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian +characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a commander." +Already, over little more than the space of the author's life--for he was +a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the death of Burns, +Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four, Byron's by seven +years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse of the +"cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea. Two +whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms. +"Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old policies, +governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been +sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig, +Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was +seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory +and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires, +two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions, +revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During his life our sway in +the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Italian +without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Continent, while another +across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes +alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated +and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of the world's most +restless, if not its wisest, age. In the internal affairs of the leading +nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a +pantomime. The Art and Literature of those eighty-six years--stirred to +new thought and form at their commencement by the so-called Romantic +movement, more recently influenced by the Classic reaction, the +Pre-Raphaelite protest, the Aesthetic _mode,_--followed various, even +contradictory, standards. But, in one line of progress, there was no +shadow of turning. Over the road which Bacon laid roughly down and +Newton made safe for transit, Physical Science, during the whole period, +advanced without let and beyond the cavil of ignorance. If the dreams +of the _New Atlantis_ have not even in our days been wholly realised, +Science has been brought from heaven to earth, and the elements made +ministers of Prospero's wand. This apparent, and partially real, conquest +of matter has doubtless done much to "relieve our estate," to make life +in some directions run more smoothly, and to multiply resources to meet +the demands of rapidly-increasing multitudes: but it is in danger of +becoming a conquest of matter over us; for the agencies we have called +into almost fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's miscreated +goblin, to beat us down to the same level. Sanguine spirits who + + throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring, + With, at every mile run taster, O the wondrous, wondrous age, + +are apt to forget that the electric light can do nothing to dispel the +darkness of the mind; that there are strict limits to the power of +prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a +great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable, +accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He +swallows formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes +analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him +by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed +to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by +syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of +Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will--essential Calvinist +or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist, +practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is +consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of +the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was +among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the +link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an +expert in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously subserves +physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a +physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms +of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or +rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with +unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in +his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern +Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously +of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit +the battle-fields of Friedrich II.-- + +Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admiring.... +The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still +infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged flight through +immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of bright? You unfortunate, +you grin as an ape would at such a question: you do not know that unless +you can reach thither in some effectual most veritable sense, you are +lost, doomed to Hela's death-realm and the abyss where mere brutes are +buried. I do not want cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I want what +Novalis calls "God, Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift railways and +sacrifices to Hudson help me towards that? + +The ECONOMIC AND MECHANICAL SPIRIT of the age, faith in mere steel or +stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The others were INSINCERITY in +Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY +without Sense. In our time these two last powers have made such strides +as to threaten the Reign of Law. The Democrat without a ruler, who +protests that one man is by nature as good as another, according to +Carlyle is "shooting Niagara." In deference to the mandate of the +philanthropist the last shred of brutality, with much of decision, +has vanished from our code. Sentiment is in office and Mercy not only +tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When Sir Samuel Romilly began his +beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was at school, talkers of treason were +liable to be disembowelled before execution; now the crime of treason is +practically erased, and the free use of dynamite brings so-called reforms +"within the range of practical politics." Individualism was still a mark +of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi" +survived in Mirabeau's "never name to me that _bete_ of a word +'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador, +"I will break your empire like this vase"; in Nelson turning his blind +eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres +Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found +perhaps its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck. + +This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided +sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men +who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to +the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not +inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute +to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents +may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the +_Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :-- + +"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous +fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated, +formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful +and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy +of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen +Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress, +there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero +that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that +produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble +the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a +fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built _Sartor Resartus_ and the +Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the +earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern +thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally +accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are +denied the faculty of producing nations." + +_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary +of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied +assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that +Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted +Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism +extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three +volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of +revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an +assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly, +every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and +one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr. +Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful +and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results, +but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius, who has thrown Hoods of light on +the inter-relations of the organic world. But there are whole troops +of serfs, "addicti jururo in verba magistri," who, accepting, without +attempt or capacity to verify the conclusions of the master mind, think +to solve all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word +"Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's +divining rod, and you answer "Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart +and sick in head, I were referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to +Grimm's Law or to the Magnetic Belt. + +Let us grant that Caesar was evolved from the currents in the air about +the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and +Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William +I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame +from the altar of the mediaeval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to +masterdom in German woods, or later--not to heap up figures whose +memories still possess the world--that Columbus was a Genoan breeze, +Bacon a _rechauffe_ of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch +dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or Corsican +Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at all events, +were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied and +dominated. + +So much, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistence that great men +are creators as well as creatures of their age. Doubtless, as we advance +in history, direct personal influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In +an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education, +when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised +to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest +civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead +the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be +accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a +mere "matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence of the +matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain +that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become +civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more," +preludes, though over a long interval, the cynic comment of the second +"Locksley Hall" on the "increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier +date "Luria" had protested against the arrogance of mere majorities. + + A people is but the attempt of many + To rise to the completer life of one; + And those who live as models to the mass + Are singly of more value than they all. + +Carlyle set these notes to Tennyson and to Browning in his +_Hero-Worship_--a creed, though in thought, and more in action, older +than Buddha or than Achilles, which he first launched as a dogma on our +times, clenching it with the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau +and Napoleon, mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of +Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made remains marked on the minds of +the men of light who _lead_, and cannot be wholly effaced by the clamour +of the men of words who _orate_. If he leans unduly to the exaltation +of personal power, Carlyle is on the side of those whose defeat can be +beneficent only if it be slow. Further to account for his attitude, +we must refer to his life and to its surroundings, _i.e._ to the +circumstances amid which he was "evolved." + + + + +CHAPTER II + +ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH + +[1795-1826] + +In the introduction to one of his essays, Carlyle has warned us against +giving too much weight to genealogy: but all his biographies, from the +sketch of the Riquetti kindred to his full-length _Friedrich_, prefaced +by two volumes of ancestry, recognise, if they do not overrate, inherited +influences; and similarly his fragments of autobiography abound in +suggestive reference. His family portraits are to be accepted with the +deductions due to the family fever that was the earliest form of his +hero-worship. Carlyle, says the _Athenaeum_ critic before quoted, divides +contemporary mankind into the fools and the wise: the wise are the +Carlyles, the Welshes, the Aitkens, and Edward Irving; the fools all the +rest of unfortunate mortals: a Fuseli stroke of the critic rivalling any +of the author criticised; yet the comment has a grain of truth. + +[Footnote: Even the most adverse critics of Carlyle are often his +imitators, their hands taking a dye from what they work in.] + +The Carlyles are said to have come, from the English town somewhat +differently spelt, to Annandale, with David II.; and, according to a +legend which the great author did not disdain to accept, among them was a +certain Lord of Torthorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The +churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the graves of the +family, all with coats of arms--two griffins with adders' stings. More +definitely we find Thomas, the author's grandfather, settled in that +dullest of county villages as a carpenter. In 1745 he saw the rebel +Highlanders on their southward march: he was notable for his study of +_Anson's Voyages_ and of the _Arabian Nights_: "a fiery man, his stroke +as ready as his word; of the toughness and springiness of steel; an +honest but not an industrious man;" subsequently tenant of a small farm, +in which capacity he does not seem to have managed his affairs with +much effect; the family were subjected to severe privations, the mother +having, on occasion, to heat the meal into cakes by straw taken from the +sacks on which the children slept. In such an atmosphere there grew and +throve the five sons known as the five fighting masons--"a curious +sample of folks," said an old apprentice of one of them, "pithy, bitter +speaking bodies, and awfu' fighters." The second of the group, James, +born 1757, married--first, a full cousin, Janet Carlyle (the sole issue +of which marriage was John, who lived at Cockermouth); second, Margaret +Aitken, by whom he had four sons--THOMAS, 1795-1881; Alexander, +1797-1876; John (Dr. Carlyle, translator of Dante), 1801-1879; and James, +1805-1890; also five daughters, one of whom, Jane, became the wife of her +cousin James Aitken of Dumfries, and the mother of Mary, the niece who +tended her famous uncle so faithfully during the last years of his life. +Nowhere is Carlyle's loyalty to his race shown in a fairer light than in +the first of the papers published under the name of _Reminiscences_. +It differs from the others in being of an early date and free from all +offence. From this pathetic sketch, written when on a visit to London in +1832 he had sudden news of his father's death, we may, even in our brief +space, extract a few passages which throw light on the characters, _i.e._ +the points of contact and contrast of the writer and his theme:-- + +In several respects I consider my father as one of the most interesting +men I have known, ... of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of +any it has been my lot to converse with. None of you will ever forget +that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, +full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all +manner of potent words.... Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to +render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Emphatic I have +heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: his words +were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that +he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet in description, and +for the sake chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man of rigid, even +scrupulous veracity.... He was never visited with doubt. The old Theorem +of the Universe was sufficient for him ... he stood a true man, while +his son stands here on the verge of the new.... A virtue he had which +I should learn to imitate: he never spoke of what was disagreeable and +past. His was a healthy mind. He had the most open contempt for all +"clatter."... He was irascible, choleric, and we all dreaded his wrath, +but passion never mastered him.... Man's face he did not fear: God he +always feared. His reverence was, I think, considerably mixed with +fear--rather awe, as of unutterable depths of silence through which +flickered a trembling hope.... Let me learn of him. Let me write my books +as he built his houses, and walk as blamelessly through this shadow +world.... Though genuine and coherent, living and life-giving, he was +nevertheless but half developed. We had all to complain that we durst not +freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in: he had not the free +means to unbosom himself.... It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear +repelled us from him. To me it was especially so. Till late years I was +ever more or less awed and chilled by him. + +James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. The failings of +both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. They were at one in their +integrity, independence, fighting force at stress, and their command of +winged words; but the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a +broader spirit; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he was a +better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a grimmer Calvinist. +"Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, "is doing very well, and has given us no +more paraphrases." He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged, under +the narrowing influences of the Covenanting land; but he remained stable +and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built with his own hands. James +Carlyle hammered on at Ecclefechan, making in his best year L100, till, +after the first decade of the century, the family migrated to Mainhill, +a bleak farm two miles from Lockerbie, where he so throve by work and +thrift that he left on his death in 1832 about L1000. Strong, rough, and +eminently _straight,_ intolerant of contradiction and ready with words +like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the +Brontes on the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle of +Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological theory as strict as +her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her +favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her +heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a +fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late +in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they +talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she +was to the last proud of the genius which grew in large measure under the +unfailing sunshine of her anxious love. + +Book II. of _Sartor_ is an acknowledged fragment of autobiography, mainly +a record of the author's inner life, but with numerous references to +his environment. There is not much to identify the foster parents of +Teufelsdroeckh, and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the +place of ancestry: Entepfuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, where the ducks +are paddling in the ditch that has to pass muster for a stream, to-day as +a century gone: the severe frugality which (as in the case of Wordsworth +and Carlyle himself) survived the need for it, is clearly recalled; also +the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, "In an orderly house, +where the litter of children's sports is hateful, your training is rather +to bear than to do. I was forbid much, wishes in any measure bold I had +to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of obedience inflexibly held me +down. It was not a joyful life, yet ... a wholesome one." The following +oft-quoted passage is characteristic of his early love of nature and the +humorous touches by which he was wont to relieve his fits of sentiment:-- + +On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread crumb boiled +in milk) and eat it out of doors. On the coping of the wall, which I +could reach by climbing, my porringer was placed: there many a sunset +have I, looking at the distant mountains, consumed, not without relish, +my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of world's +expectation as day died, were still a Hebrew speech for me: nevertheless +I was looking at the fair illumined letters, and had an eye for the +gilding. + +In all that relates to the writer's own education, the Dichtung of +_Sartor_ and the Wahrheit of the _Reminiscences_ are in accord. By +Carlyle's own account, an "insignificant portion" of it "depended on +schools." Like Burns, he was for some years trained in his own parish, +where home influences counted for more than the teaching of not very +competent masters. He soon read eagerly and variously. At the age of +seven he was, by an Inspector of the old order, reported to be "complete +in English." In his tenth year (1805) he was sent to the Grammar School +of Annan, the "Hinterschlag Gymnasium," where his "evil days" began. +Every oversensitive child finds the life of a public school one long +misery. Ordinary boys--those of the Scotch borderland being of the most +savage type--are more brutal than ordinary men; they hate singularity as +the world at first hates originality, and have none of the restraints +which the later semi-civilisation of life imposes. "They obey the impulse +of rude Nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any stricken hart, the +duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all +hands the strong tyrannise over the weak." Young Carlyle was mocked for +his moody ways, laughed at for his love of solitude, and called "Tom the +Tearful" because of his habit of crying. To add much to his discomfort, +he had made a rash promise to his pious mother, who seems, in contrast to +her husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles--a promise +to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well +broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he +refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew +Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty +called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by +appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge +of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began +to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright +prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend. +On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University, +despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, "Educate a +boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." "Thou hast not +done so," said old James in after years, "God be thanked for it;" and the +son pays due tribute to the tolerant patience and substantial generosity +of the father: "With a noble faith he launched me forth into a world +which he himself had never been permitted to visit." Carlyle walked +through Moffat all the way to Edinburgh with a senior student, Tom Smail +(who owes to this fact the preservation of his name), with eyes open +to every shade on the moors, as is attested in two passages of the +_Reminiscences_. The boys, as is the fashion still, clubbed together in +cheap lodgings, and Carlyle attended the curriculum from 1809 to 1814. +Comparatively little is known of his college life, which seems to +have been for the majority of Scotch students much as it is now, a +compulsorily frugal life, with too little variety, relaxation, or society +outside Class rooms; and, within them, a constant tug at Science, mental +or physical, at the gateway to dissecting souls or bodies. We infer, from +hints in later conversations and memorials, that Carlyle lived much with +his own fancies, and owed little to any system. He is clearly thinking +of his own youth in his account of Dr. Francia: "Jose must have been a +loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn reflection, probably +to crying humours, with fits of vehement ill nature--subject to the +terriblest fits of hypochondria." His explosion in _Sartor,_ "It is my +painful duty to say that out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of +all hitherto discovered Universities," is the first of a long series of +libels on things and persons he did not like. The Scotch capital was +still a literary centre of some original brilliancy, in the light of +the circle of Scott, which followed that of Burns, in the early fame of +Cockburn and of Clerk (Lord Eldin), of the _Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh +Reviews,_ and of the elder Alison. The Chairs of the University were +conspicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of ability required +from Professors, some of them--conspicuously Brown (the more original if +less "sound" successor of Dugald Stewart), Playfair, and Leslie--rising +to a higher rank. But great Educational Institutions must adapt +themselves to the training of average minds by requirements and +restrictions against which genius always rebels. Biography more than +History repeats itself, and the murmurs of Carlyle are, like those +of Milton, Gibbon, Locke, and Wordsworth, the protests or growls of +irrepressible individuality kicking against the pricks. He was never in +any sense a classic; read Greek with difficulty--Aeschylus and Sophocles +mainly in translations--and while appreciating Tacitus disparaged Horace. +For Scotch Metaphysics, or any logical system, he never cared, and in his +days there was written over the Academic entrances "No Mysticism." He +distinguished himself in Mathematics, and soon found, by his own vaunt, +the _Principia_ of Newton prostrate at his feet: he was a favourite pupil +of Leslie, who escaped the frequent penalty of befriending him, but he +took no prizes: the noise in the class room hindered his answers, and he +said later to Mr. Froude that thoughts only came to him properly when +alone. + +[Footnote: He went so far as to say in 1847 that "the man who had mastered +the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he +had done before."] + +The social leader of a select set of young men in his own rank, by choice +and necessity _integer vitae_, he divided his time between the seclusion +of study and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was perhaps +the most prolific writer of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed his course +without taking a degree, did some tutorial work, and, in the same year, +accepted the post of Mathematical Usher at Annan as successor to Irving, +who had been translated to Haddington. Still in formal pursuit of the +ministry, though beginning to fight shy of its fences, he went up twice a +year to deliver addresses at the Divinity Hall, one of which, "on the uses +of affliction," was afterwards by himself condemned as flowery; another +was a Latin thesis on the theme, "num detur religio naturalis." The +posthumous publication of some of his writings, e.g. of the fragment of +the novel _Wotton Reinfred_, reconciles us to the loss of those which have +not been recovered. + +In the vacations, spent at Mainhill, he began to study German, and +corresponded with his College friends. Many of Carlyle's early letters, +reproduced in the volumes edited by Mr. Charles E. Norton, are written in +that which, according to Voltaire, is the only unpermissible style, "the +tiresome"; and the thought, far from being precocious, is distinctly +commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell on the fall of Napoleon; +or the following to his parents: "There are few things in this world more +valuable than knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it"; or +to James Johnstone the trite quotation, "Truly pale death overturns with +impartial foot the hut of the poor man and the palace of the king." +Several are marred by the egotism which in most Scotch peasants of +aspiring talent takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves +with others; refrains of the ambition against which the writer elsewhere +inveighs as the "kettle tied to the dog's tail." In a note to Thomas +Murray he writes:-- + +Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known +has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! bestow coronets and crowns and +principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and +noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart unyielding +to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary +fame. + +That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is +ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of +Leyden :-- + + Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye, + For that was a day + When we stood in our array + Like the lion's might at bay. + +"Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell consumes +almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have not, then I +desire you read it (_sic_) and tell me what you think of _him_," etc. +Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the +lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been previously travestied +in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns. "Many of his +opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to refer all the +modifications of national character to the influence of moral causes. +Might it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those which +he denominates moral causes originate from physical circumstances?" The +whole first volume of this somewhat overexpanded collection overflows +with ebullitions of bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of +Byron's early romances seems philanthropy, e.g.-- + +How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this +world. For what are its inhabitants? Its great men and its little, its +fat ones and its lean ... pitiful automatons, despicable Yahoos, yea, +they are altogether an insufferable thing. "O for a lodge in some vast +wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where the scowl of the +purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of the coxcomb, the bray of the +ninny and the clodpole might never reach me more!" + +On the other hand, there are frequent evidences of the imperial +intrepidity, the matchless industry, and the splendid independence of +the writer. In his twenty-first year Carlyle again succeeded his Annan +predecessor (who seems to have given dissatisfaction by some vagaries of +severity) as mathematical teacher in the main school of Kirkcaldy. The +_Reminiscences_ of Irving's generous reception of his protege present one +of the pleasantest pictures in the records of their friendship. The same +chapter is illustrated by a series of sketches of the scenery of the +east coast rarely rivalled in descriptive literature. It is elsewhere +enlivened, if also defaced, by the earliest examples of the cynical +criticisms of character that make most readers rejoice in having escaped +the author's observation. + +During the two years of his residence in Fifeshire, Carlyle encountered +his first romance, in making acquaintance with a well-born young lady, +"by far the brightest and cleverest" of Irving's pupils--Margaret +Gordon--"an acquaintance which might easily have been more" had not +relatives and circumstances intervened. Doubtless Mr. Froude is right in +asserting this lady to have been the original of _Sartor's_ "Blumine"; +and in leaving him to marry "Herr Towgood," ultimately governor of Nova +Scotia, she bequeathed, though in antithetical style, advice that attests +her discrimination of character. "Cultivate the milder dispositions of +the heart, subdue the mere extravagant visions of the brain. Genius +will render you great. May virtue render you beloved. Remove the awful +distance between you and other men by kind and gentle manners. Deal +gently with their inferiority, and be convinced that they will respect +you as much and like you more." To this advice, which he never even +tried to take, she adds, happily perhaps for herself, "I give you not my +address, because I dare not promise to see you." In 1818 Carlyle, always +intolerant of work imposed, came to the conclusion that "it were better +to perish than to continue schoolmastering," and left Kirkcaldy, with L90 +saved, for Edinburgh, where he lived over three years, taking private +pupils, and trying to enter on his real mission through the gates of +literature--gates constantly barred; for, even in those older days of +laxer competition, obstinate eccentricity unredeemed by any social +advantages led to failure and rebuff. Men with the literary form of +genius highly developed have rarely much endurance of defeat. Carlyle, +even in his best moods, resented real or fancied injuries, and at this +stage of his career complained that he got nothing but vinegar from his +fellows, comparing himself to a worm that trodden on would "turn into a +torpedo." He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, which "gnawed +like a rat" at its life-long tenement, his stomach, and by sleeplessness, +due in part to internal causes, but also to the "Bedlam" noises of men, +machines, and animals, which pestered him in town and country from first +to last. He kept hesitating about his career, tried law, mathematical +teaching, contributions to magazines and dictionaries, everything but +journalism, to which he had a rooted repugnance, and the Church, which he +had definitely abandoned. How far the change in his views may have been +due to his reading of Gibbon, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc., how far to self- +reflection, is uncertain; but he already found himself unable, in any +plain sense, to subscribe to the Westminster Confession or to any +"orthodox" Articles, and equally unable by any philosophical +reconciliation of contraries to write black with white on a ground of +neutral gray. + +[Footnote: He refers to Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ as "of all books the +most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. +His winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing, were +often admirably potent and illustrative to me."] + +Mentally and physically adrift he was midway in the valley of the shadow, +which he represents as "The Everlasting No," and beset by "temptations in +the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, "The biographies of men of +letters are the wretchedest chapters in our history, except perhaps the +Newgate Calendar," a remark that recalls the similar cry of Burns, "There +is not among the martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the +poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness +to the absence of a popularity which he yet professes to scorn.--I was +entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles; solitary eating my own heart, +misgivings as to whether there shall be presently anything else to eat, +fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles and miseries ... three +weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free of noise, +... wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual questions unanswered, +etc. + +What is this but Byron's cry, "I am not happy," which his afterwards +stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-jack? + +Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same dismal mood. +"Mainhill," says his biographer, "was never a less happy home to him than +it was this summer (1819). He could not conceal the condition of his +mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a +matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have +seemed as if possessed." + +Returning to Edinburgh in the early winter, he for a time wrote hopefully +about his studies. "The law I find to be a most complicated subject, +yet I like it pretty well. Its great charm in my eyes is that no mean +compliances are requisite for prospering in it." But this strain soon +gave way to a fresh fit of perversity, and we have a record of his +throwing up the cards in one of his most ill-natured notes. + +I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and +converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But +it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere +denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as +wages for all that bogpool of disgust. + +The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radical rising in +Glasgow against the poverty which was the natural aftermath of the great +war, oppressions, half real, half imaginary, of the military force, and +the yeomanry in particular. Carlyle's contribution to the reminiscences +of the time is doubly interesting because written (in the article on +Irving, 1836) from memory, when he had long ceased to be a Radical. A +few sentences suffice to illustrate this phase or stage of his political +progress:-- + +A time of great rages and absurd terrors and expectations, a very fierce +Radical and anti-Radical time. Edinburgh, endlessly agitated by it all +around me ... gentry people full of zeal and foolish terror and fury, and +looking _disgustingly busy and important_.... One bleared Sunday morning +I had gone out for my walk. At the Riding-house in Nicolson Street was a +kind of straggly group, with red-coats interspersed. They took their way, +not very dangerous-looking men of war; but there rose from the little +crowd the strangest shout I have heard human throats utter, not very +loud, but it said as plain as words, and with infinitely more emphasis of +sincerity, "May the devil go with you, ye peculiarly contemptible, and +dead to the distresses of your fellow-creatures!" Another morning ... I +met an advocate slightly of my acquaintance hurrying along, musket in +hand, towards the Links, there to be drilled as item of the "gentlemen" +volunteers now afoot. "You should have the like of this," said he, +cheerily patting his musket "Hm, yes; but I haven't yet quite settled on +which side"--which probably he hoped was quiz, though it really expressed +my feeling ... mutiny and revolt being a light matter to the young. + +This period is illustrated by numerous letters from Irving, who had +migrated to Glasgow as an assistant to Dr. Chalmers, abounding in sound +counsels to persevere in some profession and make the best of practical +opportunities. Carlyle's answers have in no instance been preserved, but +the sole trace of his having been influenced by his friend's advice is his +contribution (1820-1823) of sixteen articles to the _Edinburgh +Encyclopedia_ under the editorship of Sir David Brewster. The scant +remuneration obtained from these was well timed, but they contain no +original matter, and did nothing for his fame. Meanwhile it appears from +one of Irving's letters that Carlyle's thoughts had been, as later in his +early London life, turning towards emigration. He says, writes his friend, +"I have the ends of my thoughts to bring together ... my views of life to +reform, my health to recover, and then once more I shall venture my bark +on the waters of this wide realm, and if she cannot weather it I shall +steer west and try the waters of another world." + +[Footnote: The subjects of these were--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, +Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker, +Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, +Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord Chatham, William Pitt. These articles, on +the whole judiciously omitted from the author's collected works, are +characterised by marks of great industry, commonplace, and general +fairness, with a style singularly formal, like that of the less im +pressive pages of Johnson. The following, among numerous passages, are +curious as illustrating the comparative orthodoxy of the writer's early +judgments: "The brilliant hints which Montesquieu scatters round him with +a liberal hand have excited or assisted the speculations of others in +almost every department of political economy, and he is deservedly +mentioned as a principal founder of that important science." "Mirabeau +confronted him (Necker) like his evil genius; and being totally without +scruple in the employment of any expedient, was but too successful in +overthrowing all reasonable proposals, and conducting the people to that +state of anarchy out of which his own ambition was to be rewarded," etc. +Similarly the verdicts on Pitt, Chatham, Nelson, Park, Lady Montagu, etc., +are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of conscientious research, +fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as +in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend +itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to +show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be +united with a coarse and ignoble heart."] + +The resolves, sometimes the efforts, of celebrated Englishmen,--"nos manet +oceanus,"--as Cromwell, Burns, Coleridge, and Southey (allured, some +critic suggests, by the poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough, +Richard Hengist Horne, and Browning's "Waring," to elude "the fever and +the fret" of an old civilisation, and take refuge in the fancied freedom +of wild lands--when more than dreams--have been failures. + +[Footnote: Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his +New York Press and "plant him where the red deer feed, in the green +forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's banished Duke.] + +Puritan patriots, it is true, made New England, and the scions of the +Cavaliers Virginia; but no poet or imaginative writer has ever been +successfully transplanted, with the dubious exception of Heinrich Heine. +It is certain that, despite his first warm recognition coming from across +the Atlantic, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ would have found +the "States" more fruitful in food for cursing than either Edinburgh or +London. + +The spring of 1820 was marked by a memorable visit to Irving, on +Carlyle's way to spend as was his wont the summer months at home. His +few days in Glasgow are recorded in a graphic sketch of the bald-headed +merchants at the Tontine, and an account of his introduction to Dr. +Chalmers, to whom he refers always with admiration and a respect but +slightly modified. The critic's praise of British contemporaries, other +than relatives, is so rare that the following sentences are worth +transcribing:-- + +He (Chalmers) was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honesty, and +kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination.... He had a +burst of genuine fun too.... His laugh was ever a hearty, low guffaw, +and his tones in preaching would reach to the piercingly pathetic. No +preacher ever went so into one's heart. He was a man essentially of +little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. Such an intellect, +professing to be educated, and yet ... ignorant in all that lies beyond +the horizon in place or time I have almost nowhere met with--a man +capable of so much soaking indolence, lazy brooding ... as the first +stage of his life well indicated, ... yet capable of impetuous activity +and braying audacity, as his later years showed. I suppose there will +never again be such a preacher in any Christian church. "The truth of +Christianity," he said, "was all written in us already in sympathetic +ink. Bible awakens it, and you can read"--a sympathetic image but of no +great weight as an argument addressed to doubting Thomas. Chalmers, whose +originality lay rather in his quick insight and fire than in his mainly +commonplace thought, had the credit of recognising the religious side of +Carlyle's genius, when to the mass of his countrymen he was a rock of +offence. One of the great preacher's criticisms of the great writer is +notably just: "He is a lover of earnestness more than a lover of truth." + +There follows in some of the early pages of the _Reminiscences_ an +account of a long walk with Irving, who had arranged to accompany Carlyle +for the first stage, _i.e._ fifteen miles of the road, of his for the +most part pedestrian march from Glasgow to Ecclefechan, a record among +many of similar excursions over dales and hills, and "by the beached +margent," revived for us in sun and shade by a pen almost as magical as +Turner's brush. We must refer to the pages of Mr. Froude for the +picture of Drumclog moss,--"a good place for Cameronian preaching, and +dangerously difficult for Claverse _(sic)_ and horse soldiery if the +suffering remnant had a few old muskets among them,"--for the graphic +glimpse of Ailsa Craig, and the talk by the dry stone fence, in the +twilight. "It was just here, as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from +me by degrees, in the softest manner, that I did not think as he of the +Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or +should. This, if this was so, he had pre-engaged to take well of me, like +an elder brother, if I would be frank with him. And right loyally he did +so." They parted here: Carlyle trudged on to the then "utterly quiet +little inn" at Muirkirk, left next morning at 4 A.M., and reached +Dumfries, a distance of fifty-four miles, at 8 P.M., "the longest walk I +ever made." He spent the summer at Mainhill, studying modern +languages, "living riotously with Schiller and Goethe." at work on the +_Encyclopedia_ articles, and visiting his friend at Annan, when he was +offered the post of tutor to the son of a Yorkshire farmer, an offer +which Irving urged him to accept, saying, "You live too much in an ideal +world," and wisely adding, "try your hand with the respectable illiterate +men of middle life. You may be taught to forget ... the splendours and +envies ... of men of literature." + +This exhortation led to a result recorded with much humour, egotism, and +arrogance in a letter to his intimate friend Dr. John Fergusson, of Kelso +Grammar School, which, despite the mark "private and confidential," was +yet published, several years after the death of the recipient and shortly +after that of the writer, in a gossiping memoir. We are therefore at +liberty to select from the letter the following paragraphs:-- + + I delayed sending an answer till I might have it in my power + to communicate what seemed then likely to produce a + considerable change in my stile (_sic_) of life, a + proposal to become a "travelling tutor," as they call it, to + a young person in the North Riding, for whom that exercise + was recommended on account of bodily and mental weakness. + They offered me L150 per annum, and withal invited me to + come and examine things on the spot before engaging. I went + accordingly, and happy was it I went; from description I was + ready to accept the place; from inspection all Earndale + would not have hired me to accept it. This boy was a dotard, + a semi-vegetable, the elder brother, head of the family, a + two-legged animal without feathers, intellect, or virtue, + and all the connections seemed to have the power of eating + pudding but no higher power. So I left the barbarous + people....York is but a heap of bricks. Jonathan Dryasdust + (see _Ivanhoe_) is justly named. York is the Boetia of + Britain.... Upon the whole, however, I derived great + amusement from my journey, ... I conversed with all kinds of + men, from graziers up to knights of the shire, argued with + them all, and broke specimens from their souls (if any), + which I retain within the museum of my cranium. I have no + prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown + from another planet on this dark terrestrial ball, an alien, + a pilgrim ... and life is to me like a pathless, a waste, + and a howling wilderness. Do not leave your situation if + you can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a + fearful thing to be swept in by the roaring surge of life, + and then to float alone undirected on its restless, + monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet you may, or if you + must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the waves without + a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cock-boats, yet hold + fast by the Manilla ship, _and do not let go the painter_. + +Towards the close of this year Irving, alarmed by his friend's +despondency, sent him a most generous and delicately-worded invitation to +spend some months under his roof; but Carlyle declined, and in a letter +of March 1821 he writes to his brother John: "Edinburgh, with all its +drawbacks, is the only scene for me," on which follows one of his finest +descriptions, that of the view from Arthur Seat. + +According to the most probable chronology, for many of Carlyle's dates +are hard to fix, the next important event of his life, his being +introduced, on occasion of a visit to Haddington, to Miss Jane Welsh by +her old tutor, Edward Irving--an event which marks the beginning of a new +era in his career--took place towards the close of May or in the first +week of June. To June is assigned the incident, described in _Sartor_ as +the transition from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea, a sort of +revelation that came upon him as he was in Leith Walk--Rue St. Thomas de +l'Enfer in the Romance--on the way to cool his distempers by a plunge in +the sea. The passage proclaiming this has been everywhere quoted; and it +is only essential to note that it resembled the "illuminations" of St. +Paul and of Constantine merely by its being a sudden spiritual impulse. +It was in no sense a conversion to any belief in person or creed, it was +but the assertion of a strong manhood against an almost suicidal mood +of despair; a condition set forth with superabundant paraphernalia of +eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of Teufelsdroeckh had +darkened into disbelief in divine or human justice, freedom, or himself. +If there be a God, He sits on the hills "since the first Sabbath," +careless of mankind. Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire +and fear"; virtue "some bubble of the blood," absence of vitality +perhaps. + +What in these days are terrors of conscience to diseases of the liver? +Not on morality but on cookery let us build our stronghold.... Thus has +the bewildered wanderer to stand, shouting question after question into +the Sibyl cave, and receiving for answer an echo. + +From this scepticism, deeper than that of _Queen Mab,_ fiercer than that +of _Candide,_ Carlyle was dramatically rescued by the sense that he was a +servant of God, even when doubting His existence. + + After all the nameless woe that inquiry had wrought me, + I nevertheless still loved truth, and would hate no jot of my + allegiance....Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me + for following her; no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubberland + were the price of apostacy. + +With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough of despond and +asserts himself: + + Denn ich bin ein Mensch gewesen + Und das heisst ein Kaempfer seyn. + +He finds in persistent action, energy, and courage a present strength, +and a lamp of at least such partial victory as he lived to achieve. + + He would not make his judgment blind; + He faced the spectres of the mind,-- + +but he never "laid them," or came near the serenity of his master, +Goethe; and his teaching, public and private, remained half a wail. He +threw the gage rather in the attitude of a man turning at bay than that of +one making a leap. + + Death? Well, Death ... let it come then, and I will + meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream + of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from + that time the temper of my misery was changed; not ... + whining sorrow ... but grim defiance. + +Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:-- + +I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce, +upon myself and all things earthly....The year is closing. This time +eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago.... + + Oh! little did my mother think, + That day she cradled me, + The lands that I should travel in, + The death I was to dee. + +My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in +a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain. +How have I deserved this? I know not. Then why don't you kill yourself, +sir? Is there not arsenic? Is there not ratsbane of various kinds? And +hemp, and steel? Most true, Sathanas...but it will be time enough to +use them when I have _lost_ the game I am but _losing_, ... and while +my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not +breaking their hearts would still remain....I want health, health, +health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious: my torments are +greater than I am able to bear. + +Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is there any excess of +Optimism; but after the Leith Walk inspiration he had resolved on "no +surrender"; and that, henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have +proof in its more regular, if not more rapid progress. His last hack +service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless we add a +translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's Geometry, begun, +according to some reports, in the Kirkcaldy period, finished in 1822, +and published in 1824. For this task, prefixed by an original _Essay on +Proportion_, much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respectable sum +of L50. Two subsequent candidatures for Chairs of Astronomy showed that +Carlyle had not lost his taste for Mathematics; but this work was his +practical farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an +author were those of an interpreter. His complete mastery of German has +been said to have endowed him with "his sword of sharpness and shoes of +swiftness"; it may be added, in some instances also, with the "fog-cap." +But in his earliest substantial volume, the _Life of Schiller_, there is +nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. This work began to +appear in the _London Magazine_ in 1823, was finished in 1824, and in +1825 published in a separate form. Approved during its progress by an +encouraging article in the _Times_, it was, in 1830, translated into +German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced the work by an +important commendatory preface, and so first brought the author's name +conspicuously before a continental public. Carlyle himself, partly +perhaps from the spirit of contradiction, was inclined to speak +slightingly of this high-toned and sympathetic biography: "It is," said +he, "in the wrong vein, laborious, partly affected, meagre, bombastic." +But these are sentences of a morbid time, when, for want of other +victims, he turned and rent himself. _Pari passu_, he was toiling at his +translation of _Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship_. This was published in +Edinburgh in 1824. Heartily commended in _Blackwood_, it was generally +recognised as one of the best English renderings of any foreign author; +and Jeffrey, in his absurd review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks +in high terms of the skill displayed by the translator. The virulent +attack of De Quincey--a writer as unreliable as brilliant--in the _London +Magazine_ does not seem to have carried much weight even then, and has +none now. The _Wanderjahre_, constituting the third volume of the English +edition, first appeared as the last of four on German Romance--a series +of admirably selected and executed translations from Musaeus, Fouque, +Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Goethe, prefaced by short biographical and +critical notices of each--published in Edinburgh in 1827. This date is +also that of the first of the more elaborate and extensive criticisms +which, appearing in the Edinburgh and Foreign reviews, established +Carlyle as the English pioneer of German literature. The result of these +works would have been enough to drive the wolf from the door and to +render their author independent of the oatmeal from home; while another +source of revenue enabled him not only to keep himself, but to settle +his brother Alick in a farm, and to support John through his University +course as a medical student. This and similar services to the family +circle were rendered with gracious disclaimers of obligation. "What any +brethren of our father's house possess, I look on as a common stock from +which all are entitled to draw." + +For this good fortune he was again indebted to his friend of friends. +Irving had begun to feel his position at Glasgow unsatisfactory, and +at the close of 1821 he was induced to accept an appointment to the +Caledonian Chapel at Hatton Garden. On migrating to London, to make a +greater, if not a safer, name in the central city, and finally, be lost +in its vortex, he had invited Carlyle to follow him, saying, "Scotland +breeds men, but England rears them." Shortly after, introduced by Mrs. +Strachey, one of his worshipping audience, to her sister Mrs. Buller, he +found the latter in trouble about the education of her sons. Charles, the +elder, was a youth of bright but restive intelligence, and it was desired +to find some transitional training for him on his way from Harrow to +Cambridge. Irving urged his being placed, in the interim, under Carlyle's +charge. The proposal, with an offer of L200 a year, was accepted, and the +brothers were soon duly installed in George Square, while their tutor +remained in Moray Place, Edinburgh. The early stages of this relationship +were eminently satisfactory; Carlyle wrote that the teaching of the +Bullers was a pleasure rather than a task; they seemed to him "quite +another set of boys than I have been used to, and treat me in another +sort of manner than tutors are used. The eldest is one of the cleverest +boys I have ever seen." There was never any jar between the teacher and +the taught. Carlyle speaks with unfailing regard of the favourite pupil, +whose brilliant University and Parliamentary career bore testimony to the +good practical guidance he had received. His premature death at the +entrance on a sphere of wider influence made a serious blank in his old +master's life. + +[Footnote: Charles Buller became Carlyle's pupil at the age of fifteen. +He died as Commissioner of the Poor in 1848 (_aet_. forty-two).] + +But as regards the relation of the employer and employed, we are wearied +by the constantly recurring record of kindness lavishly bestowed, +ungraciously received, and soon ungratefully forgotten. The elder +Bullers--the mother a former beauty and woman of some brilliancy, the +father a solid and courteous gentleman retired from the Anglo-Indian +service--came to Edinburgh in the spring of the tutorship, and +recognising Carlyle's abilities, welcomed him to the family circle, and +treated him, by his own confession, with a "degree of respect" he "did +not deserve"; adapting their arrangements, as far as possible, to his +hours and habits; consulting his convenience and humouring his whims. +Early in 1823 they went to live together at Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld, +when he continued to write letters to his kin still praising his patrons; +but the first note of discord is soon struck in satirical references to +their aristocratic friends and querulous complaints of the servants. +During the winter, for greater quiet, a room was assigned to him in +another house near Kinnaird; a consideration which met with the award: +"My bower is the most polite of bowers, refusing admittance to no wind +that blows." And about this same time he wrote, growling at his fare: "It +is clear to me that I shall never recover my health under the economy of +Mrs. Buller." + +In 1824 the family returned to London, and Carlyle followed in June by +a sailing yacht from Leith. On arrival he sent to Miss Welsh a letter, +sneering at his fellow passengers, but ending with a striking picture of +his first impressions of the capital:-- + + We were winding slowly through the forest of masts in the + Thames up to our station at Tower Wharf. The giant bustle, + the coal heavers, the bargemen, the black buildings, the ten + thousand times ten thousand sounds and movements of that + monstrous harbour formed the grandest object I had ever + witnessed. One man seems a drop in the ocean; you feel + annihilated in the immensity of that heart of all the world. + +On reaching London he first stayed for two or three weeks under Irving's +roof and was introduced to his friends. Of Mrs. Strachey and her young +cousin Kitty, who seems to have run the risk of admiring him to excess, +he always spoke well: but the Basil Montagues, to whose hospitality and +friendship he was made welcome, he has maligned in such a manner as to +justify the retaliatory pamphlet of the sharp-tongued eldest daughter +of the house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By letter and +"reminiscence" he is equally reckless in invective against almost all the +eminent men of letters with whom he then came in contact, and also, +in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, +Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in +some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being +addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of +well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain +on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he +writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in +the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature." +And a fortnight later, from Irving's house at Pentonville, he sends to +his mother an account of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him +two alternatives--to go with the family to France or to remain in the +country preparing the eldest boy for Cambridge. He declined both, and +they parted, shaking hands with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a +sentence that recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge, "that I have done +with them ... I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for L200 a +year." + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_ (1st ed. 1851), chap. viii. +p. 79.] + +There followed eight weeks of residence in or about Birmingham, with a +friend called 'Badams, who undertook to cure dyspepsia by a new method +and failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others, +as the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the toiling +squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from radical democracy to +Platonic autocracy, continued to take a deep interest; on other days +they had pleasant excursions to the green fields and old towers of +Warwickshire. On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De +Quincey's review of _Meister_, and in recounting the event credits +himself with the philosophic thought, "This man is perhaps right on some +points; if so let him be admonitory." + +But the description that follows of "the child that has been in hell," +however just, is less magnanimous. Then came a trip, in company with Mr. +Strachey and Kitty and maid, by Dover and Calais along Sterne's route to +Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis XVIII. was then +lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments are mainly acid remarks on the +Palais Royal, with the refrain, "God bless the narrow seas." But he met +Legendre and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and saw Talma act, and, what +was of more moment, had his first glimpse of the Continent and the city +of one phase of whose history he was to be the most brilliant recorder. +Back in London for the winter, where his time was divided between +Irving's house and his own neighbouring room in Southampton Street, +he was cheered by Goethe's own acknowledgment of the translation of +_Meister_, characteristically and generously cordial. + +In March 1825 Carlyle again set his face northward, and travelling by +coach through Birmingham, Manchester, Bolton, and Carlisle, established +himself, in May, at Hoddam Hill; a farm near the Solway, three miles from +Mainhill, which his father had leased for him. His brother Alexander +farmed, while Thomas toiled on at German translations and rode about on +horseback. For a space, one of the few contented periods of his life, +there is a truce to complaining. Here free from the noises which are the +pests of literary life, he was building up his character and forming the +opinions which, with few material changes, he long continued to hold. +Thus he writes from over a distance of forty years :-- + + With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam + Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now + like a not ignoble russet-coated idyll in my memory; one of + the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly + important of my life.... I found that I had conquered all my + scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with + the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch, + and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of + ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory.... Once + more, thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and + still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, + in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep road + before me, the first of the moderns. Bodily health itself + seemed improving.... Nowhere can I recollect of myself such + pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact + and Nature as in these poor Annandale localities. The sound + of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday mornings from + Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, was + strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen + hundred years. + +Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid +storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his +tyrannous love of liberty:-- + + It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of + consciousness--of inward dignity--I have gained since I came + within the walls of this poor cottage--my own four walls. + They simply admit that I am _Herr im Hause_, and act on + this conviction. There is no grumbling about my habitudes + and whims. If I choose to dine on fire and brimstone, they + will cook it for me to their best skill, thinking only that + I am an unintelligible mortal, _facheux_ to deal with, + but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own four walls. + +The last words form the refrain of a set of verses, the most +characteristic, as Mr. Froude justly observes, of the writer, the actual +composition of which seems, however, to belong to the next chapter of his +career, beginning-- + + Wild through the wind the huntsman calls, + As fast on willing nag I haste + Home to my own four walls. + +The feeling that inspires them is clenched in the defiance-- + + King George has palaces of pride, + And armed grooms must ward those halls; + With one stout bolt I safe abide + Within my own four walls. + + Not all his men may sever this; + It yields to friends', not monarchs' calls; + My whinstone house my castle is-- + I have my own four walls. + + When fools or knaves do make a rout, + With gigmen, dinners, balls, cabals, + I turn my back and shut them out; + These are my own four walls. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +CRAIGENPUTTOCK + +[1826-1834] + +"Ah, when she was young, she was a fleein', dancin", light-heartit thing, +Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a' at +ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher; and +he cam' aboot her. Then there was Maister ----. Then there was Maister +Carlyle himsel', and _he_ cam' to finish her off like."--HADDINGTON +NURSE. + +"My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at a +furlong's distance."--T. CARLYLE, from Craigenputtock, Oct. 1830. + +During the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the verge of a crisis +of his career, _i.e._ his making a marriage, for the chequered fortune of +which he was greatly himself to blame. + +No biography can ignore the strange conditions of a domestic life, +already made familiar in so many records that they are past evasion. +Various opinions have been held regarding the lady whom he selected to +share his lot. Any adequate estimate of this remarkable woman belongs to +an account of her own career, such as that given by Mrs. Ireland in her +judicious and interesting abridgment of the material amply supplied. Jane +Baillie Welsh (_b.1801, d. 1866_)--descended on the paternal side from +Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of John Knox; on the maternal owning to +an inheritance of gipsy blood--belonged to a family long esteemed +in the borders. Her father, a distinguished Edinburgh student, and +afterwards eminent surgeon at Haddington, noted alike for his humanity +and skill, made a small fortune, and purchased in advance from his father +his inheritance of Craigenputtock, a remnant of the once larger family +estate. He died in 1819, when his daughter was in her eighteenth year. To +her he left the now world-famous farm and the bulk of his property. Jane, +of precocious talents, seems to have been, almost from infancy, the +tyrant of the house at Haddington, where her people took a place of +precedence in the small county town. Her grandfathers, John of +Penfillan and Walter of Templand, also a Welsh, though of another--the +gipsy--stock, vied for her baby favours, while her mother's quick and +shifty tempers seem at that date to have combined in the process of +"spoiling" her. The records of the schooldays of the juvenile Jane all +point to a somewhat masculine strength of character. Through life, +it must be acknowledged, this brilliant creature was essentially "a +mockingbird," and made game of every one till she met her mate. The +little lady was learned, reading Virgil at nine, ambitious enough to +venture a tragedy at fourteen, and cynical; writing to her life-long +friend, Miss Eliza Stodart, of Haddington as a "bottomless pit of +dulness," where "all my little world lay glittering in tinsel at my +feet." She was ruthless to the suitors--as numerous, says Mr. Froude, +"as those of Penelope "--who flocked about the young beauty, wit, and +heiress. Of the discarded rivals there was only one of note--George +Rennie, long afterwards referred to by Carlyle as a "clever, decisive, +very ambitious, but quite unmelodious young fellow whom we knew here (in +Chelsea) as sculptor and M.P." She dismissed him in 1821 for some cause +of displeasure, "due to pride, reserve, and his soured temper about the +world"; but when he came to take leave, she confesses, "I scarcely heard +a word he said, my own heart beat so loud." Years after, in London, she +went by request of his wife to Rennie's death-bed. + +Meanwhile she had fallen under the spell of her tutor, Edward Irving, +and, as she, after much _finesse_ and evasion, admitted, came to love him +in earnest. Irving saw her weak points, saying she was apt to turn +her powers to "arts of cruelty which satire and scorn are," and "to +contemplate the inferiority of others rather from the point of view +of ridicule and contempt than of commiseration and relief." Later she +retaliated, "There would have been no 'tongues' had Irving married me." +But he was fettered by a previous engagement, to which, after some +struggle for release, he held, leaving in charge of his pupil, as guide, +philosopher, and friend, his old ally and successor, Thomas Carlyle. +Between this exceptional pair there began in 1821 a relationship of +constant growth in intimacy, marked by frequent visits, conversations, +confidences, and a correspondence, long, full, and varied, starting with +interchange of literary sympathies, and sliding by degrees into the +dangerous friendship called Platonic. At the outset it was plain that +Carlyle was not the St. Preux or Wolmar whose ideas of elegance Jane +Welsh--a hasty student of Rousseau--had set in unhappy contrast to the +honest young swains of Haddington. Uncouth, ungainly in manner and +attire, he first excited her ridicule even more than he attracted her +esteem, and her written descriptions of him recall that of Johnson by +Lord Chesterfield. "He scrapes the fender, ... only his tongue should be +left at liberty, his other members are most fantastically awkward"; but +the poor mocking-bird had met her fate. The correspondence falls under +two sections, the critical and the personal. The critical consists of +remarks, good, bad, and indifferent, on books and their writers. Carlyle +began his siege by talking German to her, now extolling Schiller and +Goethe to the skies, now, with a rare stretch of deference, half +conniving at her sneers. Much also passed between them about English +authors, among them comments on Byron, notably inconsistent. Of him +Carlyle writes (April 15th 1824) as "a pampered lord," who would care +nothing for the L500 a year that would make an honest man happy; but +later, on hearing of the death at Mesolonghi, more in the vein of his +master Goethe, he exclaims:-- + + Alas, poor Byron! the news of his death came upon me like + a mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful + twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. O + God! that so many souls of mud and clay should fill up + their base existence to the utmost bound; and this, the + noblest spirit in Europe, should sink before half his course + was run.... Late so full of fire and generous passion and + proud purposes, and now for ever dumb and cold.... Had he + been spared to the age of threescore and ten what might he + not have been! what might he not have been! ... I dreamed of + seeing him and knowing him; but ... we shall go to him, he + shall not return to us. + +This in answer to her account of the same intelligence: "I was told it +all alone in a room full of people. If they had said the sun or the moon +was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of +a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words 'Byron is +dead.'" Other letters of the same period, from London, are studded or +disfigured by the incisive ill-natured sarcasms above referred to, or +they relate to the work and prospects of the writer. Those that bear +on the progress of his suit mark it as the strangest and, when we look +before and after, one of the saddest courtships in literary history. As +early as 1822 Carlyle entertained the idea of making Jane Welsh his wife; +she had begun to yield to the fascinations of his speech--a fascination +akin to that of Burns--when she wrote, "I will be happier contemplating +my beau-ideal than a real, substantial, eating, drinking, sleeping, +honest husband." In 1823 they were half-declared lovers, but there were +recalcitrant fits on both sides. On occasion of a meeting at Edinburgh +there was a quarrel, followed by a note of repentance, in which she +confessed, "Nothing short of a devil could have tempted me to torment +you and myself as I did on that unblessed day." Somewhat earlier she had +written in answer to his first distinct avowal, "My friend, I love you. +But were you my brother I should love you the same. No. Your friend I +will be ... while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife never, +though you were as rich as Croesus, as honoured and renowned as you yet +shall be." To which Carlyle answered with characteristic pride, "I have +no idea of dying in the Arcadian shepherd's style for the disappointment +of hopes which I never seriously entertained, and had no right to +entertain seriously." There was indeed nothing of Corydon and Phyllis in +this struggle of two strong wills, the weaker giving way to the stronger, +the gradual but inexorable closing of an iron ring. Backed by the natural +repugnance of her mother to the match, Miss Welsh still rebelled, bracing +herself with the reflection, "Men and women may be very charming without +having any genius;" and to his renewed appeal (1825), "It lies with +you whether I shall be a right man or only a hard and bitter Stoic," +retorting, "I am not in love with you ... my affections are in a state of +perfect tranquillity." But she admitted he was her "only fellowship and +support," and confiding at length the truth about Irving, surrendered in +the words, "Decide, and woe to me if your reason be your judge and not +your love." In this duel of Puck and Theseus, the latter felt he had won +and pressed his advantage, offering to let her free and adding warnings +to the blind, "Without great sacrifices on both sides, the possibility +of our union is an empty dream." At the eleventh hour, when, in her own +words, she was "married past redemption," he wrote, "If you judge fit, I +will take you to my heart this very week. If you judge fit, I will this +very week forswear you for ever;" and replied to her request that her +widowed mother might live under their wedded roof in terms that might +have become Petruchio: "It may be stated in a word. The man should bear +rule in the house, not the woman. This is an eternal axiom, the law of +nature which no mortal departs from unpunished. . . . Will your mother +consent to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to her +daughter's husband!" + + Was ever woman in this humour woo'd, + Was ever woman in this humour won? + +Miss Welsh at length reluctantly agreed to come to start life at +Scotsbrig, where his family had migrated; but Carlyle pushed another +counter: "Your mother must not visit mine: the mere idea of such a visit +argued too plainly that you _knew nothing_ of the family circle in which +for my sake you were willing to take a place." It being agreed that Mrs. +Welsh was to leave Haddington, where the alliance was palpably unpopular, +Carlyle proposed to begin married life in his mother-in-law's vacant +house, saying in effect to his fiancee that as for intrusive visitors he +had "nerve enough" to kick her old friends out of doors. At this point, +however, her complaisance had reached its limit. The bridegroom-elect had +to soothe his sense of partial retreat by a scolding letter. As regards +difficulties of finance he pointed out that he had L200 to start with, +and that a labourer and his wife had been known to live on L14 a year. + +On the edge of the great change in her life, Jane Welsh writes, "I am +resolved in spirit, in the face of every horrible fate," and says she has +decided to put off mourning for her father, having found a second father. +Carlyle proposed that after the "dreaded ceremony" he and his bride and +his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach from Dumfries +to Edinburgh. In "the last dying speech and marrying words" she objects +to this arrangement, and after the event (October 17th 1826) they drove +in a post-chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself settled +at Templand, had furnished a house for them. Meanwhile the Carlyle family +migrated to Scotsbrig. There followed eighteen comparatively tranquil +months, an oasis in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in +some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social +gatherings--Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their +brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the +northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster, +John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey, +a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as Irving himself. +Procter had introduced Carlyle to the famous editor, who, as a Scotch +cousin of the Welshes, took from the first a keen interest in the still +struggling author, and opened to him the door of the _Edinburgh Review_. +The appearance, of the article on _Richter_, 1827, and that, in the +course of the same year, on _The State of German Literature,_ marks +the beginning of a long series of splendid historical and critical +essays--closing in 1855 with the _Prinzenraub_--which set Carlyle in the +front of the reviewers of the century. The success in the _Edinburgh_ +was an "open sesame;" and the conductors of the _Foreign_ and _Foreign +Quarterly_ Reviews, later, those of _Fraser_ and the _Westminster_, were +ready to receive whatever the new writer might choose to send. + +To the _Foreign Review_ he contributed from Comely Bank the _Life and +Writings of Werner_, a paper on _Helena_, the leading episode of the +second part of "Faust," and the first of the two great Essays on +_Goethe_, which fixed his place as the interpreter of Germany to England. +In midsummer 1827 Carlyle received a letter from Goethe cordially +acknowledging the _Life of Schiller_, and enclosing presents of books for +himself and his wife. This, followed by a later inquiry as to the +author of the article on _German Literature_, was the opening of a +correspondence of sage advice on the one side and of lively gratitude +on the other, that lasted till the death of the veteran in 1832. Goethe +assisted, or tried to assist, his admirer by giving him a testimonial in +a candidature for the Chair (vacant by the promotion of Dr. Chalmers) of +Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Jeffrey, a frequent visitor and host +of the Carlyles, still regarded as "a jewel of advocates ... the most +lovable of little men," urged and aided the canvass, but in vain. The +testimonials were too strong to be judicious, and "it was enough that" +the candidate "was described as a man of original and extraordinary gifts +to make college patrons shrink from contact with him." Another failure, +about the same date and with the same backing, was an application for a +Professorship in London University, practically under the patronage of +Brougham; yet another, of a different kind, was Carlyle's attempt +to write a novel, which having been found--better before than after +publication--to be a failure, was for the most part burnt. "He could +not," says Froude, "write a novel any more than he could write poetry. He +had no _invention._" + +[Footnote: Carlyle's verses also demonstrate that he had no metrical ear. +The only really good lines he ever wrote, save in translations where the +rhythm was set to him, are those constantly quoted about the dawn of +"another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud Hapsburg," and to +Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of Macaulay's school-boy, "Non di +non homines;" but it took much hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact, +and when persuaded he concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of +cymbals!] + +"His genius was for fact; to lay hold on truth, with all his intellect and +all his imagination. He could no more invent than he could lie." + +The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are few: a visit from +his mother; a message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter +Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in +Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new +Annual Register, designed to be a literary _resume_ of the year, make up +the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic +life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox +honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom +saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined together and +read _Don Quixote_ in Spanish. The husband was half forgotten in the +author beginning to prophesy: he wrote alone, walked alone, thought +alone, and for the most part talked alone, _i.e._ in monologue that did +not wait or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, but +there was little companionship. Meanwhile, despite the _Review_ articles, +Carlyle's other works, especially the volumes on German romance, were not +succeeding, and the mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful +whether he could afford to live in Edinburgh; he craved after greater +quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh inheritance, fell +vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His wife yielding, though with a +natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the +Jeffreys kindly assisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of +the Hawks. + +Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British +dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy +straths of grass around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid +bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in +front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or +apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. Here Carlyle +allowed his wife to serve him through six years of household drudgery; +an offence for which he was never quite forgiven, and to estimate its +magnitude here seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother, +and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he was as unfit, +and for some of the same reasons, to make "a happy fireside clime" as was +Jonathan Swift; and less even than Byron had he a share of the mutual +forbearance which is essential to the closest of all relations. + +"Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked everything and +spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, +nor himself." With a slight change of phrase the same may be said of +Carlyle's devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain in +his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of literature as +a profession, nor are there wiser words than those in which the veteran +warns the young men, whose questions he answers with touching solicitude, +against its adoption. "It should be," he declares, "the wine not the food +of life, the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread of +action parches up nature and makes strong souls like Byron dangerous, +the weak despicable." But it was nevertheless the profession of his +deliberate choice, and he soon found himself bound to it as Ixion to his +wheel. The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was +great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out +the heart of the mystery, be it of himself, as in _Sartor_; of Germany, +as in his Goethes and Richters; the state of England, as in _Chartism_ +and _Past and Present;_ of _Cromwell_ or of _Friedrich,_ he faced all +obstacles and overthrew them. Dauntless and ruthless, he allowed nothing +to divert or to mar his designs, least of all domestic cares or even +duties. "Selfish he was,"--I again quote from his biographer,--"if it +be selfish to be ready to sacrifice every person dependent on him as +completely as he sacrificed himself." What such a man wanted was a +housekeeper and a nurse, not a wife, and when we consider that he had +chosen for the latter companionship a woman almost as ambitious as +himself, whose conversation was only less brilliant than his own, of +delicate health and dainty ways, loyal to death, but, according to Mr. +Froude, in some respects "as hard as flint," with "dangerous sparks of +fire," whose quick temper found vent in sarcasms that blistered and words +like swords, who could declare during the time of the engagement, to +which in spite of warnings manifold she clung, "I will not marry to live +on less than my natural and artificial wants"; who, ridiculing his accent +to his face and before his friends, could write, "apply your talents to +gild over the inequality of our births"; and who found herself obliged +to live sixteen miles from the nearest neighbour, to milk a cow, scour +floors and mend shoes--when we consider all this we are constrained to +admit that the 17th October 1826 was a _dies nefastus,_ nor wonder that +thirty years later Mrs. Carlyle wrote, "I married for ambition, Carlyle +has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him, and I am +miserable,"--and to a young friend, "My dear, whatever you do, never +marry a man of genius." + +Carlyle's own references to the life at Craigenputtock are marked by all +his aggravating inconsistency. "How happy we shall be in this Craig o' +Putta," he writes to his wife from Scotsbrig, April 17th 1827; and later +to Goethe:-- + + Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of + Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here + to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good results. + But I came here solely with the design to simplify my way of + life, and to secure the independence through which I could + be enabled to be true to myself. This bit of earth is our + own; here we can live, write, and think as best pleases + ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the + monarch of literature. From some of our heights I can descry, + about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola + and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I + was born, and there both father and mother still live to + love me.... The only piece of any importance that I have + written since I came here is an Essay on Burns. + +This Essay,--modified at first, then let alone, by Jeffrey,--appeared in +the _Edinburgh_ in the autumn of 1828. We turn to Carlyle's journal +and find the entry, "Finished a paper on Burns at this Devil's Den," +elsewhere referred to as a "gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he +confesses, when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I have +really had enough." + + Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Romam. + +Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and in the town for +the moor. During the first twenty years of his London life, in what he +called "the Devil's oven," he is constantly clamouring to return to the +den. His wife, more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently +disliked it; little wonder, between sluttish maid-servants and owl-like +solitude: and she expressed her dislike in the pathetic verses, "To a +Swallow Building under our Eaves," sent to Jeffrey in 1832, and ending-- + + God speed thee, pretty bird; may thy small nest + With little ones all in good time be blest; + I love thee much + For well thou managest that life of thine, + While I! Oh, ask not what I do with mine, + Would I were such! + + _The Desert._ + +The monotony of the moorland life was relieved by visits of relations and +others made and repaid, an excursion to Edinburgh, a residence in London, +and the production of work, the best of which has a chance of living with +the language. One of the most interesting of the correspondences of this +period is a series of letters, addressed to an anonymous Edinburgh friend +who seems to have had some idea of abandoning his profession of the Law +for Literature, a course against which Carlyle strenuously protests. From +these letters, which have only appeared in the columns of the _Glasgow +Herald_, we may extract a few sentences:-- + + Don't disparage the work that gains your bread. What is all + work but a drudgery? no labour for the present joyous, but + grievous. A man who has nothing to admire except himself is + in the minimum state. The question is, Does a man really + love Truth, or only the market price of it? Even literary + men should have something else to do. Katnes was a lawyer, + Roscoe a merchant, Hans Sachs a cobbler, Burns a gauger, + etc. + +The following singular passage, the style of which suggests an imitation +of Sterne, is the acme of unconscious self-satire:-- + + You are infinitely unjust to Blockheads, as they are called. + Ask yourself seriously within your own heart--what right + have you to live wisely in God's world, and they not to live + a little less wisely? Is there a man more to be condoled + with, nay, I will say to be cherished and tenderly treated, + than a man that has no brain? My Purse is empty, it can be + filled again; the Jew Rothschild could fill it; or I can + even live with it very far from full. But, gracious heavens! + What is to be done with my _empty Head_? + +Three of the visits of this period are memorable. Two from the Jeffreys +(in 1828 and 1830) leave us with the same uncomfortable impression of +kindness ungrudgingly bestowed and grudgingly received. Jeffrey had a +double interest in the household at Craigenputtock--an almost brotherly +regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by the range of a keen +though limited appreciation, in the powers of the husband, to whom he +wrote: "Take care of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so +entirely to you," and with a half truth, "You have no mission upon earth, +whatever you may fancy, half so important as to be innocently happy." And +again: "Bring your blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek +shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the "banner with a +strange device," and was either deaf or indignant. The visits passed, +with satirical references from both host and hostess; for Mrs. Carlyle, +who could herself abundantly scoff and scold, would allow the liberty to +no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary of well-doing. Previous to +his promotion as Lord Advocate and consequent transference to London, +he tried to negotiate for Carlyle's appointment as his successor in the +editorship of the _Review,_ but failed to make him accept the necessary +conditions. The paper entitled _Signs of the Times_ was the last +production that he had to revise for his eccentric friend. Those +following on Taylor's _German Literature_ and the _Characteristics_ were +brought out in 1831 under the auspices of Macvey Napier. The other visit +was from the most illustrious of Carlyle's English-speaking friends, +in many respects a fellow-worker, yet "a spirit of another sort," and +destined, though a transcendental mystic, to be the most practical of his +benefactors. Twenty-four hours of Ralph Waldo Emerson (often referred to +in the course of a long and intimate correspondence) are spoken of by +Mrs. Carlyle as a visit from the clouds, brightening the prevailing gray. +He came to the remote inland home with "the pure intellectual gleam" of +which Hawthorne speaks, and "the quiet night of clear fine talk" remained +one of the memories which led Carlyle afterwards to say, "Perhaps our +happiest days were spent at the Craig." Goethe's letters, especially +that in which he acknowledges a lock of Mrs. Carlyle's hair, "eine +unvergleichliche schwarze Haar locke," were also among the gleams of +1829. The great German died three years later, after receiving the +birthday tribute, in his 82nd year, from English friends; and it is +pleasant to remember that in this instance the disciple was to the end +loyal to his master. To this period belong many other correspondences. "I +am scribble scribbling," he says in a letter of 1832, and mere scribbling +may fill many pages with few headaches; but Carlyle wrestled as he wrote, +and not a page of those marvellous _Miscellanies_ but is red with his +life's blood. Under all his reviewing, he was set on a work whose +fortunes were to be the strangest, whose result was, in some respects, +the widest of his efforts. The plan of _Sartor Resartus_ is far from +original. Swift's _Tale of a Tub_ distinctly anticipates the Clothes +Philosophy; there are besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs, +Jean Paul Richter, and other German authors: but in our days originality +is only possible in the handling; Carlyle has made an imaginary German +professor the mere mouthpiece of his own higher aspirations and those of +the Scotland of his day, and it remains the most popular as surely as +his _Friedrich_ is the greatest of his works. The author was abundantly +conscious of the value of the book, and super-abundantly angry at the +unconsciousness of the literary patrons of the time. In 1831 he resolved +if possible to go up to London to push the prospects of this first-born +male child. The _res angusta_ stood in the way. Jeffrey, after asking his +friend "what situation he could get him that he would detest the least," +pressed on him "in the coolest, lightest manner the use of his purse." +This Carlyle, to the extent of L50 as a loan (carefully returned), was +induced ultimately to accept. It has been said that "proud men never +wholly forgive those to whom they feel themselves obliged," but their +resenting benefits is the worst feature of their pride. Carlyle made +his second visit to London to seek types for _Sartor_, in vain. Always +preaching reticence with the sound of artillery, he vents in many pages +the rage of his chagrin at the "Arimaspian" publishers, who would not +print his book, and the public which, "dosed with froth," would not +buy it. The following is little softened by the chiaroscuro of +five-and-thirty years:-- + + Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and + August 1830, _Teufelsdroeckh_ was ready, and I decided + to make for London; night before going, how I remember it.... + The beggarly history of poor _Sartor_ among the + blockheadisms is not worth recording or remembering, least + of all here! In short, finding that I had got L100 (if + memory serve) for _Schiller_ six or seven years before, + and for _Sartor_, at least twice as good, I could not + only not get L200, but even get no Murray or the like to + publish it on half profits. Murray, a most stupendous + object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the evidently + strong wish to say "Yes" and "No,"--my first signal + experience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will + make it "No," then; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for + some two years from one terrified owl to another; published + at last experimentally in _Fraser_, and even then + mostly laughed at, nothing coming of the volume except what + was sent by Emerson from America. + +This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, on Jeffrey's +recommendation, to accept the book; but on finding that Carlyle had +carried the MS. to Longmans and another publisher, in hopes of a better +bargain, and that it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the +matter to his "reader," and the negotiation closed. _Sartor_ struggled +into half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already +contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published +with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a +nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to +justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in +general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense," +pronounced the _Sun_. "Stop that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of +_Fraser's_ constituents. "When is that stupid series of articles by the +crazy tailor going to end?" cried another. At this time Carlyle used +to say there were only two people who found anything in his book worth +reading--Emerson and a priest in Cork, who said to the editor that he +would take the magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of +_Sartor_. The volume was only published in 1838, by Saunders and Otley, +after the _French Revolution_ had further raised the writer's name, and +then on a guarantee from friends willing to take the risk of loss. +It does not appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some +slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in the +_Reminiscences: "I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends, +from not one of whom did I get the smallest whisper even of receipt--a +thing disappointing more or loss to human nature, and which has silently +and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book to +Edinburgh.... The plebs of literature might be divided in their verdicts +about me; though by count of heads I always suspect the guilty clear had +it; but the conscript fathers declined to vote at all." + +[Footnote: _Tempora mutantur_. A few months before Carlyle's death a cheap +edition of _Sartor_ was issued, and 30,000 copies were sold within a few +weeks.] + +In America _Sartor_ was pieced together from _Fraser_, published in +a volume introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by Emerson as "A +criticism of the spirit of the age in which we live; exhibiting in the +most just and novel light the present aspect of religion, politics, +literature, and social life." The editors add: "We believe no book has +been published for many years ... which discovers an equal mastery over +all the riches of the language. The author makes ample amends for the +occasional eccentricity of his genius not only by frequent bursts of pure +splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him." + +Americans are intolerant of honest criticism on themselves; but they are, +more than any other nation, open to appreciate vigorous expressions +of original views of life and ethics--all that we understand by +philosophy--and equally so to new forms of art. The leading critics of +the New England have often been the first and best testers of the fresh +products of the Old. A land of experiment in all directions, ranging from +Mount Lebanon to Oneida Creek, has been ready to welcome the suggestions, +physical or metaphysical, of startling enterprise. Ideas which filter +slowly through English soil and abide for generations, flash over the +electric atmosphere of the West. Hence Coleridge, Carlyle and Browning +were already accepted as prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen +were still examining their credentials. To this readiness, as of a +photographic plate, to receive, must be added the fact that the message +of _Sartor_ crossed the Atlantic when the hour to receive it had struck. +To its publication has been attributed the origin of a movement that was +almost simultaneously inaugurated by Emerson's _Harvard Discourse_. It +was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in +theory, and precedent in Art that gave birth to the Transcendentalism of +_The Dial_--a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a +place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous, +almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally +obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of +the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory +of his critic--to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable +of slightly erring men--with more than the force of a boomorang. A sheaf +of sharp sayings of the same date owe their sting to their half truth, +_e.g._ to a man who excused himself for profligate journalism on the +old plea, "I must live, sir." "No, sir, you need not live, if your body +cannot be kept together without selling your soul." Similarly he was +abusing the periodicals--"mud," "sand," and "dust magazines"--to which +he had contributed, _inter alia_, the great Essay on _Voltaire_ and the +consummate sketch of _Novalis_; with the second paper on _Richler_ to the +_Foreign Review_, the reviews of _History_ and of _Schiller_ to _Fraser_, +and that on _Goethe's Works_ to the _Foreign Quarterly_. During this +period he was introduced to Molesworth, Austin, and J.S. Mill. On his +summons, October 1st 1832, Mrs. Carlyle came up to Ampton Street, where +he then resided, to see him safe through the rest of his London time. +They lamented over the lapse of Irving, now lost in the delirium of +tongues, and made a league of friendship with Mill, whom he describes as +"a partial disciple of mine," a friendship that stood a hard test, but +was broken when the author of _Liberty_ naturally found it impossible to +remain a disciple of the writer of _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Mill, like +Napier, was at first staggered by the _Characteristics_, though he +afterwards said it was one of Carlyle's greatest works, and was +enthusiastic over the review of Boswell's _Johnson_, published in +_Fraser_ in the course of this year. Meanwhile Margaret, Carlyle's +favourite sister, had died, and his brightest, Jean, "the Craw," had +married her cousin, James Aitken. In memory of the former he wrote as a +master of threnody: to the bridegroom of the latter he addressed a letter +reminding him of the duties of a husband, "to do as he would be done by +to his wife"! In 1832 John, again by Jeffrey's aid, obtained a situation +at L300 a year as travelling physician to Lady Clare, and was enabled, +as he promptly did, to pay back his debts. Alexander seems to have been +still struggling with an imperfectly successful farm. In the same year, +when Carlyle was in London, his father died at Scotsbrig, after a +residence there of six years. His son saw him last in August 1831, when, +referring to his Craigenputtock solitude, he said: "Man, it's surely +a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of +Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak." + +The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic services, baking +bread, preserving eggs, and brightening grates till her eyes grew dim; he +to work at his _Diderot_, doing justice to a character more alien to his +own than even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, to +complete the essay; then at _Count Cagliostro_, also for _Fraser_, a link +between his last Craigenputtock and his first London toils. The period +is marked by shoals of letters, a last present from Weimar, a visit to +Edinburgh, and a candidature for a University Chair, which Carlyle +thought Jeffrey could have got for him; but the advocate did not, +probably could not, in this case satisfy his client. In excusing himself +he ventured to lecture the applicant on what he imagined to be the +impracticable temper and perverse eccentricity which had retarded and +might continue to retard his advancement. + +[Footnote: The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.] + +Carlyle, never tolerant of rebuke however just, was indignant, and though +an open quarrel was avoided by letters, on both sides, of courteous +compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and Jeffrey has a +niche in the _Reminiscences_ as a "little man who meant well but did not +see far or know much." Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the +_Diamond Necklace,_ which is a proem to the _French Revolution,_ but inly +growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any +promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his +own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr uebel: all dim, misty, squally, +disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather +than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede. +He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His _Sartor_ is indeed more +contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's +_Confessions,_ or the _Sorrows of Werther,_ or the first two cantos of +_Childe Harold:_ but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay +and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in +the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through +glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At +last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for _me_," and his brave wife +approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his ships and seek his +fortune sink or swim--in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the +initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to +London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in +Chelsea near the Thames. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +CHEYNE ROW + +[1834-1842] + +The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills, +and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds, +as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea, +dotted with brown-sailed ships and holiday boats in place of the +excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle +Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a +stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square." Turning up the row, we find over No. +24, formerly No. 5, the Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house +where the Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men, +lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his headquarters, +but he was a frequent wanderer. About half the time was occupied in trips +almost yearly to Scotland, one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France, +and two to Germany; besides, in the later days, constant visits to +admiring friends, more and more drawn from the higher ranks in English +society, the members of which learnt to appreciate his genius before he +found a hearing among the mass of the people. + +The whole period falls readily under four sections, marking as many phases +of the author's outer and inner life, while the same character is +preserved throughout:-- + +I. 1834-1842--When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the late success of +Carlyle's work relieved him from a long, sometimes severe, struggle with +narrow means. It is the period of the _French Revolution, The Lectures_, +and _Hero-Worship_, and of _Chartism_, the last work with a vestige of +adherence to the Radical creed. + +II. 1842-1853--When the death of his mother loosened his ties to the +North. This decade of his literary career is mainly signalised by the +writing and publication of the _Life and Letters of Cromwell_, of +Carlyle's political works, _Past and Present_ and the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_, and of the _Life of Sterling_, works which mark his now +consummated disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration of +adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed of Christendom." + +III. 1853-1866--When the laurels of his triumphant speech as Lord Rector +at Edinburgh were suddenly withered by the death of his wife. This period +is filled with the _History of Friedrick II._, and marked by a yet more +decidedly accentuated trust in autocracy. + +IV. 1866-1881.--Fifteen years of the setting of the sun. + +The Carlyles, coming to the metropolis in a spirit of rarely realised +audacity on a reserve fund of from L200 to L300 at most, could not +propose to establish themselves in any centre of fashion. In their +circumstances their choice of abode was on the whole a fortunate one. +Chelsea, + + Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite + Beyond it, + +was, even in those days of less constant communication, within measurable +distance of the centres of London life: it had then and still preserves a +host of interesting historic and literary traditions. Among the men who in +old times lived or met together in that outlying region of London, we have +memories of Sir Thomas More and of Erasmus, of the Essayists Addison and +Steele, and of Swift. Hard by is the tomb of Bolingbroke and the Square of +Sir Hans Sloane; Smollett lived for a time in Laurence Street; nearer our +own day, Turner resided in Cheyne Walk, later George Eliot, W.B. Scott, +Dante Rossetti, Swinburne for a season, and George Meredith. When Carlyle +came to settle there, Leigh Huntin Upper Cheyne Row, an almost next-door +neighbour, was among the first of a series of visitors; always welcome, +despite his "hugger-mugger" household and his borrowing tendencies, his +"unpractical messages" and "rose-coloured reform processes," as a bright +"singing bird, musical in flowing talk," abounding in often subtle +criticisms and constant good humour. To the Chelsea home, since the Mecca +of many pilgrims, there also flocked other old Ampton Street friends, +drawn thither by genuine regard, Mrs. Carlyle, by the testimony of Miss +Cushman and all competent judges, was a "_raconteur_ unparalleled." To +quote the same authority, "that wonderful woman, able to live in the full +light of Carlyle's genius without being overwhelmed by it," had a peculiar +skill in drawing out the most brilliant conversationalist of the age. +Burns and Wilson were his Scotch predecessors in an art of which the close +of our century--when every fresh thought is treasured to be printed and +paid for--knows little but the shadow. Of Carlyle, as of Johnson, it might +have been said, "There is no use arguing with him, for if his pistol +misses fire he knocks you down with the butt": both men would have +benefited by revolt from their dictation, but the power to contradict +either was overborne by a superior power to assert. Swift's occasional +insolence, in like manner, prevailed by reason of the colossal strength +that made him a Gulliver in Lilliput. Carlyle in earlier, as in later +times, would have been the better of meeting his mate, or of being +overmatched; but there was no Wellington found for this "grand Napoleon of +the realms" of prose. His reverence for men, if not for things, grew +weaker with the strengthening of his sway, a sway due to the fact that men +of extensive learning are rarely men of incisive force, and Carlyle--in +this respect more akin to Johnson than to Swift--had the acquired material +to serve as fuel for the inborn fire. Hence the least satisfactory of his +criticisms are those passed on his peers. Injustices of conversation +should be pardoned to an impulsive nature, even those of correspondence in +the case of a man who had a mania for pouring out his moods to all and +sundry; but where Carlyle has carefully recarved false estimates in cameo, +his memory must abide the consequence. Quite late in life, referring to +the Chelsea days, he says, "The best of those who then flocked about us +was Leigh Hunt," who never seriously said him nay; "and the worst Lamb," +who was not among the worshippers. No one now doubts that Carlyle's best +adviser and most candid critic might have been John Stuart Mill, for whom +he long felt as much regard as it was possible for him to entertain +towards a proximate equal. The following is characteristic: "He had taken +a great attachment to me (which lasted about ten years and then suddenly +ended, I never knew how), an altogether clear, logical, honest, amicable, +affectionate young man, and respected as such here, though sometimes felt +to be rather colourless, even aqueous, no religion in any form traceable +in him." And similarly of his friend, Mrs. Taylor, "She was a will-o'-the- +wispish iridescence of a creature; meaning nothing bad either"; and again +of Mill himself, "His talk is sawdustish, like ale when there is no wine +to be had." Such criticisms, some ungrateful, others unjust, may be +relieved by reference to the close of two friendships to which (though +even these were clouded by a touch of personal jealousy) he was faithful +in the main; for the references of both husband and wife to Irving's +"delirations" are the tears due to the sufferings of errant minds. Their +last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days was in October 1834, when +he came on horseback to the door of their new home, and left with the +benediction to his lost Jane, "You have made a little Paradise around +you." He died in Glasgow in December of the same year, and his memory is +pathetically embalmed in Carlyle's threnody. The final phases of another +old relationship were in some degree similar. During the first years of +their settlement, Lord Jeffrey frequently called at Cheyne Row, and sent +kind letters to his cousin, received by her husband with the growl, "I am +at work stern and grim, not to be interrupted by Jeffrey's theoretic +flourish of epistolary trumpeting." Carlyle, however, paid more than one +visit to Craigcrook, seeing his host for the last time in the autumn of +1849, "worn in body and thin in mind," "grown lunar now and not solar any +more." Three months later he heard of the death of this benefactor of his +youth, and wrote the memorial which finds its place in the second volume +of the _Reminiscences_. + +[Footnote: Cf. Byron's account of the same household at Pisa. Carlyle +deals very leniently with the malignant volume on Byron which amply +justified the epigram of Moore. But he afterwards spoke more slightly of +his little satellite, attributing the faint praise, in the _Examiner_, of +the second course of lectures to Hunt's jealousy of a friend now +"beginning to be somebody."] + +The work "stern and grim" was the _French Revolution_, the production +of which is the dominant theme of the first chapter of Carlyle's London +life. Mr. Froude, in the course of an estimate of this work which leaves +little room for other criticism, dwells on the fact that it was written +for a purpose, _i.e._ to show that rulers, like those of the French +in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the pleasures and +oblivious of the duties of life, must end by being "burnt up." This, +doubtless, is one of the morals of the _French Revolution_--the other +being that anarchy ends in despotism--and unquestionably a writer who +never ceased to be a preacher must have had it in his mind. But Carlyle's +peculiarity is that he combined the functions of a prophet and of an +artist, and that while now the one, now the other, was foremost, he never +wholly forgot the one in the other. In this instance he found a theme +well fit for both, and threw his heart into it, though under much +discouragement. Despite the Essays, into each of which he had put work +enough for a volume, the Reviews were shy of him; while his _Sartor_ had, +on this side of the Atlantic, been received mainly with jeers. Carlyle, +never unconscious of his prerogative and apostolic primogeniture, felt +like an aspirant who had performed his vigils, and finding himself still +ignored, became a knight of the rueful countenance. Thoroughly equipped, +adept enough in ancient tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German +and a fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from +Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "tragically hard," +exclaiming, "I could learn to do all things I have seen done, and am +forbidden to try any of them." The efforts to keep the wolf from his own +doors were harder than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed in +London with his L200 reserve, he could easily have made way in the +usual ruts; but he would have none of them, and refused to accept the +employment which is the most open, as it is the most lucrative, to +literary aspirants. To nine out of ten the "profession of literature" +means Journalism; while Journalism often means dishonesty, always +conformity. Carlyle was, in a sense deeper than that of the sects, +essentially a nonconformist; he not only disdained to write a word he +did not believe, he would not suppress a word he did believe--a rule +of action fatal to swift success. During these years there began an +acquaintance, soon ripening into intimacy, the memories of which are +enshrined in one of the most beautiful of biographies. Carlyle's relation +to John Sterling drew out the sort of affection which best suited +him--the love of a master for a pupil, of superior for inferior, of the +benefactor for the benefited; and consequently there is no line in the +record of it that jars. Sterling once tried to benefit his friend, and +perhaps fortunately failed. He introduced Carlyle to his father, then the +chief writer in the _Times_, and the Editor invited the struggling author +to contribute to its columns, but, according to Mr. Froude, "on the +implied conditions ... when a man enlists in the army, his soul as well +as his body belong to his commanding officer." Carlyle talked, all his +life, about what his greatest disciple calls "The Lamp of Obedience"; but +he himself would obey no one, and found it hard to be civil to those who +did not see with his eyes. Ho rejected--we trust in polite terms--the +offer of "the Thunderer." "In other respects also," says our main +authority, "he was impracticable, unmalleable, and as independent and +wilful as if he were the heir to a peerage. He had created no 'public' of +his own; the public which existed could not understand his writings +and would not buy them; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more +neglected than he had been in Scotland." Welcome to a limited range of +literary society, he astonished and amused by his vehement eloquence, +but when crossed he was not only "sarcastic" but rude, and speaking of +people, as he wrote of them, with various shades of contempt, naturally +gave frequent offence. Those whose toes are trodden on, not by accident, +justifiably retaliate. "Are you looking for your t-t-turban?" Charles +Lamb is reported to have said in some entertainer's lobby after listening +for an evening to Carlyle's invectives, and the phrase may have rankled +in his mind. Living in a glass case, while throwing stones about, +super-sensitive to criticism though professing to despise critics, he +made at least as many enemies as friends, and by his own confession +became an Ishmaelite. In view of the reception of _Sartor_, we do not +wonder to find him writing in 1833-- + + It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the + craft of literature, and yet I know no fault I have + committed.... I am tempted to go to America.... I shall quit + literature, it does not invite me. Providence warns me to + have done with it. I have failed in the Divine Infernal + Universe; + +or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world +like Teufelsdroeckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet +all the time, with incomparable naivete, he was asserting:-- + + The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my + feeling of natural superiority to them.... The literary + world here is a thing which I have no other course left me + but to defy.... I can reverence no existing man. With health + and peace for one year, I could write a better book than + there has been in this country for generations. + +All through his journal and his correspondence there is a perpetual +alternation of despair and confidence, always closing with the refrain, +"Working, trying is the only remover of doubt," and wise counsels often +echoed from Goethe, "Accomplish as well as you can the task on hand, and +the next step will become clear;" on the other hand--A man must not only +be able to work but to give over working.... If a man wait till he has +entirely brushed off his imperfections, he will spin for ever on his +axis, advancing no whither.... The _French Revolution_ stands pretty +fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to +splash down what I know in large masses of colours, that it may look like +a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance. + +The progress of this work was retarded by the calamity familiar to every +reader, but it must be referred to as throwing one of the finest lights +on Carlyle's character. His closest intellectual link with J.S. Mill was +their common interest in French politics and literature; the latter, +himself meditating a history of the Revolution, not only surrendered in +favour of the man whose superior pictorial genius he recognised, but +supplied him freely with the books he had accumulated for the enterprise. +His interest in the work was unfortunately so great as to induce him to +borrow the MS. of the first volume, completed in the early spring of +1835, and his business habits so defective as to permit him to lend it +without authority; so that, as appears, it was left lying about by Mrs. +Taylor and mistaken by her servant for waste paper: certainly it was +destroyed; and Mill came to Cheyne Row to announce the fact in such a +desperate state of mind that Carlyle's first anxiety seems to have been +to console his friend. According to Mrs. Carlyle, as reported by Froude, +"the first words her husband uttered as the door closed were, 'Well, +Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him +how very serious this business is to us.'" This trait of magnanimity under +the first blow of a disaster which seemed to cancel the work of years +should be set against his nearly contemporaneous criticisms of Coleridge, +Lamb, Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Macaulay, etc. + +[Footnote: Carlyle had only been writing the volume for five months; but +he was preparing for it during much of his life at Craigenputtock.] + +Mill sent a cheque of L200 as "the slightest external compensation" for +the loss, and only, by urgent entreaty, procured the acceptance of half +the sum. Carlyle here, as in every real emergency, bracing his resolve +by courageous words, as "never tine heart or get provoked heart," set +himself to re-write the volume with an energy that recalls that of Scott +rebuilding his ruined estate; but the work was at first so "wretched" +that it had to be laid aside for a season, during which the author +wisely took a restorative bath of comparatively commonplace novels. The +re-writing of the first volume was completed in September 1835; the whole +book in January 1837. The mood in which it was written throws a light on +the excellences as on the defects of the history. The _Reminiscences_ +again record the gloom and defiance of "Thomas the Doubter" walking +through the London streets "with a feeling similar to Satan's stepping +the burning marl," and scowling at the equipages about Hyde Park Corner, +sternly thinking, "Yes, and perhaps none of you could do what I am at. I +shall finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and +withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." In an adjacent page he reports +himself as having said to his wife-- + + What they will do with this book none knows, my lass; but + they have not had for two hundred years any book that came + more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample + it under foot and hoof as they see best.... "They cannot + trample that," she would cheerily answer. + +This passage points at once to the secret of the writer's spell and to +the limits of his lasting power. His works were written seldom with +perfect fairness, never with the dry light required for a clear +presentation of the truth; they have all "an infusion from the will and +the affections"; but they were all written with a whole sincerity and +utter fervour; they rose from his hot heart, and rushed through the air +"like rockets druv' by their own burnin'." Consequently his readers +confess that he has never forgot the Horatian maxim-- + + Si vis me flere, dolendum est + Primum ipsi tibi. + +About this time Carlyle writes, "My friends think I have found the art of +living upon nothing," and there must, despite Mill's contribution, have +been "bitter thrift" in Cheyne REow during the years 1835-1837. He +struggled through the unremunerative interval of waiting for the sale +of a great work by help of fees derived from his essay on the _Diamond +Necklace_ (which, after being refused by the _Foreign Quarterly,_ +appeared in _Fraser,_ 1837), that on _Mirabeau_ in the _Westminster,_ +and in the following year, for the same periodical, the article on _Sir +Walter Scott._ To the last work, undertaken against the grain, he refers +in one of the renewed wails of the year: "O that literature had never +been devised. I am scourged back to it by the whip of necessity." The +circumstance may account for some of the manifest defects of one of the +least satisfactory of Carlyle's longer' reviews. Frequent references in +previous letters show that he never appreciated Scott, to whom he refers +as a mere Restaurateur. + +Meanwhile the appearance of the _French Revolution_ had brought the +name of its author, then in his forty-third year, for the first time +prominently before the public. It attracted the attention of Thackeray, +who wrote a generous review in the _Times,_ of Southey, Jeffrey, +Macaulay, Hallam, and Brougham, who recognised the advent of an equal, if +sometimes an adverse power in the world of letters. But, though the book +established his reputation, the sale was slow, and for some years the +only substantial profits, amounting to about L400, came from America, +through the indefatigable activity and good management of Emerson. It +is pleasant to note a passage in the interesting volumes of their +_Correspondence_ which shows that in this instance the benefited +understood his financial relation to the benefactor: "A reflection I +cannot but make is that, at bottom, this money was all yours; not a penny +of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful friend-ship.... I +could not examine it (the account) without a kind of crime." Others +who, at this period, made efforts to assist "the polar Bear" were less +fortunate. In several instances good intentions paved the palace of +Momus, and in one led a well-meaning man into a notoriously false +position. Mr. Basil Montagu being in want of a private secretary offered +the post to his former guest, as a temporary makeshift, at a salary of +L200, and so brought upon his memory a torrent of contempt. Undeterred by +this and similar warnings, the indefatigable philanthropist, Miss Harriet +Martineau, who at first conciliated the Carlyles by her affection for +"this side of the street," and was afterwards an object of their joint +ridicule, conceived the idea of organising a course of lectures to an +audience collected by canvass to hoar the strange being from the moors +talk for an hour on end about literature, morals, and history. He was +then an object of curiosity to those who knew anything about him at all, +and lecturing was at that time a lucrative and an honourable employment. +The "good Harriet," so called by Cheyne Row in its condescending mood, +aided by other kind friends of the Sterling and Mill circles--the former +including Frederick Denison Maurice--made so great a success of the +enterprise that it was thrice repeated. The _first_ course of six +lectures on "German Literature," May 1837, delivered in Willis's Rooms, +realised L135; the _second_ of twelve, on the "History of European +Literature," at 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, had a net result of +L300; the _third,_ in the same rooms, on "Revolutions," brought L200; the +_fourth,_ on "Heroes," the same. In closing this course Carlyle appeared +for the last time on a public platform until 1866, when he delivered +his Inaugural Address as Lord Rector to the students of Edinburgh. The +impression he produced on his unusually select audiences was that of a +man of genius, but roughly clad. The more superficial auditors had a +new sensation, those who came to stare remained to wonder; the more +reflective felt that they had learnt something of value. Carlyle had +no inconsiderable share of the oratorical power which he latterly so +derided; he was able to speak from a few notes; but there were comments +more or less severe on his manner and style. J. Grant, in his _Portraits +of Public Characters,_ says: "At times he distorts his features as if +suddenly seized by some paroxysm of pain ... he makes mouths; he has a +harsh accent and graceless gesticulation." Leigh Hunt, in the _Examiner,_ +remarks on the lecturer's power of extemporising; but adds that he often +touches only the mountain-tops of the subject, and that the impression +left was as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalised by +German philosophy. Bunsen, present at one of the lectures, speaks of +the striking and rugged thoughts thrown at people's heads; and Margaret +Fuller, afterwards Countess Ossoli, referred to his arrogance redeemed +by "the grandeur of a Siegfried melting down masses of iron into sunset +red." Carlyle's own comments are for the most part slighting. He refers +to his lectures as a mixture of prophecy and play-acting, and says that +when about to open his course on "Heroes" he felt like a man going to be +hanged. To Emerson, April 17th 1839, he writes :-- + + My lectures come on this day two weeks. O heaven! I cannot + "speak"; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a + spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by + want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then--! + Shall it be Switzerland? shall it be Scotland? nay, shall it + be America and Concord? + +Emerson had written about a Boston publication of the _Miscellanies_ +(first there collected), and was continually urging his friend to +emigrate and speak to more appreciative audiences in the States; but +the London lectures, which had, with the remittances from over sea, +practically saved Carlyle from ruin or from exile, had made him decide +"to turn his back to the treacherous Syren"--the temptation to sink into +oratory. Mr. Froude's explanation and defence of this decision may be +clenched by a reference to the warning his master had received. He had +announced himself as a preacher and a prophet, and been taken at his +word; but similarly had Edward Irving, who for a season of sun or glamour +gathered around him the same crowd and glitter: the end came; twilight +and clouds of night. Fashion had flocked to the sermons of the elder +Annandale youth--as to the recitatives of the younger--to see a wild man +of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on" +to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with +"unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed +his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause, +madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with +the fixed resolve, "De me fabula non narrabitur," he shut the book on +this phase of his life. + +The lectures on "Hero-Worship" (a phrase taken from Hume) were published +in 1841, and met with considerable success, the name of the writer having +then begun to run "like wildfire through London." At the close of the +previous year he had published his long pamphlet on _Chartism_, it having +proved unsuitable for its original destination as an article in the +_Quarterly_. Here first he clearly enunciates, "Might is right"--one +of the few strings on which, with all the variations of a political +Paganini, he played through life. This tract is on the border line +between the old modified Radicalism of _Sartor_ and the less modified +Conservatism of his later years. In 1840 Carlyle still speaks of himself +as a man foiled; but at the close of that year all fear of penury was +over, and in the following he was able to refuse a Chair of History at +Edinburgh, as later another at St. Andrews. Meanwhile his practical +power and genuine zeal for the diffusion of knowledge appeared in his +foundation of the London Library, which brought him into more or less +close contact with Tennyson, Milman, Forster, Helps, Spedding, Gladstone, +and other leaders of the thought and action of the time. + +There is little in Carlyle's life at any time that can be called +eventful. From first to last it was that of a retired scholar, a thinker +demanding sympathy while craving after solitude, and the frequent +inconsistency of the two requirements was the source of much of his +unhappiness. Our authorities for all that we do not see in his +published works are found in his voluminous correspondence, copious +autobiographical jottings, and the three volumes of his wife's letters +and journal dating from the commencement of the struggle for recognition +in London, and extending to the year of her death. Criticism of these +remarkable documents, the theme of so much controversy, belongs rather +to a life of Mrs. Carlyle; but a few salient facts may here be noted. It +appears on the surface that husband and wife had in common several +marked peculiarities; on the intellectual side they had not only an +extraordinary amount but the same kind of ability, superhumanly keen +insight, and wonderful power of expression, both with tongue and pen; the +same intensity of feeling, thoroughness, and courage to look the ugliest +truths full in the face; in both, these high qualities were marred by a +tendency to attribute the worst motives to almost every one. Their joint +contempt for all whom they called "fools," _i.e._ the immense majority of +mankind, was a serious drawback to the pleasure of their company. It is +indeed obvious that, whether or not it be correct to say that "his nature +was the soft one, her's the hard," Mrs. Carlyle was the severer cynic of +the two. Much of her writing confirms the impression of those who have +heard her talk that no one, not even her husband, was safe from the +shafts of her ridicule. Her pride in his genius knew no bounds, and it is +improbable that she would have tolerated from any outsider a breath of +adverse criticism; but she herself claimed many liberties she would not +grant. She was clannish as Carlyle himself, yet even her relations +are occasionally made to appear ridiculous. There was nothing in her +affections, save her memory of her own father, corresponding to his +devotion to his whole family. With equal penetration and greater scorn, +she had no share of his underlying reverence. Such limited union as was +granted to her married life had only soured the mocking-bird spirit +of the child that derided her grandfather's accent on occasion of his +bringing her back from a drive by another route to "varry the shane." + +Carlyle's constant wailings take from him any claim to such powers of +endurance as might justify his later attacks on Byron. But neither +had his wife any real reticence. Whenever there were domestic +troubles--flitting, repairing, building, etc., on every occasion of +clamour or worry, he, with scarce pardonable oblivion of physical +delicacy greater than his own, went off, generally to visit distinguished +friends, and left behind him the burden and the heat of the day. She +performed her unpleasant work and all associated duties with a practical +genius that he complimented as "triumphant." She performed them, +ungrudgingly perhaps, but never without complaint; her invariable +practice was to endure and tell. "Quelle vie," she writes in 1837 to John +Sterling, whom she seems to have really liked, "let no woman who values +peace of soul ever marry an author"; and again to the same in 1839, +"Carlyle had to sit on a jury two days, to the ruin of his whole being, +physical, moral, and intellectual," but "one gets to feel a sort of +indifference to his growling." Conspicuous exceptions, as in the case of +the Shelleys, the Dobells, and the Brownings, have been seen, within +or almost within our memories, but as a rule it is a risk for two +supersensitive and nervous people to live together: when they are +sensitive in opposite ways the alliance is fatal; fortunately the +Carlyles were, in this respect, in the main sympathetic. With most of the +household troubles which occupy so exaggerated a space in the letters and +journals of both--papering, plastering, painting, deceitful or disorderly +domestics--general readers have so little concern that they have reason +to resent the number of pages wasted in printing them; but there was one +common grievance of wider and more urgent interest, to which we must here +again finally refer, premising that it affected not one period but the +whole of their lives, _i.e._ their constant, only half-effectual struggle +with the modern Hydra-headed Monster, the reckless and needless Noises +produced or permitted, sometimes increased rather than suppressed, by +modern civilisation. Mrs. Carlyle suffered almost as much as her husband +from these murderers of sleep and assassins of repose; on her mainly fell +the task of contending with the cochin-chinas, whose senseless shrieks +went "through her like a sword," of abating a "Der Freischuetz of cats," +or a pandemonium of barrel organs, of suppressing macaws for which +Carryle "could neither think nor live"; now mitigating the scales on a +piano, now conjuring away, by threat or bribe, from their neighbours +a shoal of "demon fowls"; lastly of superintending the troops of +bricklayers, joiners, iron-hammerers employed with partial success to +convert the top story of 5 Cheyne Row into a sound-proof room. Her +hard-won victories in this field must have agreeably added to the sense +of personality to which she resolutely clung. Her assertion, "Instead +of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle +round every individuality," is the essence of much of her mate's +philosophy; but, in the following to Sterling, she somewhat bitterly +protests against her own absorption: "In spite of the honestest efforts +to annihilate my I---ity or merge it in what the world doubtless +considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting, and, +alas, self-seeking me." + +The ever-restive consciousness of being submerged is one of the dominant +notes of her journal, the other is the sense of being even within the +circle unrecognised. "C. is a domestic wandering Jew.... When he is at +work I hardly ever see his face from breakfast to dinner."... "Poor +little wretch that I am, ... I feel as if I were already half-buried ... +in some intermediate state between the living and the dead.... Oh, so +lonely." These are among the _suspiria de profundis_ of a life which her +husband compared to "a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother, +whom he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming:--"Solitude, +indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad like Bedlam; absence +of delirium is possible only for me in solitude"; a sentiment almost +literally acted on. In his offering of penitential cypress, referring to +his wife's delight in the ultimate success of his work, he says, "She +flickered round me like a perpetual radiance." But during their joint +lives their numerous visits and journeys were made at separate times or +apart. They crossed continually on the roads up and down, but when +absent wrote to one another often the most affectionate letters. Their +attraction increased, contrary to Newton's law, in the _direct_ ratio of +the square of the distance, and when it was stretched beyond the stars +the long-latent love of the survivor became a worship. + +Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his +bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration +for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him +unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic +differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have +practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in +comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond +was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first +great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many +callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne +Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, +in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant +friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) +had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with +so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in +her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was +accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to +having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed +on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to +interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her +mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too +characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. +Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger +than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of +candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with +an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother +resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which +prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will +that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round +which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has +recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many +graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane +down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They +parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, +perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but +bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet +waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 +news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried +north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; +when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her +mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle +came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that +the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as +executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, +devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of +pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in +the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading +them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of +the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, +with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again +revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said +of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the +Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place +opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness +of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. +Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath +that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry +scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies +completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the +Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. + +The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife +more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once +Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been +glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the +restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was +constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land +to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed +better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdroeckh wanderings +abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A +letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- + +Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his +bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration +for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him +unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic +differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have +practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in +comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond +was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first +great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many +callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne +Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, +in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant +friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) +had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with +so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in +her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was +accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to +having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed +on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to +interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her +mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too +characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. +Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger +than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of +candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with +an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother +resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which +prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will +that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round +which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has +recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many +graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane +down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They +parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, +perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but +bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet +waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 +news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried +north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; +when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her +mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle +came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that +the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as +executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, +devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of +pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in +the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading +them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of +the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, +with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again +revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said +of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the +Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place +opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness +of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. +Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath +that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry +scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies +completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the +Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. + +The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife +more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once +Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been +glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the +restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was +constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land +to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed +better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdroeckh wanderings +abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A +letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- + + This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont: and as for + my particular case uses me not worse but better than of old. + Nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for + me.... The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge + roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of + nerves as mine. + + The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the + streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to + be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressingly + as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be _buried_ at + least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub ... + if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I + will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge. + +The competence had come, the death of Mrs. Welsh leaving to his wife and +himself practically from L200 to L300 a year: why not finally return to +the home of their early restful secluded life, "in reducta, valle," with +no noise around it but the trickle of rills and the nibbling of sheep? +Craigenputtock was now their own, and within its "four walls" they would +begin a calmer life. Fortunately Mrs. Carlyle, whose shrewd practical +instinct was never at fault, saw through the fallacy, and set herself +resolutely against the scheme. Scotland had lost much of its charm for +her--a year later she refused an invitation from Mrs. Aitken, saying, "I +could do nothing at Scotsbrig or Dumfries but cry from morning to night." +She herself had enough of the Hill of the Hawks, and she know that within +a year Carlyle would again be calling it the Devil's Den and lamenting +Cheyne Row. He gave way with the protest, "I cannot deliberately mean +anything that is harmful to you," and certainly it was well for him. + +There is no record of an original writer or artist coming from the +north of our island to make his mark in the south, succeeding, and then +retracing his steps. Had Carlyle done so, he would probably have passed +from the growing recognition of a society he was beginning to find on the +whole congenial, to the solitude of intellectual ostracism. Scotland may +be breezy, but it is not conspicuously free. Erratic opinions when duly +veiled are generally allowed; but this concession is of little worth. On +the tolerance of those who have no strong belief in anything, Carlyle, +thinking possibly of rose-water Hunt and the litterateurs of his tribe, +expressed himself with incisive and memorable truth: "It is but doubt +and indifference. _Touch the thing they do believe and value, their own +self-conceit: they are rattlesnakes then_." + +[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] + +Tolerance for the frank expression of views which clash with the sincere +or professed faith of the majority is rare everywhere; in Scotland +rarest. English Churchmen, high and broad, were content to condone the +grim Calvinism still infiltrating Carlyle's thoughts, and to smile, at +worst, at his idolatry of the iconoclast who said, "the idolater shall +die the death." But the reproach of "Pantheism" was for long fatal to his +reception across the Tweed. + +Towards the close of this period he acknowledged that London was "among +improper places" the best for "writing books," after all the one use of +living "for him;" its inhabitants "greatly the best" he "had ever walked +with," and its aristocracy--the Marshalls, Stanleys, Hollands, Russells, +Ashburtons, Lansdownes, who held by him through life--its "choicest +specimens." Other friendships equally valued he made among the leading +authors of the age. Tennyson sought his company, and Connop Thirlwall. +Arnold of Rugby wrote in commendation of the _French Revolution_ and +hailed _Chartism._ Thackeray admired him and reviewed him well. In +Macaulay, condemned to limbo under the suspicion of having reviewed him +ill, he found, when the suspicion was proved unjust, a promise of +better things. As early as 1839 Sterling had written an article in the +_Westminster,_ which gave him intense pleasure; for while contemning +praise in almost the same words as Byron did, he loved it equally well. +In 1840 he had crossed the Rubicon that lies between aspiration and +attainment. The populace might be blind or dumb, the "rattlesnakes"--the +"irresponsible indolent reviewers," who from behind a hedge pelt every +wrestler till they found societies for the victor--might still obscurely +hiss; but Carlyle was at length safe by the verdict of the "Conscript +Fathers." + +[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] + + + + +CHAPTER V + +CHEYNE ROW + +[1842-1853] + +The bold venture of coming to London with a lean purse, few friends, +and little fame had succeeded: but it had been a terrible risk, and the +struggle had left scars behind it. To this period of his life we may +apply Carlyle's words,--made use of by himself at a later date,--"The +battle was over and we were sore wounded." It is as a maimed knight +of modern chivalry, who sounded the _reveil_ for an onslaught on the +citadels of sham, rather than as a prophet of the future that his name is +likely to endure in the history of English thought. He has also a place +with Scott amongst the recreators of bygone ages, but he regarded their +annals less as pictures than as lesson-books. His aim was that expressed +by Tennyson to "steal fire from fountains of the past," but his design +was to admonish rather than "to glorify the present." This is the avowed +object of the second of his distinctly political works, which following +on the track of the first, _Charlism_, and written in a similar spirit, +takes higher artistic rank. _Past and Present_, suggested by a visit to +the poorhouse of St. Ives and by reading the chronicle of _Jocelin de +Brakelond_, was undertaken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a +greater work,--the duty he felt laid upon him to say some thing that +should bear directly on the welfare of the people, especially of the poor +around him. It was an impulse similar to that which inspired _Oliver +Twist_, but Carlyle's remedies were widely different from those of +Dickens. Not merely more kindness and sympathy, but paternal government, +supplying work to the idle inmates of the workhouse, and insisting, by +force if need be, on it being done, was his panacea. It had been Abbot +Samson's way in his strong government of the Monastery of St. Edmunds, +and he resolved, half in parable, half in plain sermon, to recommend it +to the Ministers Peel and Russell. + +In this mood, the book was written off in the first seven weeks of +1843, a _tour de force_ comparable to Johnson's writing of _Rasselas_. +Published in April, it at once made a mark by the opposition as well as +by the approval it excited. Criticism of the work--of its excellences, +which are acknowledged, and its defects as manifold--belongs to a review +of the author's political philosophy: it is enough here to note that it +was remarkable in three ways. _First_, the object of its main attack, +_laissez faire_, being a definite one, it was capable of having and had +some practical effect. Mr. Froude exaggerates when he says that Carlyle +killed the pseudo-science of orthodox political economy; for the +fundamental truths in the works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, and Mill +cannot be killed: but he pointed out that, like Aristotle's leaden rule, +the laws of supply and demand must be made to bend; as Mathematics made +mechanical must allow for friction, so must Economics leave us a little +room for charity. There is ground to believe that the famous Factory Acts +owed some of their suggestions to _Past and Present_. Carlyle always +speaks respectfully of the future Lord Shaftesbury. "I heard Milnes +saying," notes the Lady Sneerwell of real life, "at the Shuttleworths +that Lord Ashley was the greatest man alive: he was the only man that +Carlyle praised in his book. I daresay he knew I was overhearing him." +But, while supplying arguments and a stimulus to philanthropists, his +protests against philanthropy as an adequate solution of the problem of +human misery became more pronounced. About the date of the conception of +this book we find in the Journal:-- + + Again and again of late I ask myself in whispers, is it the + duty of a citizen to paint mere heroisms? ... Live to make + others happy! Yes, surely, at all times, so far as you can. + But at bottom that is not the aim of my life ... it is mere + hypocrisy to call it such, as is continually done + nowadays.... Avoid cant. Do not think that your life means + a mere searching in gutters for fallen figures to wipe and + set up. + +_Past and Present_, in the _second_ place, is notable as the only +considerable consecutive book--unless we also except the _Life of +Sterling_,--which the author wrote without the accompaniment of +wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts. _Thirdly_, though marking a stage +in his mental progress, the fusion of the refrains of _Chartism_ and +_Hero-Worship_, and his first clear breach with Mazzini and with Mill, +the book was written as an interlude, when he was in severe travail with +his greatest contribution to English history. The last rebuff which +Carlyle encountered came, by curious accident, from the _Westminster_, to +which Mill had engaged him to contribute an article on "Oliver Cromwell." +While this was in preparation, Mill had to leave the country on account +of his health, and gave the review in charge to an Aberdonian called +Robertson, who wrote to stop the progress of the essay with the message +that _he_ had decided to undertake the subject himself. Carlyle was +angry; but, instead of sullenly throwing the MS. aside, he set about +constructing on its basis a History of the Civil War. + +Numerous visits and tours during the following three years, though +bringing him into contact with new and interesting personalities, were +mainly determined by the resolve to make himself acquainted with the +localities of the war; and his knowledge of them has contributed to give +colour and reality to the finest battle-pieces in modern English prose. +In 1842 with Dr. Arnold he drove from Rugby fifteen miles to Naseby, and +the same year, after a brief yachting trip to Belgium--in the notes on +which the old Flemish towns stand out as clearly as in Longfellow's +verse--he made his pilgrimage to St. Ives and Ely Cathedral, where Oliver +two centuries before had called out to the recalcitrant Anglican in the +pulpit, "Cease your fooling and come down." In July 1843 Carlyle made a +trip to South Wales; to visit first a worthy devotee called Redwood, and +then Bishop Thirlwall near Carmarthen. "A right solid simple-hearted +robust man, very strangely swathed," is the visitor's meagre estimate of +one of our most classic historians. + +On his way back he carefully reconnoitred the field of Worcester. Passing +his wife at Liverpool, where she was a guest of her uncle, and leaving +her to return to London and brush up Cheyne Row, he walked over Snowdon +from Llanheris to Beddgelert with his brother John. He next proceeded +to Scotsbrig, then north to Edinburgh, and then to Dunbar, which he +contrived to visit on the 3rd of September, an anniversary revived in his +pictured page with a glow and force to match which we have to revert +to Bacon's account of the sea-fight of the _Revenge_. From Dunbar he +returned to Edinburgh, spent some time with his always admired and +admiring friend Erskine of Linlathen, a Scotch broad churchman of the +type of F.D. Maurice and Macleod Campbell, and then went home to set in +earnest to the actual writing of his work. He had decided to abandon +the design of a History, and to make his book a Biography of Cromwell, +interlacing with it the main features and events of the Commonwealth. The +difficulties even of this reduced plan were still immense, and his groans +at every stage in its progress were "louder and more loud," _e.g._ "My +progress in _Cromwell_ is frightful." "A thousand times I regretted that +this task was ever taken up." "The most impossible book of all I ever +before tried," and at the close, "_Cromwell_ I must have written in 1844, +but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to +me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling, +and misery I used to count it had cost me." The book issued in 1845 soon +went through three editions, and brought the author to the front as the +most original historian of his time. Macaulay was his rival, but in +different paths of the same field. About this time Mr. Froude became his +pupil, and has left an interesting account (iii. 290-300) of his master's +influence over the Oxford of those days, which would be only spoilt +by selections. Oxford, like Athens, ever longing after something new, +patronised the Chelsea prophet, and then calmed down to her wonted +cynicism. But Froude and Ruskin were, as far as compatible with the +strong personality of each, always loyal; and the capacity inborn in +both, the power to breathe life into dry records and dead stones, had at +least an added impulse from their master. + +The year 1844 is marked by the publication in the _Foreign Quarterly_ of +the essay on _Dr. Francia,_ and by the death of John Sterling,--loved +with the love of David for Jonathan--outside his own family losses, the +greatest wrench in Carlyle's life. Sterling's published writings are as +inadequate to his reputation as the fragmentary remains of Arthur Hallam; +but in friendships, especially unequal friendships, personal fascination +counts for more than half, and all are agreed as to the charm in both +instances of the inspiring companionships. Archdeacon Hare having given a +somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergyman, Carlyle three +years later, in 1851, published his own impressions of his friend as +a thinker, sane philanthropist, and devotee of truth, in a work that, +written in a three months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though +faltering, as prose after verse, with _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, and +Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_. + +These years are marked by a series of acts of unobtrusive benevolence, +the memory of which has been in some cases accidentally rescued from the +oblivion to which the benefactor was willing to have them consigned. +Carlyle never boasted of doing a kindness. He was, like Wordsworth, +frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as generous in giving as he +was ungenerous in judging. His assistance to Thomas Cooper, author of the +_Purgatory of Suicides_, his time spent in answering letters of "anxious +enquirers,"--letters that nine out of ten busy men would have flung into +the waste-paper basket,--his interest in such works as Samuel Bamford's +_Life of a Radical_, and admirable advice to the writer; his instructions +to a young student on the choice of books, and well-timed warning to +another against the profession of literature, are sun-rifts in the storm, +that show "a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The same +epoch, however,--that of the start of the great writer's almost +uninterrupted triumph--brings us in face of an episode singularly delicate +and difficult to deal with, but impossible to evade. + +[Footnote: These letters to Bamford, showing a keen interest in the +working men of whom his correspondent had written, point to the ideal of a +sort of Tory Democracy. Carlyle writes: "We want more knowledge about the +Lancashire operatives; their miseries and gains, virtues and vices. Winnow +what you have to say, and give us wheat free from chaff. Then the rich +captains of workers will he willing to listen to you. Brevity and +sincerity will succeed. Be brief and select, omit much, give each subject +its proper proportionate space; and be exact without caring to round off +the edges of what you have to say." Later, he declines Bamford's offer of +verses, saying "verse is a bugbear to booksellers at present. These are +prosaic, earnest, practical, not singing times."] + +Carlyle, now generally recognised in London as having one of the most +powerful intellects and by far the greatest command of language among his +contemporaries, was beginning to suffer some of the penalties of renown +in being beset by bores and travestied by imitators; but he was also +enjoying its rewards. Eminent men of all shades of opinion made his +acquaintance; he was a frequent guest of the genial Maecenas, an admirer +of genius though no mere worshipper of success, R. Monckton Milnes; +meeting Hallam, Bunsen, Pusey, etc., at his house in London, and +afterwards visiting him at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. The future Lord +Houghton was, among distinguished men of letters and society, the one of +whom he spoke with the most unvarying regard. Carlyle corresponded with +Peel, whom he set almost on a par with Wellington as worthy of +perfect trust, and talked familiarly with Bishop Wilberforce, whom he +miraculously credits with holding at heart views much like his own. At +a somewhat later date, in the circle of his friends, bound to him by +various degrees of intimacy, History was represented by Thirlwall, Grote, +and Froude; Poetry by Browning, Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Clough; +Social Romance by Kingsley; Biography by James Spedding and John Forster; +and Criticism by John Ruskin. His link to the last named was, however, +their common distrust of political economy, as shown in _Unto This Last_, +rather than any deep artistic sympathy. In Macaulay, a conversationalist +more rapid than himself, Carlyle found a rival rather than a companion; +but his prejudiced view of physical science was forgotten in his personal +affection for Tyndall and in their congenial politics. His society was +from the publication of _Cromwell_ till near his death increasingly +sought after by the aristocracy, several members of which invited him to +their country seats, and bestowed on him all acceptable favours. In this +class he came to find other qualities than those referred to in the +_Sartor_ inscription, and other aims than that of "preserving their +game,"--the ambition to hold the helm of the State in stormy weather, and +to play their part among the captains of industry. In the _Reminiscences_ +the aristocracy are deliberately voted to be "for continual grace of +bearing and of acting, steadfast honour, light address, and cheery +stoicism, actually yet the best of English classes." There can be no +doubt that his intercourse with this class, as with men of affairs and +letters, some of whom were his proximate equals, was a fortunate sequel +to the duck-pond of Ecclefechan and the lonely rambles on the Border +moors. + + Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, + Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt. + +The life of a great capital may be the crown of education, but there is +a danger in homage that comes late and then without reserve. Give me +neither poverty nor riches, applies to praise as well as to wealth; and +the sudden transition from comparative neglect to + + honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, + +is a moral trial passing the strength of all but a few of the "irritable +race" of writers. The deference paid to Carlyle made him yet more +intolerant of contradiction, and fostered his selfishness, in one +instance with the disastrous result of clouding a whole decade of his +domestic life. In February 1839 he speaks of dining--"an eight-o'clock +dinner which ruined me for a week"--with "a certain Baring," at whose +table in Bath House he again met Bunsen, and was introduced to Lord +Mahon. This was the beginning of what, after the death of Sterling, +grew into the most intimate friendship of his life. Baring, son of Lord +Ashburton of the American treaty so named, and successor to the title on +his father's death in 1848, was a man of sterling worth and sound sense, +who entered into many of the views of his guest. His wife was by general +consent the most brilliant woman of rank in London, whose grace, wit, +refinement, and decision of character had made her the acknowledged +leader of society. Lady Harriet, by the exercise of some overpowering +though purely intellectual spell, made the proudest of men, the modern +Diogenes, our later Swift, so much her slave that for twelve years, +whenever he could steal a day from his work, he ran at her beck from town +to country, from castle to cot; from Addiscombe, her husband's villa in +Surrey, to the Grange, her father-in-law's seat in Hampshire; from Loch +Luichart and Glen Finnan, where they had Highland shootings, to the +Palais Eoyal. Mr. Froude's comment in his introduction to the Journal +is substantially as follows: Lady Harriet Baring or Ashburton was the +centre of a planetary system in which every distinguished public man of +genuine worth then revolved. Carlyle was naturally the chief among them, +and he was perhaps at one time ambitious of himself taking some part in +public affairs, and saw the advantage of this stepping-stone to enable +him to do something more for the world, as Byron said, than write books +for it. But the idea of entering Parliament, which seems to have once +suggested itself to him in 1849, was too vague and transient to have ever +influenced his conduct. It is more correct to say that he was flattered +by a sympathy not too thorough to be tame, pleased by adulation never +gross, charmed by the same graces that charmed the rest, and finally +fascinated by a sort of hypnotism. The irritation which this strange +alliance produced in the mind of the mistress of Cheyne Row is no matter +of surprise. Pride and affection together had made her bear with all her +husband's humours, and share with him all the toils of the struggle +from obscurity. He had emerged, and she was still half content to be +systematically set aside for his books, the inanimate rivals on which he +was building a fame she had some claim to share. But her fiery spirit was +not yet tamed into submitting to be sacrificed to an animate rival, or +passively permitting the usurpation of companionship grudged to herself +by another woman, whom she could not enjoy the luxury of despising. Lady +Harriet's superiority in _finesse_ and geniality, as well as advantages +of station, only aggravated the injury; and this with a singular want of +tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting +the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, +were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between +the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently +unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental +neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's +"Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen goddess," while Mrs. +Carlyle, with reference to her favourite dog "Nero," was in her turn +nicknamed "Agrippina." + +In midsummer of 1846, after an enforced sojourn at Addiscombe in worse +than her usual health, she returned to Chelsea with "her mind all churned +to froth," and opened it to her husband with such plainness that "there +was a violent scene": she left the house in a mood like that of the first +Mrs. Milton, and took refuge with her friends the Paulets at Seaforth +near Liverpool, uncertain whether or not she would return. There were +only two persons from whom it seemed natural for her at such a crisis +to ask advice; one was Geraldine Jewsbury, a young Manchester lady, +authoress of a well-known novel, _The Half-Sisters_, from the beginning +of their acquaintance in 1841 till the close in 1866 her most intimate +associate and chosen confidant, who, we are told, "knew all" her secrets. + +[Footnote: Carlyle often speaks, sometimes slightingly, of Miss Jewsbury, +as a sensational novelist and admirer of George Sand, but he appreciated +her genuine worth.] + +The other was the inspired Italian, pure patriot and Stoic moralist Joseph +Mazzini. To him she wrote twice--once apparently before leaving London, +and again from Seaforth. His letters in reply, tenderly sympathetic and +yet rigidly insistent on the duty of forbearance and endurance, availed to +avert the threatened catastrophe; but there are sentences which show how +bitter the complaints must have been. + + It is only you who can teach yourself that, whatever the + _present_ may be, you must front it with dignity.... I + could only point out to you the fulfilment of duties which + can make life--not happy--what can? but earnest, sacred, and + resigned.... I am carrying a burden even heavier than you, + and have undergone even bitterer deceptions. Your life + proves an empty thing, you say. Empty! Do not blaspheme. + Have you never done good? Have you never loved? ... Pain and + joy, deception and fulfilled hopes are just the rain and the + sunshine that must meet the traveller on his way. Bless the + Almighty if He has thought proper to send the latter to + you.... Wrap your cloak round you against the first, but do + not think a single moment that the one or the other have + anything to do with the _end_ of the journey. + +Carlyle's first letter after the rupture is a mixture of reproach +and affection. "We never parted before in such a manner; and all for +literally nothing.... Adieu, dearest, for that is, and, if madness +prevail not, may for ever be your authentic title." Another, enclosing +the birthday present which he had never omitted since her mother's death, +softened his wife's resentment, and the storm blew over for a time. +But while the cause remained there was in the house at best a surface +tranquillity, at worst an under tone of misery which (October 1855 to May +1856) finds voice in the famous Diary, not merely covered with "black +spider webs," but steeped in gall, the publication of which has made so +much debate. It is like a page from _Othello_ reversed. A few sentences +condense the refrain of the lament. "Charles Buller said of the Duchess +de Praslin, 'What could a poor fellow do with a wife that kept a journal +but murder her?'" "That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand +miles Mr. C. has walked between here and there?" "Being an only child, I +never wished to sew men's trousers--no, never!" + + I gin to think I've sold myself + For very little cas." + +"To-day I called on my lady: she was perfectly civil, for a wonder." + +"Edward Irving! The past is past and gone is gone-- + + O waly, waly, love is bonnie, + A little while when it is new;" + +quotations which, laid alongside the records of the writer's visit to the +people at Haddington, "who seem all to grow so good and kind as they grow +old," and to the graves in the churchyard there, are infinitely pathetic. +The letters that follow are in the same strain, _e.g._ to Carlyle when +visiting his sister at the Gill, "I never forget kindness, nor, alas, +unkindness either": to Luichart, "I don't believe thee, wishing yourself +at home.... You don't, as weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself +for the pleasure of others"; to Mrs. Russell at Thornhill, "My London +doctor's prescription is that I should be kept always happy and +tranquil(!!!)." + +In the summer of 1856 Lady Ashburton gave a real ground for offence in +allowing both the Carlyles, on their way north with her, to take a seat +in an ordinary railway carriage, beside her maid, while she herself +travelled in a special saloon. Partly, perhaps in consequence, Mrs. +Carlyle soon went to visit her cousins in Fifeshire, and afterwards +refused to accompany her ladyship on the way back. This resulted in +another quarrel with her husband, who had issued the command from +Luichart--but it was their last on the subject, for Gloriana died on the +4th of the following May, 1857, at Paris: "The most queen-like woman I +had ever known or seen, by nature and by culture _facile princeps_ she, I +think, of all great ladies I have ever seen." This brought to a close an +episode in which there were faults on both sides, gravely punished: the +incidents of its course and the manner in which they were received show, +among other things, that railing at the name of "Happiness" does little +or nothing to reconcile people to the want of the reality. In 1858 Lord +Ashburton married again--a Miss Stuart Mackenzie, who became the attached +friend of the Carlyles, and remained on terms of unruffled intimacy with +both till the end: she survived her husband, who died in 1864, leaving a +legacy of L2000 to the household at Cheyne Row. _Sic transiit._ + +From this date we must turn back over nearly twenty years to retrace the +main steps of the great author's career. Much of the interval was devoted +to innumerable visits, in acceptance of endless hospitalities, or in +paying his annual devotions to Annandale,--calls on his time which kept +him rushing from place to place like a comet. Two facts are notable about +those expeditions: they rarely seemed to give him much pleasure, even at +Scotsbrig he complained of sleepless nights and farm noises; and he was +hardly ever accompanied by his wife. She too was constantly running north +to her own kindred in Liverpool or Scotland, but their paths did not run +parallel, they almost always intersected, so that when the one was on the +way north the other was homeward bound, to look out alone on "a horizon +of zero." Only a few of these visits are worth recording as of general +interest. Most of them were paid, a few received. In the autumn of 1846, +Margaret Fuller, sent from Emerson, called at Cheyne Row, and recorded +her impression of the master as "in a very sweet humour, full of wit and +pathos, without being overbearing," adding that she was "carried away by +the rich flow of his discourse"; and that "the hearty noble earnestness +of his personal bearing brought back the charm of his writing before she +wearied of it." A later visitor, Miss Martineau, his old helper in days +of struggle, was now thus esteemed: "Broken into utter wearisomeness, +a mind reduced to these three elements--imbecility, dogmatism, and +unlimited hope. I never in my life was more heartily bored with any +creature!" In 1847 there followed the last English glimpse of Jeffrey and +the last of Dr. Chalmers, who was full of enthusiasm about _Cromwell_; +then a visit to the Brights, John and Jacob, at Rochdale: with the former +he had "a paltry speaking match" on topics described as "shallow, totally +worthless to me," the latter he liked, recognising in him a culture and +delicacy rare with so much strength of will and independence of thought. +Later came a second visit from Emerson, then on a lecturing tour to +England, gathering impressions revived in his _English Traits_. "His +doctrines are too airy and thin," wrote Carlyle, "for the solid practical +heads of the Lancashire region. We had immense talkings with him here, +but found that he did not give us much to chew the cud upon. He is a +pure-minded man, but I think his talent is not quite so high as I had +anticipated." They had an interesting walk to Stonehenge together, +and Carlyle attended one of his friend's lectures, but with modified +approval, finding this serene "spiritual son" of his own rather "gone +into philanthropy and moonshine." Emerson's notes of this date, on the +other hand, mark his emancipation from mere discipleship. "Carlyle had +all the kleinstadtlicher traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and +reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a +vast continent.... In him, as in Byron, one is more struck with the +rhetoric than with the matter.... There is more character than intellect +in every sentence, therein strangely resembling Samuel Johnson." The same +year Carlyle perpetrated one of his worst criticisms, that on Keats:-- + + The kind of man he was gets ever more horrible to me. Force + of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other + force.... Such a structure of soul, it would once have been + very evident, was a chosen "Vessel of Hell"; + +and in the next an ungenerously contemptuous reference to Macaulay's +_History_:-- + + The most popular ever written. Fourth edition already, + within perhaps four months. Book to which four hundred + editions could not add any value, there being no depth of + sense in it at all, and a very great quantity of rhetorical + wind. + +Landor, on the other hand, whom he visited later at Bath, he appreciated, +being "much taken with the gigantesque, explosive but essentially +chivalrous and almost heroic old man." He was now at ease about the sale +of his books, having, _inter alia_, received L600 for a new edition of +the _French Revolution_ and the _Miscellanies_. His journal is full of +plans for a new work on Democracy, Organisation of Labour, and Education, +and his letters of the period to Thomas Erskine and others are largely +devoted to politics. + +[Footnote: This is one of the few instances in which further knowledge led +to a change for the better in Carlyle's judgment. In a letter to Emerson, +1840, he speaks disparagingly of Landor as "a wild man, whom no extent of +culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be +weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about +anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind +shows him this side or the other of the object: and _sides_ of an object +are all that he sees." _De te faliula._ Emerson answers defending Landor, +and indicating points of likeness between him and Carlyle.] + +In 1846 he spent the first week of September in Ireland, crossing from +Ardrossan to Belfast, and then driving to Drogheda, and by rail to +Dublin, where in Conciliation Hall he saw O'Connell for the first time +since a casual glimpse at a radical meeting arranged by Charles Buller--a +meeting to which he had gone out of curiosity in 1834. O'Connell was +always an object of Carlyle's detestation, and on this occasion he does +not mince his words. + + Chief quack of the then world ... first time I had ever + heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney + ... the big beggar-man who had L15,000 a year, and, _proh + pudor!_ the favour of English ministers instead of the + pillory. + +At Dundrum he met by invitation Carleton the novelist, with Mitchell and +Gavan Duffy, the Young Ireland leaders whom he seems personally to have +liked, but he told Mitchell that he would probably be hanged, and said +during a drive about some flourishing and fertile fields of the Pale, "Ah! +Duffy, there you see the hoof of the bloody Saxon." + +[Footnote: Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the "Conversations and Correspondence," +now being published in the _Contemporary Review_, naturally emphasises +Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several expressions of +sympathy with the "Tenant Agitations"; but his demur to the _Reminiscences +of My Irish Journey_ being accepted as an accurate account of the writer's +real sentiments is of little avail in face of the letters to Emerson, more +strongly accentuating the same views, _e.g._ "Bothered almost to madness +with Irish balderdash.... '_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars,' I +sometimes advised, 'and sell them in Brazil as niggers!'--perhaps +Parliament on sweet constraint will allow you to advance them to be +niggers!"] + +He returned from Kingston to Liverpool on the 10th, and so closed his +short and unsatisfactory trip. Three years later, July to August 6th, +1849, he paid a longer and final visit to the "ragged commonweal" or +"common woe," as Raleigh called it, landing at Dublin, and after some days +there passing on to Kildare, Kilkenny, Lismore, Waterford, beautiful +Killarney and its beggar hordes, and then to Limerick, Clare, Castlebar, +where he met W.E. Forster, whose acquaintance he had made two years +earlier at Matlock. At Gweedore in Donegal he stayed with Lord George +Hill, whom he respected, though persuaded that he was on the wrong road to +Reform by Philanthropy in a country where it had never worked; and then on +to half Scotch Derry. There, August 6th, he made an emphatic after- +breakfast speech to a half-sympathetic audience; the gist of it being that +the remedy for Ireland was not "emancipation" or "liberty," but to "cease +following the devil, as it had been doing for two centuries." The same +afternoon he escaped on board a Glasgow steamer, and landed safe at 2 A.M. +on the morning of the 7th. The notes of the tour, set down on his return +to Chelsea and republished in 1882, have only the literary merit of the +vigorous descriptive touches inseparable from the author's lightest +writing; otherwise they are mere rough-and-tumble jottings, with no +consecutive meaning, of a rapid hawk's-eye view of the four provinces. + +But Carlyle never ceased to maintain the thesis they set forth, that +Ireland is, for the most part, a country of semi-savages, whose +staple trade is begging, whose practice is to lie, unfit not only +for self-government but for what is commonly called constitutional +government, whose ragged people must be coerced, by the methods of +Raleigh, of Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and +respect for law. At Westport, where "human swinery has reached its acme," +he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred +hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, +while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be +a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of +the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his +neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers +generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country +when he formulated his idea of the Home Rule that seemed to him most for +their good. + + Kildare Railway: big blockhead sitting with his dirty feet + on seat opposite, not stirring them for one who wanted to + sit there. "One thing we're all agreed on," said he; "we're + very ill governed: Whig, Tory, Radical, Repealer, all all + admit we're very ill-governed!" I thought to myself, "Yes, + indeed; you govern yourself! He that would govern you well + would probably surprise you much, my friend--laying a hearty + horse-whip over that back of yours." + +And a little later at Castlebar he declares, "Society here would have to +eat itself and end by cannibalism in a week, if it were not held up by +the rest of our Empire standing afoot." These passages are written in +the spirit which inspired his paper on "The Nigger Question" and the +aggressive series of assaults to which it belongs, on what he regarded as +the most prominent quackeries, shams, and pretence philanthropies of the +day. His own account of the reception of this work is characteristic:-- + + In 1849, after an interval of deep gloom and bottomless + dubitation, came _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, which + unpleasantly astonished everybody, set the world upon the + strangest suppositions--"Carlyle got deep into whisky," said + some,--ruined my reputation according to the friendliest + voices, and in effect divided me altogether from the mob of + "Progress-of-the-species" and other vulgar; but were a great + relief to my own conscience as a faithful citizen, and have + been ever since. + +These pamphlets alienated Mazzini and Mill, and provoked the assault +of the newspapers; which, by the author's confession, did something to +arrest and restrict the sale. + +Nor was this indignation wholly unnatural. Once in his life, on occasion +of his being called to serve at a jury trial, Carlyle, with remarkable +adroitness, coaxed a recalcitrant juryman into acquiescence with the +majority; but coaxing as a rule was not his way. When he found himself in +front of what he deemed to be a falsehood his wont was to fly in its face +and tear it to pieces. His satire was not like that of Horace, who taught +his readers _ridendo dicere verum_, it was rather that of the elder +Lucilius or the later Juvenal; not that of Chaucer, who wrote-- + + That patience is a virtue high is plain, + Because it conquers, as the clerks explain, + Things that rude valour never could attain, + +but that of _The Lye_, attributed to Raleigh, or Swift's _Gulliver_ or +the letters of Junius. The method of direct denunciation has advantages: +it cannot be mistaken, nor, if strong enough, ignored; but it must lay +its account with consequences, and Carlyle in this instance found them +so serious that he was threatened at the height of his fame with +dethronement. Men said he had lost his head, gone back to the everlasting +"No," and mistaken swearing all round for political philosophy. The +ultimate value attached to the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ must depend to a +large extent on the view of the critic. It is now, however, generally +admitted on the one hand that they served in some degree to counteract +the rashness of Philanthropy; on the other, that their effect was marred +by more than the writer's usual faults of exaggeration. It is needless to +refer the temper they display to the troubles then gathering about his +domestic life. A better explanation is to be found in the public events +of the time. + +The two years previous to their appearance were the Revolution years, +during which the European world seemed to be turned upside down. The +French had thrown out their _bourgeois_ king, Louis Philippe--"the +old scoundrel," as Carlyle called him,--and established their second +Republic. Italy, Hungary, and half Germany were in revolt against the old +authorities; the Irish joined in the chorus, and the Chartist monster +petition was being carted to Parliament. Upheaval was the order of the +day, kings became exiles and exiles kings, dynasties and creeds were +being subverted, and empires seemed rocking as on the surface of an +earthquake. They were years of great aspirations, with beliefs in all +manner of swift regeneration-- + + Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, + +all varieties of doctrinaire idealisms. Mazzini failed at Rome, Kossuth +at Pesth; the riots of Berlin resulted in the restoration of the old +dull bureaucratic regime; Smith O'Brien's bluster exploded in a cabbage +garden; the Railway Bubble burst in the fall of the bloated king Hudson, +and the Chartism of the time evaporated in smoke. The old sham gods, with +Buonaparte of the stuffed eagle in front, came back; because, concluded +Carlyle, there was no man in the front of the new movement strong enough +to guide it; because its figure-heads were futile sentimentalists, +insurgents who could not win. The reaction produced by their failure had +somewhat the same effect on his mind that the older French Revolution had +on that of Burke: he was driven back to a greater degree than Mr. Froude +allows on practical conservatism and on the negations of which +the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ are the expression. To this series of +_pronunciamentos_ of political scepticism he meant to add another, of +which he often talks under the name of "Exodus from Houndsditch," boldly +stating and setting forth the grounds of his now complete divergence from +all forms of what either in England or Europe generally could be called +the Orthodox faith in Religion. He was, we are told, withheld from this +by the feeling that the teaching even of the priests he saw and derided +in Belgium or in Galway was better than the atheistic materialism which +he associated with the dominion of mere physical science. He may have +felt he had nothing definite enough to be understood by the people to +substitute for what he proposed to destroy; and he may have had a thought +of the reception of such a work at Scotsbrig. Much of the _Life of +Sterling_, however, is somewhat less directly occupied with the same +question, and though gentler in tone it excited almost as much clamour as +the _Pamphlets_, especially in the north. The book, says Carlyle himself, +was "utterly revolting to the religious people in particular (to my +surprise rather than otherwise). 'Doesn't believe in us either!' Not he +for certain; can't, if you will know." During the same year his almost +morbid dislike of materialism found vent in denunciations of the "Crystal +Palace" Exhibition of Industry; though for its main promoter, Prince +Albert, he subsequently entertained and expressed a sincere respect. + +In the summer of 1851 the Carlyles went together to Malvern, where they +met Tennyson (whose good nature had been proof against some slighting +remarks on his verses), Sydney Dobell, then in the fame of his +"Roman," and other celebrities. They tried the "Water Cure," under the +superintendence of Dr. Gully, who received and treated them as guests; +but they derived little good from the process. "I found," says Carlyle, +"water taken as medicine to be the most destructive drug I had ever +tried." Proceeding northward, he spent three weeks with his mother, then +in her eighty-fourth year and at last growing feeble; a quiet time only +disturbed by indignation at "one ass whom I heard the bray of in some +Glasgow newspaper," comparing "our grand hater of shams" to Father +Gavazzi. His stay was shortened by a summons to spend a few days with the +Ashburtons at Paris on their return from Switzerland. Though bound by +a promise to respond to the call, Carlyle did not much relish it. +Travelling abroad was always a burden to him, and it was aggravated in +this case by his very limited command of the language for conversational +purposes. Fortunately, on reaching London he found that the poet Browning, +whose acquaintance he had made ten years before, was, with his wife, about +to start for the same destination, and he prevailed upon them, though +somewhat reluctant, to take charge of him. + +[Footnote: Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life of Robert Browning_.] + +The companionship was therefore not accidental, and it was of great +service. "Carlyle," according to Mrs. Browning's biographer, "would have +been miserable without Browning," who made all the arrangements for the +party, passed luggage through the customs, saw to passports, fought the +battles of all the stations, and afterwards acted as guide through the +streets of the great city. By a curious irony, two verse-makers and +admirers of George Sand made it possible for the would-be man of action to +find his way. The poetess, recalling the trip afterwards, wrote that she +liked the prophet more than she expected, finding his "bitterness only +melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." Browning himself continued through +life to regard Carlyle with "affectionate reverence." "He never ceased," +says Mrs. Orr, "to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his +wife, or to believe that, in the matter of their domestic unhappiness, she +was the more responsible of the two.... He always thought her a hard +unlovable woman, and I believe little liking was lost between them ... Yet +Carlyle never rendered him that service--easy as it appears--which one man +of letters most justly values from another, that of proclaiming the +admiration which he privately professed for his work." The party started, +September 24th, and reached Dieppe by Newhaven, after a rough passage, the +effects of which on some fellow-travellers more unfortunate than himself +Carlyle describes in a series of recently-discovered jottings [Footnote: +Partially reproduced, _Pall Mall Gazette,_ April 9th 1890, with +illustrative connecting comments.] made on his return, October 2nd, to +Chelsea. On September 25th they reached Paris. Carlyle joined the +Ashburtons at Meurice's Hotel; there dined, went in the evening to the +Theatre Francais, cursed the play, and commented unpleasantly on General +Changarnier sitting in the stalls. + +During the next few days he met many of the celebrities of the time, and +caricatured, after his fashion, their personal appearance, talk, and +manner. These criticisms are for the most part of little value. The +writer had in some of his essays shown almost as much capacity of +understanding the great Frenchmen of the last century as was compatible +with his Puritan vein; but as regards French literature since the +Revolution he was either ignorant or alien. What light could be thrown on +that interesting era by a man who could only say of the authors of _La +Comedie Humaine_ and _Consuelo_ that they were ministers in a Phallus +worship? Carlyle seems to have seen most of Thiers, whom he treats with +good-natured condescension, but little insight: "round fat body, tapering +like a ninepin into small fat feet, placidly sharp fat face, puckered +eyeward ... a frank, sociable kind of creature, who has absolutely +no malignity towards any one, and is not the least troubled with +self-seekings." Thiers talked with contempt of Michelet; and Carlyle, +unconscious of the numerous affinities between that historian of genius +and himself, half assented. Prosper Merimee, on the other hand, +incensed him by some freaks of criticism, whether in badinage or in +earnest--probably the former. "Jean Paul," he said, getting on the theme +of German literature, "was a hollow fool of the first magnitude," and +Goethe was "insignificant, unintelligible, a paltry kind of Scribe +manque." "I could stand no more of it, but lighted a cigar, and adjourned +to the street. 'You impertinent blasphemous blockhead!' this was sticking +in my throat: better to retire without bringing it out." + +[Footnote: The two men were mutually antagonistic; Merimee tried to read +the _French Revolution_, but flung the book aside in weariness or in +disdain.] + +Of Guizot he writes, "Tartuffe, gaunt, hollow, resting on the everlasting +'No' with a haggard consciousness that it ought to be the everlasting +'Yea.'" "To me an extremely detestable kind of man." Carlyle missed +General Cavaignac, "of all Frenchmen the one" he "cared to see." In the +streets of Paris he found no one who could properly be called a gentleman. +"The truly ingenious and strong men of France are here (_i.e_. among the +industrial classes) making money, while the politician, literary, etc. +etc. class is mere play-actorism." His summary before leaving at the close +of a week, rather misspent, is: "Articulate-speaking France was altogether +without beauty or meaning to me in my then diseased mood; but I saw traces +of the inarticulate ... much worthier." + +Back in London, he sent Mrs. Carlyle to the Grange (distinguishing +himself, in an interval of study at home, by washing the back area flags +with his own hands), and there joined her till the close of the year. +During the early part of the next he was absorbed in reading and planning +work. Then came an unusually tranquil visit to Thomas Erskine of +Linlathen, during which he had only to complain that the servants were +often obliged to run out of the room to hide their laughter at his +humorous bursts. At the close of August 1852 he embarked on board a Leith +steamer bound for Rotterdam, on his first trip to Germany. Home once +more, in October, he found chaos come, and seas of paint overwhelming +everything; "went to the Grange, and back in time to witness from Bath +House the funeral, November 18th, of the great Duke," remarking, "The +one true man of official men in England, or that I know of in Europe, +concludes his long course.... Tennyson's verses are naught. Silence alone +is respectable on such an occasion." In March, again at the Grange, he +met the Italian minister Azeglio, and when this statesman disparaged +Mazzini--a thing only permitted by Carlyle to himself--he retorted with +the remark, "Monsieur, vous ne le connaissez pas du tout, du tout." At +Chelsea, on his return, the fowl tragic-comedy reached a crisis, "the +unprotected male" declaring that he would shoot them or poison them. "A +man is not a Chatham nor a Wallenstein; but a man has work too, which the +Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two and sixpence +worth of bantams.... They must either withdraw or die." Ultimately his +mother-wife came to the rescue of her "babe of genius"; the cocks +were bought off, and in the long-talked-of sound-proof room the last +considerable work of his life, though painfully, proceeded. Meanwhile +"brother John" had married, and Mrs. Carlyle went to visit the couple at +Moffat. While there bad tidings came from Scotsbrig, and she dutifully +hurried off to nurse her mother-in-law through an attack from which the +strong old woman temporarily rallied. But the final stroke could not be +long delayed. When Carlyle was paying his winter visit to the Grange in +December news came that his mother was worse, and her recovery +despaired of; and, by consent of his hostess, he hurried off to +Scotsbrig,--"mournful leave given me by the Lady A., mournful +encouragement to be speedy, not dilatory,"--and arrived in time to hear +her last words. "Here is Tom come to bid you good-night, mother," said +John. "As I turned to go, she said, 'I'm muckle obleeged to you.'" She +spoke no more, but passed from sleep after sleep of coma to that of +death, on Sunday, Christmas Day, 1853. "We can only have one mother," +exclaimed Byron on a like event--the solemn close of many storms. But +between Margaret Carlyle and the son of whom she was so proud there had +never been a shadow. "If," writes Mr. Froude, "she gloried in his fame +and greatness, he gloried more in being her son, and while she lived she, +and she only, stood between him and the loneliness of which he so often +and so passionately complained." + +Of all Carlyle's letters none are more tenderly beautiful than those +which he sent to Scotsbrig. The last, written on his fifty-eighth +birthday, December 4th, which she probably never read, is one of the +finest. The close of their wayfaring together left him solitary; his +"soul all hung with black," and, for months to come, everything around +was overshadowed by the thought of his bereavement. In his journal of +February 28th 1854, he tells us that he had on the Sunday before seen a +vision of Mainhill in old days, with mother, father, and the rest getting +dressed for the meeting-house. "They are gone now, vanished all; their +poor bits of thrifty clothes, ... their pious struggling efforts; their +little life, it is all away. It has all melted into the still sea, it +was rounded with a sloop." The entry ends, as fitting, with a prayer: "O +pious mother! kind, good, brave, and truthful soul as I have ever found, +and more than I have elsewhere found in this world. Your poor Tom, long +out of his schooldays now, has fallen very lonely, very lame and broken +in this pilgrimage of his; and you cannot help him or cheer him ... any +more. From your grave in Ecclefechan kirkyard yonder you bid him trust in +God; and that also he will try if he can understand and do." + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE MINOTAUR + +[1853-1866] + +Carlyle was now engaged on a work which required, received, and well nigh +exhausted all his strength, resulting in the greatest though the least +generally read of all his books. _Cromwell_ achieved, he had thrown +himself for a season into contemporary politics, condescending even, +contrary to his rule, to make casual contributions to the Press; but his +temper was too hot for success in that arena, and his letters of the time +are full of the feeling that the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ had set the world +against him. Among his generous replies to young men asking advice, none +is more suggestive than that in which he writes from Chelsea (March 9th +1850):-- + + If my books teach you anything, don't mind in the least + whether other people believe it or not; but lay it to + heart ... as a real message left with you, which you must + set about fulfilling, whatever others do.... And be not + surprised that "people have no sympathy with you." That is + an accompaniment that will attend you all your days if you + mean to live an earnest life. + +But he himself, though "ever a fighter," felt that, even for him, it was +not good to be alone. He decided there "was no use railing in vain like +Timon"; he would go back again from the present to the past, from the +latter days of discord to seek countenance in some great figure of +history, under whose aegis he might shelter the advocacy of his views. +Looking about for a theme, several crossed his mind. He thought of +Ireland, but that was too burning a subject; of William the Conqueror, of +Simon de Montfort, the Norsemen, the Cid; but these may have seemed to +him too remote. Why, ask patriotic Scotsmen, did he not take up his and +their favourite Knox? But Knox's life had been fairly handled by M'Crie, +and Carlyle would have found it hard to adjust his treatment of that +essentially national "hero" to the "Exodus from Houndsditch." "Luther" +might have been an apter theme; but there too it would have been a strain +to steer clear of theological controversy, of which he had had enough. +Napoleon was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste. Looking over +Europe in more recent times, he concluded that the Prussian monarchy had +been the main centre of modern stability, and that it had been made so by +its virtual creator, Friedrich II., called the Great. Once entertained, +the subject seized him as with the eye of Coleridge's mariner, and, in +spite of manifold efforts to get free, compelled him, so that he could +"not choose but" write on it. Again and again, as the magnitude of the +task became manifest, we find him doubting, hesitating, recalcitrating, +and yet captive. He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own Memoirs +and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains through which he had to dig. +"Prussian Friedrich and the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust +lay crushing me with the continual question, Dare I try it? Dare I not?" +At length, gathering himself together for the effort, he resolved, as +before in the case of Cromwell, to visit the scenes of which he was to +write. Hence the excursion to Germany of 1852, during which, with the +kindly-offered guidance of Mr. Neuberg, an accomplished German admirer of +some fortune resident in London, he made his first direct acquaintance +with the country of whose literature he had long been himself the English +interpreter. The outlines of the trip may be shortly condensed from the +letters written during its progress to his wife and mother. He reached +Rotterdam on September 1st; then after a night made sleepless by "noisy +nocturnal travellers and the most industrious cocks and clamorous bells" +he had ever heard, he sailed up the river to Bonn, where he consulted +books, saw "Father Arndt," and encountered some types of the German +professoriate, "miserable creatures lost in statistics." There he met +Neuberg, and they went together to Rolandseck, to the village of Hunef +among the Sieben-Gebirge, and then on to Coblenz. After a detour to Ems, +which Carlyle, comminating the gaming-tables, compared to Matlock, and +making a pilgrimage to Nassau as the birthplace of William the Silent, +they rejoined the Rhine and sailed admiringly up the finest reach of the +river. From Mainz the philosopher and his guide went on to Frankfort, +paid their respects to Goethe's statue and the garret where _Werther_ was +written, the Judengasse, "grimmest section of the Middle Ages," and the +Roemer--election hall of the old Kaisers; then to Homburg, where they saw +an old Russian countess playing "gowpanfuls of gold pieces every +stake," and left after no long stay, Carlyle, in a letter to Scotsbrig, +pronouncing the fashionable Badeort to be the "rallying-place of such a +set of empty blackguards as are not to be found elsewhere in the world." +We find him next at Marburg, where he visited the castle of Philip of +Hesse. Passing through Cassel, he went to Eisenach, and visited the +neighbouring Wartburg, where he kissed the old oaken table, on which the +Bible was made an open book for the German race, and noted the hole in +the plaster where the inkstand had been thrown at the devil and his +noises; an incident to which eloquent reference is made in the lectures +on "Heroes." Hence they drove to Gotha, and lodged in Napoleon's room +after Leipzig. Then by Erfurt, with more Luther memories, they took rail +to Weimar, explored the houses of Goethe and of Schiller, and dined by +invitation with the Augustenburgs; the Grand Duchess, with sons and +daughters, conversing in a Babylonish dialect, a melange of French, +English, and German. The next stage seems to have been Leipzig, then in +a bustle with the Fair. "However," says Carlyle, "we got a book or two, +drank a glass of wine in Auerbach's keller, and at last got off safe to +the comparative quiet of Dresden." He ignores the picture galleries; and +makes a bare reference to the palaces from which they steamed up the Elbe +to the heart of Saxon Switzerland. There he surveyed Lobositz, first +battle-field of the Seven Years' War, and rested at the romantic mountain +watering-place of Toeplitz. "He seems," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, "to be getting +very successfully through his travels, thanks to the patience and +helpfulness of Neuberg. He makes in every letter frightful _misereres_ +over his sleeping accommodations; but he cannot conceal that he is really +pretty well." The writer's own _misereres_ are as doleful and nearly +as frequent; but she was really in much worse health. From Toeplitz the +companions proceeded in weary stellwagens to Zittau in Lusatia, and so on +to + + Herrnhut, the primitive city of the Moravian brethren: a + place not bigger than Annan, but beautiful, pure, and quiet + beyond any town on the earth, I daresay; and, indeed, more + like a saintly dream of ideal Calvinism made real than a town + of stone and lime. + +Onward by "dreary moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred +"the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his +worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of +the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we have, October +1st:-- + + I am dead stupid; my heart nearly choked out of me, and my + head churned to pieces.... Berlin is loud almost as London, + but in no other way great ... about the size of Liverpool, + and more like Glasgow. + +They spent a week there (sight-seeing being made easier by an +introduction from Lady Ashburton to the Ambassador), discovering at +length an excellent portrait of Fritz, meeting Tieck, Cornelius, Rauch, +Preuss, etc., and then got quickly back to London by way of Hanover, +Cologne, and Ostend. Carlyle's travels are always interesting, and would +be more so without the tiresome, because ever the same, complaints. Six +years later (1858) he made his second expedition to Germany, in the +company of two friends, a Mr. Foxton--who is made a butt--and the +faithful Neuberg. Of this journey, undertaken with a more exclusively +business purpose, and accomplished with greater dispatch, there are fewer +notes, the substance of which may be here anticipated. He sailed (August +21st) from Leith to Hamburg, admiring the lower Elbe, and then went out +of his way to accept a pressing invitation from the Baron Usedom and his +wife to the Isle of Ruegen, sometimes called the German Isle of Wight. He +went there by Stralsund, liked his hosts and their pleasant place, where +for cocks crowing he had doves cooing; but in Putbus, the Richmond of the +island, he had to encounter brood sows as well as cochin-chinas. From +Ruegen he went quickly south by Stettin to Berlin, then to Cuestrin to +survey the field of Zorndorf, with what memorable result readers of +_Friedrich_ know. His next halt was at Liegnitz, headquarters for +exploring the grounds of "Leuthen, the grandest of all the battles," +and Molwitz--first of Fritz's fights--of which we hear so much in the +_Reminiscences_. His course lay on to Breslau, "a queer old city as ever +you heard of, high as Edinburgh or more so," and, by Landshut, through +the picturesque villages of the Riesen-Gebirge into Bohemia. There he +first put up at Pardubitz in a vile, big inn, for bed a "trough eighteen +inches too short, a mattress forced into it which cocked up at both +ends"--such as most travellers in remoter Germany at that period have +experienced. Carlyle was unfavourably impressed by the Bohemians; and +"not one in a hundred of them could understand a word of German. They +are liars, thieves, slatterns, a kind of miserable, subter-Irish +people,--Irish with the addition of ill-nature." He and his friends +visited the fields of Chotusitz and Kolin, where they found the "Golden +Sun," from which "the last of the Kings" had surveyed the ground, "sunk +to be the dirtiest house probably in Europe." Thence he made for Prague, +whose picturesque grandeur he could not help extolling. "Here," he +writes, enclosing the flower to his wife, "is an authentic wild pink +plucked from the battle-field. Give it to some young lady who practises +'the Battle of Prague' on her piano to your satisfaction." On September +15th he dates from Dresden, whence he spent a laborious day over Torgau. +Thereafter they sped on, with the usual tribulations, by Hochkirk, +Leipzig, Weissenfels, and Rossbach. Hurrying homeward, they were obliged +to decline another invitation from the Duchess at Weimar; and, making +for Guntershausen, performed the fatiguing journey from there to +Aix-la-Chapelle in one day, _i.e._ travelling often in slow trains from 4 +A.M. to 7 P.M., a foolish feat even for the eupeptic. Carlyle visited the +cathedral, but has left a very poor account of the impression produced +on him by the simple slab sufficiently inscribed, "Carolo Magno." "Next +morning stand upon the lid of Charlemagne, abominable monks roaring +out their idolatrous grand music within sight." By Ostend and Dover he +reached home on the 22nd. A Yankee scamper trip, one might say, but for +the result testifying to the enormous energy of the traveller. "He speaks +lightly," says Mr. Froude, "of having seen Kolin, Torgau, etc. etc. No +one would guess from reading these short notices that he had mastered the +details of every field he visited; not a turn of the ground, not a brook, +not a wood ... had escaped him.... There are no mistakes. Military +students in Germany are set to learn Frederick's battles in Carlyle's +account of them." + +During the interval between those tours there are few events of interest +in Carlyle's outer, or phases of his inner life which have not been +already noted. The year 1854 found the country ablaze with the excitement +of the Crimean War, with which he had as little sympathy as had Cobden +or Bright or the members of Sturge's deputation. He had no share in the +popular enthusiasm for what he regarded as a mere newspaper folly. All +his political leaning was on the side of Russia, which, from a safe +distance, having no direct acquaintance with the country, he always +admired as a seat of strong government, the representative of wise +control over barbarous races. Among the worst of these he reckoned the +Turk, "a lazy, ugly, sensual, dark fanatic, whom we have now had for 400 +years. I would not buy the continuance of him in Europe at the rate of +sixpence a century." Carlyle had no more faith in the "Balance of power" +than had Byron, who scoffed at it from another, the Republican, side as +"balancing straws on kings' noses instead of wringing them off," _e.g._-- + + As to Russian increase of strength, he writes, I would wait + till Russia meddled with me before I drew sword to stop his + increase of strength. It is the idle population of editors, + etc., that has done all this in England. One perceives + clearly that ministers go forward in it against their will. + +Even our heroisms at Alma--"a terrible, almost horrible, +operation"--Balaclava, and Inkermann, failed to raise a glow in his mind, +though he admitted the force of Tennyson's ringing lines. The alliance +with the "scandalous copper captain," elected by the French, as the Jews +chose Barabbas,--an alliance at which many patriots winced--was to him +only an added disgrace. Carlyle's comment on the subsequent visit to +Osborne of Victor Hugo's "brigand," and his reception within the pale of +legitimate sovereignty was, "Louis Bonaparte has not been shot hitherto. +That is the best that can be said." Sedan brought most men round to his +mind about Napoleon III.: but his approval of the policy of the Czars +remains open to the criticism of M. Lanin. In reference to the next great +struggle of the age, Carlyle was in full sympathy with the mass of his +countrymen. He was as much enraged by the Sepoy rebellion as were those +who blew the ringleaders from the muzzles of guns. "Tongue cannot speak," +he exclaims, in the spirit of Noel Paton's picture, before it was amended +or spoilt, "the horrors that were done on the English by these mutinous +hyaenas. Allow hyaenas to mutiny and strange things will follow." He +never seems to have revolved the question as to the share of his admired +Muscovy in instigating the revolt. For the barbarism of the north he had +ready apologies, for the savagery of the south mere execration; and he +writes of the Hindoos as he did, both before and afterwards, of the +negroes in Jamaica. + +Three sympathetic obituary notices of the period expressed his softer +side. In April 1854, John Wilson and Lord Cockburn died at Edinburgh. His +estimate of the former is notable as that generally entertained, now that +the race of those who came under the personal spell of Christopher North +has passed:-- + + We lived apart as in different centuries; though to say the + truth I always loved Wilson, he had much nobleness of heart, + and many traits of noble genius, but the central tie-beam + seemed always wanting; very long ago I perceived in him the + most irreconcilable contradictions--Toryism with + Sansculottism, Methodism of a sort with total incredulity, + etc.... Wilson seemed to me always by far the most gifted + of our literary men, either then or still: and yet + intrinsically he has written nothing that can endure. + +Cockburn is referred to in contrast as "perhaps the last genuinely +national type of rustic Scotch sense, sincerity, and humour--a wholesome +product of Scotch dialect, with plenty of good logic in it." Later, +Douglas Jerrold is described as "last of the London wits, I hope the +last." Carlyle's letters during this period are of minor interest: many +refer to visits paid to distinguished friends and humble relatives, with +the usual complaints about health, servants, and noises. At Farlingay, +where he spent some time with Edward FitzGerald, translator of _Omar +Khayyam_, the lowing of cows took the place of cocks crowing. Here and +there occurs a, criticism or a speculation. That on his dreams is, in the +days of "insomnia," perhaps worth noting (F. iv. 154, 155); _inter alia_ +he says:--"I have an impression that one always dreams, but that only in +cases where the nerves are disturbed by bad health, which produces light +imperfect sleep, do they start into such relief as to force themselves on +our waking consciousness." Among posthumously printed documents of Cheyne +Row, to this date belongs the humorous appeal of Mrs. Carlyle for a +larger allowance of house money, entitled "Budget of a Femme Incomprise." +The arguments and statement of accounts, worthy of a bank auditor, were +so irresistible that Carlyle had no resource but to grant the request, +_i.e._ practically to raise the amount to L230, instead of L200 per +annum. It has been calculated that his reliable income even at this time +did not exceed L400, but the rent of the house was kept very low, L30: +he and his wife lived frugally, so that despite the expenses of the +noise-proof room and his German tour he could afford in 1857 to put a +stop to her travelling in second-class railway carriages; in 1860, when +the success of the first instalment of his great work made an end of +financial fears, to keep two servants; and in 1863 to give Mrs. Carlyle +a brougham. Few men have left on the whole so unimpeachable a record in +money matters. + +In November 1854 there occurred an incident hitherto unrecorded in any +biography. The Lord Rectorship of the University of Glasgow having fallen +vacant, the "Conservative Club" of the year had put forward Mr. Disraeli +as successor to the honorary office. A small body of Mr. Carlyle's +admirers among the senior students on the other side nominated him, +partly as a tribute of respect and gratitude, partly in opposition to +a statesman whom they then distrusted. The nomination was, after much +debate, adopted by the so-called "Liberal Association" of that day; +and, with a curious irony, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ and +_Friedrich II._ was pitted, as a Radical, against the future promoter of +the Franchise of 1867 as a Tory. It soon appeared that his supporters +had underestimated the extent to which Mr. Carlyle had offended Scotch +theological prejudice and outraged the current Philanthropy. His name +received some sixty adherents, and had ultimately to be withdrawn. The +nomination was received by the Press, and other exponents of popular +opinion, with denunciations that came loudest and longest from the +leaders of orthodox Dissent, then arrogating to themselves the profession +of Liberalism and the initiation of Reform. Among the current expressions +in reference to his social and religious creeds were the following:-- + + Carlyle's philanthropy is not that of Howard, his cure for + national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving + wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be + described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong." + He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down + into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is + a sham.... Elect him and you bid God-speed to Pantheism and + spiritualism. + + [Footnote: Mr. Wylie states that "twice before his election by his + own University he (Carlyle) had been invited to allow himself to + be nominated for the office of Lord Rector, once by students in + the University of Glasgow and once by those of Aberdeen: but both + of these invitations he had declined." This as regards Glasgow is + incorrect.] + + Mr. Carlyle neither possesses the talent nor the distinction, nor + does he occupy the position which entitle a man to such an honour + as the Rectorial Chair. The _Scotch Guardian_ writes: But for the + folly exhibited in bringing forward Mr. Disraeli, scarcely any + party within the College or out of it would have ventured to + nominate a still more obnoxious personage. This is the first + instance we have been able to discover in which the suffrages of + the youth of the University have been sought for a candidate who + denied in his writings that the revealed Word of God is "the way, + the truth, the life." It is impossible to separate Mr. Carlyle + from that obtrusive feature of his works in which the solemn + verities of our holy religion are sneered at as wornout + "biblicalities," "unbelievabilities," and religious profession is + denounced as "dead putrescent cant." The reader of the _Life of + Sterling_ is not left to doubt for a moment the author's malignant + hostility to the religion of the Bible. In that work, saving faith + is described as "stealing into heaven by the modern method of + sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on earth," that is + to say, by believing in the doctrines of the Gospels. How, after + this, could the Principal and Professors of the University, the + guardians of the faiths and morals of its inexperienced youth, + accompany to the Common Hall, and allow to address the students a + man who has degraded his powers to the life-labour of sapping and + mining the foundations of the truth, and opened the fire of his + fiendish raillery against the citadel of our best aspirations and + dearest hopes? + +In the result, two men of genius--however diverse--were discarded, and +a Scotch nobleman of conspicuous talent, always an active, if not +intrusive, champion of orthodoxy, was returned by an "overwhelming +majority." In answer to intelligence transmitted to Mr. Carlyle of these +events, the president of the Association of his supporters--who had +nothing on which to congratulate themselves save that only the benches +of the rooms in which they held their meetings had been riotously +broken,--received the following previously unpublished letter:-- + + Chelsea, _16th December_ 1854. + + DEAR SIR--I have received your Pamphlet; and return many + thanks for all your kindness to me. I am sorry to learn, as + I do for the first time from this narrative, what angry + nonsense some of my countrymen see good to write of me. Not + being much a reader of Newspapers, I had hardly heard of the + Election till after it was finished; and I did not know that + anything of this melancholy element of Heterodoxy, + "Pantheism," etc. etc., had been introduced into the matter. + It is an evil, after its sort, this of being hated and + denounced by fools and ignorant persons; but it cannot be + mended for the present, and so must be left standing there. + + That another wiser class think differently, nay, that they + alone have any real knowledge of the question, or any real + right to vote upon it, is surely an abundant compensation. + If that be so, then all is still right; and probably there + is no harm done at all!--To you, and the other young + gentlemen who have gone with you on this occasion, I can + only say that I feel you have loyally meant to do me a great + honour and kindness; that I am deeply sensible of your + genial recognition, of your noble enthusiasm (which reminds + me of my own young years); and that in fine there is no loss + or gain of an Election which can in the least alter these + valuable facts, or which is not wholly insignificant to me, + in comparison with them. "Elections" are not a thing + transacted by the gods, in general; and I have known very + unbeautiful creatures "elected" to be kings, chief-priests, + railway kings, etc., by the "most sweet voices," and the + spiritual virtue that inspires these, in our time! + + Leaving all that, I will beg you all to retain your + honourable good feelings towards me; and to think that if + anything I have done or written can help any one of you in + the noble problem of living like a wise man in these evil + and foolish times, it will be more valuable to me than never + so many Elections or Non-elections. With many good wishes + and regards I heartily thank you all, and remain--Yours very + sincerely, + + T. CARLYLE. + +[Footnote: For the elucidation of some points of contact between Carlyle +and Lord Beaconsfield, _vide_ Mr. Froude's _Life_ of the latter.] + +Carlyle's letters to strangers are always valuable, for they are terse +and reticent. In writing to weavers, like Bamford; to men in trouble, as +Cooper; to students, statesmen, or earnest inquirers of whatever degree, +a genuine sympathy for them takes the place of the sympathy for himself, +often too prominent in the copious effusions to his intimates. The letter +above quoted is of special interest, as belonging to a time from which +comparatively few survive; when he was fairly under weigh with a task +which seemed to grow in magnitude under his gaze. The _Life of Friedrich_ +could not be a succession of dramatic scenes, like the _French +Revolution_, nor a biography like _Cromwell_, illustrated by the +surrounding events of thirty years. Carlyle found, to his dismay, that he +had involved himself in writing the History of Germany, and in a measure +of Europe, during the eighteenth century, a period perhaps the most +tangled and difficult to deal with of any in the world's annals. He was +like a man who, with intent to dig up a pine, found himself tugging at +the roots of an Igdrasil that twined themselves under a whole Hercynian +forest. His constant cries of positive pain in the progress of the work +are distressing, as his indomitable determination to wrestle with and +prevail over it is inspiring. There is no imaginable image that he does +not press into his service in rattling the chains of his voluntary +servitude. Above all, he groans over the unwieldy mass of his +authorities--"anti-solar systems of chaff." + + "I read old German books dull as stupidity itself--nay + superannuated stupidity--gain with labour the dreariest + glimpses of unimportant extinct human beings ... but when I + begin operating: _how_ to reduce that widespread black + desert of Brandenburg sand to a small human garden! ... I have + no capacity of grasping the big chaos that lies around me, + and reducing it to order. Order! Reducing! It is like + compelling the grave to give up its dead!" + +Elsewhere he compares his travail with the monster of his own creation +to "Balder's ride to the death kingdoms, through frozen rain, sound of +subterranean torrents, leaden-coloured air"; and in the retrospect of +the _Reminiscences_ touchingly refers to his thirteen years of rarely +relieved isolation. "A desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my whole +strength devoted to it ... withdrawn from all the world." He received few +visitors and had few correspondents, but kept his life vigorous by riding +on his horse Fritz (the gift of the Marshalls), "during that book, some +30,000 miles, much of it, all the winter part of it, under cloud of +night, sun just setting when I mounted. All the rest of the day I sat, +silent, aloft, insisting upon work, and such work, _invitissima Minerva_, +for that matter." Mrs. Carlyle had her usual share of the sufferings +involved in "the awful _Friedrich_." "That tremendous book," she writes, +"made prolonged and entire devastation of any satisfactory semblance of +home life or home happiness." But when at last, by help of Neuberg and of +Mr. Larkin, who made the maps of the whole book, the first two volumes +were in type (they appeared in autumn 1858), his wife hailed them in a +letter sent from Edinburgh to Chelsea: "Oh, my dear, what a magnificent +book this is going to be, the best of all your books, forcible, clear, and +sparkling as the _French Revolution_; compact and finished as _Cromwell_. +Yes, you shall see that it will be the best of all your books, and small +thanks to it, it has taken a doing." On which the author naively purrs: +"It would be worth while to write books, if mankind would read them as +you." Later he speaks of his wife's recognition and that of Emerson--who +wrote enthusiastically of the art of the work, though much of it was +across his grain--as "the only bit of human criticism in which he could +discern lineaments of the thing." But the book was a swift success, two +editions of 2000 and another of 1000 copies being sold in a comparatively +brief space. Carlyle's references to this--after his return from another +visit to the north and the second trip to Germany--seen somewhat +ungracious:-- + + Book ... much babbled over in newspapers ... no better to me + than the barking of dogs ... officious people put reviews + into my hands, and in an idle hour I glanced partly into + these; but it would have been better not, so sordidly ignorant + and impertinent were they, though generally laudatory. + +[Footnote: Carlyle himself writes: "I felt well enough how it was crushing +down her existence, as it was crushing down my own; and the thought that +she had not been at the choosing of it, and yet must suffer so for it, was +occasionally bitter to me. But the practical conclusion always was, Get +done with it, get done with it! For the saving of us both that is the one +outlook. And sure enough, I did stand by that dismal task with all my time +and all my means; day and night wrestling with it, as with the ugliest +dragon, which blotted out the daylight and the rest of the world to me +till I should get it slain."] + +But these notices recall the fact familiar to every writer, that while +the assailants of a book sometimes read it, favourable reviewers hardly +ever do; these latter save their time by payment of generally superficial +praise, and a few random quotations. + +Carlyle scarcely enjoyed his brief respite on being discharged of the +first instalment of his book: the remainder lay upon him like a menacing +nightmare; he never ceased to feel that the work must be completed ere he +could be free, and that to accomplish this he must be alone. Never absent +from his wife without regrets, lamentations, contrite messages, and +childlike entreaties for her to "come and protect him," when she came +it was to find that they were better apart; for his temper was never +softened by success. "Living beside him," she writes in 1858, is "the +life of a weathercock in high wind." During a brief residence together +in a hired house near Aberdour in Fifeshire, she compares herself to a +keeper in a madhouse; and writes later from Sunny bank to her husband, +"If you could fancy me in some part of the house out of sight, my absence +would make little difference to you, considering how little I do see of +you, and how preoccupied you are when I do see you." Carlyle answers in +his touching strain, "We have had a sore life pilgrimage together, much +bad road. Oh, forgive me!" and sends her beautiful descriptions; but her +disposition, not wholly forgiving, received them somewhat sceptically. +"Byron," said Lady Byron, "can write anything, but he does not feel it"; +and Mrs. Carlyle on one occasion told her "harsh spouse" that his fine +passages were very well written for the sake of future biographers: +a charge he almost indignantly repudiates. He was then, August 1860, +staying at Thurso Castle, the guest of Sir George Sinclair; a visit that +terminated in an unfortunate careless mistake about a sudden change of +plans, resulting in his wife, then with the Stanleys at Alderley, +being driven back to Chelsea and deprived of her promised pleasure and +requisite rest with her friends in the north. + +The frequency of such incidents,--each apart capable of being palliated +by the same fallacy of division that has attempted in vain to justify the +domestic career of Henry VIII.,--points to the conclusion of Miss Gully +that Carlyle, though often nervous on the subject, acted to his wife as +if he were "totally inconsiderate of her health," so much so that she +received medical advice not to be much at home when he was in the stress +of writing. In January 1858 he writes to his brother John an anxious +letter in reference to a pain about a hand-breadth below the heart, of +which she had begun to complain, the premonitory symptom of the disease +which ultimately proved fatal; but he was not sufficiently impressed +to give due heed to the warning; nor was it possible, with his +long-engrained habits, to remove the Marah spring that lay under all the +wearisome bickerings, repentances, and renewals of offence. The "very +little herring" who declined to be made a part of Lady Ashburton's +luggage now suffered more than ever from her inanimate rival. The +highly-endowed wife of one of the most eminent philanthropists of +America, whose life was devoted to the awakening of defective intellects, +thirty-five years ago murmured, "If I were only an idiot!" Similarly Mrs. +Carlyle might have remonstrated, "Why was I not born a book!" Her letters +and journal teem to tiresomeness with the refrain, "I feel myself +extremely neglected for unborn generations." Her once considerable +ambitions had been submerged, and her own vivid personality overshadowed +by a man she was afraid to meet at breakfast, and glad to avoid at +dinner. A woman of immense talent and a spark of genius linked to a man +of vast genius and imperious will, she had no choice but to adopt his +judgments, intensify his dislikes, and give a sharper edge to his sneers. + +Mr. Froude, who for many years lived too near the sun to see the sun, +and inconsistently defends many of the inconsistencies he has himself +inherited from his master, yet admits that Carlyle treated the Broad +Church party in the English Church with some injustice. His recorded +estimates of the leading theologians of the age, and personal relation to +them, are hopelessly bewildering. His lifelong friendship for Erskine of +Linlathen is intelligible, though he did not extend the same charity to +what he regarded as the muddle-headedness of Maurice (Erskine's spiritual +son), and keenly ridiculed the reconciliation pamphlet entitled +"Subscription no Bondage." The Essayists and Reviewers, "Septem contra +Christum," "should," he said, "be shot for deserting their posts"; even +Dean Stanley, their _amicus curioe,_ whom he liked, came in for a share +of his sarcasm; "there he goes," he said to Froude, "boring holes in the +bottom of the Church of England." Of Colenso, who was doing as much as +any one for the "Exodus from Houndsditch," he spoke with open contempt, +saying, "he mistakes for fame an extended pillory that he is standing +on"; and was echoed by his wife, "Colenso isn't worth talking about for +five minutes, except for the absurdity of a man making arithmetical +onslaughts on the Pentateuch with a bishop's little black silk apron on." +This is not the place to discuss the controversy involved; but we +are bound to note the fact that Carlyle was, by an inverted Scotch +intolerance, led to revile men rowing in the same boat as himself, but +with a different stroke. To another broad Churchman, Charles Kingsley, +partly from sympathy with this writer's imaginative power, he was more +considerate; and one of the still deeply religious freethinkers of the +time was among his closest friends. The death of Arthur Clough in 1861 +left another blank in Carlyle's life: we have had in this century to +lament the comparatively early loss of few men of finer genius. Clough +had not, perhaps, the practical force of Sterling, but his work is of a +higher order than any of the fragments of the earlier favourite. Among +High Churchmen Carlyle commended Dr. Pusey as "solid and judicious," and +fraternised with the Bishop of Oxford; but he called Keble "an ape," +and said of Cardinal Newman that he had "no more brains than an +ordinary-sized rabbit." + +These years are otherwise marked by his most glaring political blunder. +The Civil War, then raging in America, brought, with its close, the +abolition of Slavery throughout the States, a consummation for which he +cared little, for he had never professed to regard the negroes as fit for +freedom; but this result, though inevitable, was incidental. As is known +to every one who has the remotest knowledge of Transatlantic history, +the war was in great measure a struggle for the preservation of National +Unity: but it was essentially more; it was the vindication of Law and +Order against the lawless and disorderly violence of those who, when +defeated at the polling-booth, flew to the bowie knife; an assertion of +Right as Might for which Carlyle cared everything: yet all he had to +say of it was his "Ilias Americana in nuce," published in _Macmillan's +Magazine_, August 1863. + + _Peter of the North_ (to Paul of the South): "Paul, you + unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for + life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going + straight to Hell, you----" + + _Paul_: "Good words, Peter. The risk is my own. I am + willing to take the risk. Hire you your servants by the + month or the day, and get straight to Heaven; leave me to my + own method." + + _Peter_: "No, I won't. I will beat your brains out + first!" [And is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet + manage it.] + +This, except the _Prinzenraub_, a dramatic presentation of a dramatic +incident in old German history, was his only side publication during the +writing of _Friedrich_. + +After the war ended and Emerson's letters of remonstrance had proved +prophetic, Carlyle is said to have confessed to Mr. Moncure Conway as +well as to Mr. Froude that he "had not seen to the bottom of the matter." +But his republication of this nadir of his nonsense was an offence, +emphasising the fact that, however inspiring, he is not always a safe +guide, even to those content to abide by his own criterion of success. + +There remains of this period the record of a triumph and of a tragedy. +After seven years more of rarely intermitted toil, broken only by a few +visits, trips to the sea-shore, etc., and the distress of the terrible +accident to his wife,--her fall on a curbstone and dislocation of a +limb,--which has been often sufficiently detailed, he had finished his +last great work. The third volume of _Friedrich_ was published in May +1862, the fourth appeared in February 1864, the fifth and sixth in March +1865. Carlyle had at last slain his Minotaur, and stood before the +world as a victorious Theseus, everywhere courted and acclaimed, his +hard-earned rest only disturbed by a shower of honours. His position +as the foremost prose writer of his day was as firmly established in +Germany, where his book was at once translated and read by all readers of +history, as in England. Scotland, now fully awake to her reflected fame, +made haste to make amends. Even the leaders of the sects, bond and +"free," who had denounced him, were now eager to proclaim that he had +been intrinsically all along, though sometimes in disguise, a champion of +their faith. No men knew better how to patronise, or even seem to lead, +what they had failed to quell. The Universities made haste with their +burnt-offerings. In 1856 a body of Edinburgh students had prematurely +repeated the attempt of their forerunners in Glasgow to confer on him +their Lord Rectorship, and failed. In 1865 he was elected, in opposition +again to Mr. Disraeli, to succeed Mr. Gladstone, the genius of elections +being in a jesting mood. He was prevailed on to accept the honour, and, +later, consented to deliver in the spring of 1866 the customary Inaugural +Address. Mrs. Carlyle's anxiety on this occasion as to his success and +his health is a tribute to her constant and intense fidelity. He went +north to his Installation, under the kind care of encouraging friends, +imprimis of Professor Tyndall, one of his truest; they stopped on the road +at Fryston, with Lord Houghton, and there met Professor Huxley, who +accompanied them to Edinburgh. Carlyle, having resolved to speak and not +merely to read what he had to say, was oppressed with nervousness; and of +the event itself he writes: "My speech was delivered in a mood of defiant +despair, and under the pressure of nightmare. Some feeling that I was not +speaking lies alone sustained me. The applause, etc., I took for empty +noise, which it really was not altogether." The address, nominally on the +"Reading of Books," really a rapid autobiography of his own intellectual +career, with references to history, literature, religion, and the conduct +of life, was, as Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs. Carlyle,--save for some +difficulty the speaker had in making himself audible--"a perfect triumph." +His reception by one of the most enthusiastic audiences ever similarly +assembled marked the climax of a steadily-increasing fame. It may be +compared to the late welcome given to Wordsworth in the Oxford Theatre. +After four days spent with Erskine and his own brother James in Edinburgh, +he went for a week's quiet to Scotsbrig, and was kept there, lingering +longer than he had intended, by a sprained ankle, "blessed in the country +stillness, the purity of sky and earth, and the absence of all babble." On +April 20th he wrote his last letter to his wife, a letter which she never +read. On the evening of Saturday the 21st, when staying on the way south +at his sister's house at Dumfries, he received a telegram informing him +that the close companionship of forty years--companionship of struggle and +victory, of sad and sweet so strangely blent--was for ever at an end. Mrs. +Carlyle had been found dead in her carriage when driving round Hyde Park +on the afternoon of that day, her death (from heart-disease) being +accelerated by an accident to a favourite little dog. Carlyle felt as "one +who hath been stunned," hardly able to realise his loss. "They took me out +next day ... to wander in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and +anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation, 'My poor little +woman,' but no full gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come." On +the following Monday he set off with his brother for London. "Never for a +thousand years shall I forget that arrival hero of ours, my first +unwelcomed by her. She lay in her coffin, lovely in death. Pale death Hid +things not mine or ours had possession of our poor darling." On Wednesday +they returned, and on Thursday the 26th she was buried in the nave of the +old Abbey Kirk at Haddington, in the grave of her father The now desolate +old man, who had walked with her over many a stony road, paid the first of +his many regretful tributes in the epitaph inscribed over her tomb: in +which follows, after the name and date of birth:-- + +IN HER BRIGHT EXISTENCE SHE HAD MORE SORROWS THAN ARE COMMON, BUT ALSO +A SOFT INVINCIBILITY, A CAPACITY OF DISCERNMENT, AND A NOBLE LOYALTY OF +HEART WHICH ARE RARE. FOR 40 YEARS SHE WAS THE TRUE AND LOVING HELP-MATE +OF HER HUSBAND, AND BY ACT AND WORD UNWEARIEDLY FORWARDED HIM AS NONE +ELSE COULD IN ALL OF WORTHY THAT HE DID OR ATTEMPTED. SHE DIED AT +LONDON, 21ST APRIL 1866, SUDDENLY SNATCHED FROM HIM, AND THE LIGHT OF HIS +LIFE AS IF GONE OUT. + +[Footnote: For the most interesting, loyally sympathetic, and +characteristic account of Carlyle's journey north on this occasion, and of +the incidents which followed, we may refer to _New fragments_, by John +Tyndall, just published.] + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +DECADENCE + +[1866-1881] + +After this shock of bereavement Carlyle's days went by "on broken wing," +never brightening, slowly saddening to the close; but lit up at intervals +by flashes of the indomitable energy that, starting from no vantage, +had conquered a world of thought, and established in it, if not a new +dynasty, at least an intellectual throne. Expressions of sympathy came +to him from all directions, from the Queen herself downwards, and he +received them with the grateful acknowledgment that he had, after all, +been loved by his contemporaries. When the question arose as to his +future life, it seemed a natural arrangement that he and his brother +John, then a childless widower who had retired from his profession with a +competence, should take up house together. The experiment was made, but, +to the discredit of neither, it proved a failure. They were in some +respects too much alike. John would not surrender himself wholly to the +will or whims even of one whom he revered, and the attempt was by mutual +consent abandoned; but their affectionate correspondence lasted through +the period of their joint lives. Carlyle, being left to himself in his +"gaunt and lonesome home," after a short visit to Miss Bromley, an +intimate friend of his wife, at her residence in Kent, accepted the +invitation of the second Lady Ashburton to spend the winter in her house +at Mentone. There he arrived on Christmas Eve 1866, under the kind convoy +of Professor Tyndall, and remained breathing the balmy air and gazing on +the violet sea till March of the following year. During the interval he +occupied himself in writing his _Reminiscences,_ drawing pen-and-ink +pictures of the country, steeped in beauty fit to soothe any sorrow save +such as his, and taking notes of some of the passers-by. Of the greatest +celebrity then encountered, Mr. Gladstone, he writes in his journal, in a +tone intensified as time went on: "Talk copious, ingenious,... a man +of ardent faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons +shape.... Man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed +by the Prince, or many Princes, of the Air." Back in Chelsea, he was +harassed by heaps of letters, most of which, we are told, he answered, +and spent a large portion of his time and means in charities. + +Amid Carlyle's irreconcilable inconsistencies of theory, and sometimes +of conduct, he was through life consistent in practical benevolence. The +interest in the welfare of the working classes that in part inspired his +_Sartor, Chartism,_ and _Past and Present_ never failed him. He was +among the foremost in all national movements to relieve and solace their +estate. He was, further, with an amiable disregard of his own maxims, +over lenient towards the waifs and strays of humanity, in some instances +careless to inquire too closely into the causes of their misfortune or +the degree of their demerits. In his latter days this disposition grew +upon him: the gray of his own evening skies made him fuller of compassion +to all who lived in the shade. Sad himself, he mourned with those who +mourned; afflicted, he held out hands to all in affliction. Consequently +"the poor were always with him," writing, entreating, and personally +soliciting all sorts of alms, from advice and help to ready money. His +biographer informs us that he rarely gave an absolute refusal to any +of these various classes of beggars. He answered a letter which is a +manifest parody of his own surface misanthropy; he gave a guinea to a +ticket-of-leave-convict, pretending to be a decayed tradesman; and a +shilling to a blind man, whose dog took him over the crossing to a gin +shop. Froude remonstrated; "Poor fellow," was the answer, "I daresay he +is cold and thirsty." The memory of Wordsworth is less warmly cherished +among the dales of Westmoreland than that of Carlyle in the lanes of +Chelsea, where "his one expensive luxury was charity." + +His attitude on political questions, in which for ten years he still took +a more or less prominent part, represents him on his sterner side. The +first of these was the controversy about Governor Eyre, who, having +suppressed the Jamaica rebellion by the violent and, as alleged, cruel +use of martial law, and hung a quadroon preacher called Gordon--the man +whether honest or not being an undoubted incendiary--without any law at +all, was by the force of popular indignation dismissed in disgrace, and +then arraigned for mis-government and illegality. In the movement, which +resulted in the governor's recall and impeachment, there was doubtless +the usual amount of exaggeration--represented by the violent language +of one of Carlyle's minor biographers: "There were more innocent people +slain than at Jeffreys' Bloody Assize"; "The massacre of Glencoe was +nothing to it"; "Members of Christian Churches were flogged," etc. +etc.--but among its leaders there were so many men of mark and celebrity, +men like John S. Mill, T. Hughes, John Bright, Fawcett, Cairnes, Goldwin +Smith, Herbert Spencer, and Frederick Harrison, that it could not be set +aside as a mere unreasoning clamour. It was a hard test of Carlyle's +theory of strong government; and he stood to his colours. Years before, +on John Sterling suggesting that the negroes themselves should be +consulted as to making a permanent engagement with their masters, he had +said, "I never thought the rights of the negroes worth much discussing +in any form. Quashee will get himself made a slave again, and with +beneficent whip will be compelled to work." On this occasion he regarded +the black rebellion in the same light as the Sepoy revolt. He organised +and took the chair of a "Defence Committee," joined or backed by Ruskin, +Henry Kingsley, Tyndall, Sir R. Murchison, Sir T. Gladstone, and others. +"I never," says Mr. Froude, "knew Carlyle more anxious about anything." +He drew up a petition to Government and exerted himself heart and soul +for the "brave, gentle, chivalrous, and clear man," who when the ship was +on fire "had been called to account for having flung a bucket or two of +water into the hold beyond what was necessary." He had damaged some of +the cargo perhaps, but he had saved the ship, and deserved to be made +"dictator of Jamaica for the next twenty-five years," to govern after +the model of Dr. Francia in Paraguay. The committee failed to get +Eyre reinstalled or his pension restored; but the impeachment was +unsuccessful. + +The next great event was the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, by the +Tories, educated by Mr. Disraeli to this method of "dishing the Whigs," +by outbidding them in the scramble for votes. This instigated the famous +tract called _Shooting Niagara_, written in the spirit of the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_--Carlyle's final and unqualified denunciation of this +concession to Democracy and all its works. But the upper classes in +England seemed indifferent to the warning. "Niagara, or what you like," +the author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, "we will +at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when Church and State have +gone." A _mot_ emphatically of the decadence. + +Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions being a means of +bringing the Irish question within the range of practical politics. + + I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of + those Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house + had decided to expel and extirpate the human inhabitants, + which latter seemed to have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor + arsenic, and are trying to prevail by the method of love. + +Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland for text and Cromwell's +storm of Drogheda for example, or Otto von Bismarck, would have been, in +his view, in place at Dublin Castle. + +In the next great event of the century, the close of the greatest +European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which pleased Cato pleased +also the gods. Carlyle, especially in his later days, had a deepening +confidence in the Teutonic, a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He +regarded the contest between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, and +wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with exultation. When +a feeling spread in this country, naming itself sympathy for the +fallen,--really half that, the other half, as in the American war, being +jealousy of the victor,--and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a +decisive letter to the _Times_, November 11th 1870, tracing the sources +of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV., and ridiculing the +prevailing sentiment about the recaptured provinces of Lothringen and +Elsass. With a possible reference to Victor Hugo and his clients, he +remarks-- + + They believe that they are the "Christ of Nations."... I + wish they would inquire whether there might not be a + Cartouche of nations. Cartouche had many gallant + qualities--had many fine ladies begging locks of his hair + while the indispensable gibbet was preparing. Better he + should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, who has + him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part + of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and + try to become again a Chevalier Bayard. All Europe does + _not_ come to the rescue in gratitude for the heavenly + illumination it is getting from France: nor could all Europe + if it did prevent that awful Chancellor from having his own + way. Metz and the boundary fence, I reckon, will be + dreadfully hard to get out of that Chancellor's hands + again.... Considerable misconception as to Herr von Bismarck + is still prevalent in England. He, as I read him, is not a + person of Napoleonic ideas, but of ideas quite superior to + Napoleonic.... That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid + Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become + Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, + gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive + France, seems to me the hopefulest fact that has occurred in + my time. + +Carlyle seldom wrote with more force, or with more justice. Only, to be +complete, his paper should have ended with a warning. He has done more +than any other writer to perpetuate in England the memories of the great +thinkers and actors--Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Koerner, Stein, Goethe,--who +taught their countrymen how to endure defeat and retrieve adversity. Who +will celebrate their yet undefined successors, who will train Germany +gracefully to bear the burden of prosperity? Two years later Carlyle +wrote or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to shake, his +historical sketch of the _Early Kings of Norway_, showing no diminution +of power either of thought or expression, his estimates of the three +Hakons and of the three Olafs being especially notable; and a paper +on _The Portraits of John Knox_, the prevailing dull gray of which is +relieved by a radiant vision of Mary Stuart. + +He was incited to another public protest, when, in May 1877, towards the +close of the Russo-Turkish war, he had got, or imagined himself to have +got, reliable information that Lord Beaconsfield, then Prime Minister, +having sent our fleet to the Dardanelles, was planning to seize Gallipoli +and throw England into the struggle. Carlyle never seems to have +contemplated the possibility of a Sclavo-Gallic alliance against the +forces of civilised order in Europe, and he chose to think of the Czars +as the representatives of an enlightened autocracy. We are here mainly +interested in the letter he wrote to the _Times_, as "his last public act +in this world,"--the phrase of Mr. Froude, who does not give the letter, +and unaccountably says it "was brief, not more than three or four lines." +It is as follows:-- + + Sir--A rumour everywhere prevails that our miraculous + Premier, in spite of the Queen's Proclamation of Neutrality, + intends, under cover of care for "British interests," to + send the English fleet to the Baltic, or do some other feat + which shall compel Russia to declare war against England. + Latterly the rumour has shifted from the Baltic and become + still more sinister, on the eastern side of the scene, where + a feat is contemplated that will force, not Russia only, + but all Europe, to declare war against us. This latter I + have come to know as an indisputable fact; in our present + affairs and outlooks surely a grave one. + + As to "British interests" there is none visible or + conceivable to me, except taking strict charge of our route + to India by Suez and Egypt, and for the rest, resolutely + steering altogether clear of any copartnery with the Turk in + regard to this or any other "British interest" whatever. It + should be felt by England as a real ignominy to be connected + with such a Turk at all. Nay, if we still had, as we ought + to have, a wish to save him from perdition and annihilation + in God's world, the one future for him that has any hope in + it is even now that of being conquered by the Russians, and + gradually schooled and drilled into peaceable attempt at + learning to be himself governed. The newspaper outcry + against Russia is no more respectable to me than the howling + of Bedlam, proceeding as it does from the deepest ignorance, + egoism, and paltry national jealousy. + + These things I write, not on hearsay, but on accurate + knowledge, and to all friends of their country will + recommend immediate attention to them while there is yet + time, lest in a few weeks the maddest and most criminal + thing that a British government could do, should be done + and all Europe kindle into flames of war.--I am, etc. + + T. CARLYLE. + 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, + _May 4th._ + +Meanwhile honours without stint were being rendered to the great author +and venerable sage. In 1868 he had by request a personal interview with +the Queen, and has left, in a letter, a graphic account of the interview +at the Deanery of Westminster. Great artists as Millais, Watts, and +Boehm vied with one another, in painting or sculpture, to preserve his +lineaments; prominent reviews to record their impression of his work, +and disciples to show their gratitude. One of these, Professor Masson +of Edinburgh, in memory of Carlyle's own tribute to Goethe, started a +subscription for a medal, presented on his eightieth birthday; but he +valued more a communication of the same date from Prince Bismarck. Count +Bernstoff from Berlin wrote him (1871) a semi-official letter of thanks +for the services he had conferred on Germany, and in 1874 he was +prevailed on to accept the Prussian "Ordre pour le merite." In the same +year Mr. Disraeli proposed, in courteous oblivion of bygone hostilities, +to confer on him a pension and the "Order of the Grand Cross of Bath," an +emolument and distinction which Carlyle, with equal courtesy, declined. +To the Countess of Derby, whom he believed to be the originator of the +scheme, he (December 30th) expressed his sense of the generosity of the +Premier's letter: "It reveals to me, after all the hard things I have +said of him, a now and unexpected stratum of genial dignity and manliness +of character." To his brother John he wrote: "I do, however, truly admire +the magnanimity of Dizzy in regard to me. He is the only man I almost +never spoke of without contempt ... and yet see here he comes with a +pan of hot coals for my guilty head." That he was by no means gagged by +personal feeling or seduced in matters of policy is evident from the +above-quoted letter to the _Times_; but he liked Disraeli better than +he did his great rival; the one may have bewildered his followers, the +other, according to his critic's view, deceived himself--the lie, in +Platonic phrase, had got into the soul, till, to borrow an epigram, "he +made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice." "Carlyle," says +Mr. Froude, "did not regard Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who, +knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into +specious sentiments, but as the representative of the numerous cants of +the age ... differing from others in that the cant seemed true to him. +He in fact believed him to be one of those fatal figures created by +England's evil genius to work irreparable mischief." It must be admitted +that Carlyle's censures are so broadcast as to lose half their sting. +In uncontroversial writing, it is enough to note that his methods of +reforming the world and Mr. Gladstone's were as far as the poles asunder; +and the admirers of the latter may console themselves with the reflection +that the censor was, at the same time, talking with equal disdain of the +scientific discoverers of the age--conspicuously of Mr. Darwin, whom he +describes as "evolving man's soul from frog spawn," adding, "I have +no patience with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other +criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose _Adam Bede_ he pronounced +"simply dull," display a curious limitation or obtuseness of mind. + +One of the pleasantest features of his declining years is the ardour of +his attachment to the few staunch friends who helped to cheer and console +them. He had a sincere regard for Fitzjames Stephen, "an honest man with +heavy strokes"; for Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he said in effect, "Your +duty one day will be to take away that bauble and close the doors of +the House of Discord"; for Tyndall always; for Lecky, despite their +differences; for Moncure Conway, athwart the question of "nigger" +philanthropies; for Kingsley and Tennyson and Browning, the last of whom +was a frequent visitor till near the end. Froude he had bound to his soul +by hoops of steel; and a more faithful disciple and apostle, in intention +always, in practice in the main (despite the most perplexing errors of +judgment), no professed prophet ever had. But Carlyle's highest praise +is reserved for Ruskin, whom he regarded as no mere art critic, but as a +moral power worthy to receive and carry onward his own "cross of fire." +The relationship between the two great writers is unchequered by any +shade of patronage on the one hand, of jealousy or adulation on the +other. The elder recognised in the younger an intellect as keen, a spirit +as fearless as his own, who in the Eyre controversy had "plunged his +rapier to the hilt in the entrails of the Blatant Beast," _i.e._ Popular +Opinion. He admired all Ruskin's books; the _Stones of Venice,_ the most +solid structure of the group, he named "Sermons in Stones"; he resented +an attack on _Sesame and Lilies_ as if the book had been his own; and +passages of the _Queen of the Air_ went into his heart "like arrows." The +_Order of the Rose_ has attempted a practical embodiment of the review +contemplated by Carlyle, as a counteractive to the money making practice +and expediency-worships of the day. + +Meanwhile he had been putting his financial affairs in order. In 1867, +on return from Mentone, he had recorded his bequest of the revenues of +Graigenputtock for the endowment of three John Welsh bursaries in the +University of Edinburgh. In 1873 he made his will, leaving John Forster +and Froude his literary executors: a legacy of trust which, on the death +of the former, fell to the latter, to whose discretion, by various later +bequests, less and less limited, there was confided the choice--at +last almost made a duty--of editing and publishing the manuscripts and +journals of himself and his wife. + +Early in his seventy-third year (December 1867) Carlyle quotes, "Youth is +a garland of roses," adding, "I did not find it such. 'Age is a crown of +thorns.' Neither is this altogether true for me. If sadness and sorrow +tend to loosen us from life, they make the place of rest more desirable." +The talk of Socrates in the _Republic_, and the fine phrases in Cicero's +_De Senectute_, hardly touch on the great grief, apart from physical +infirmities, of old age--its increasing solitariness. After sixty, a man +may make disciples and converts, but few new friends, while the old ones +die daily; the "familiar faces" vanish in the night to which there is no +morning, and leave nothing in their stead. + +During these years Carlyle's former intimates were falling round him like +the leaves from an autumn tree, and the kind care of the few survivors, +the solicitous attention of his niece, nurse, and amanuensis, Mary +Aitken, yet left him desolate. Clough had died, and Thomas Erskine, and +John Forster, and Wilberforce, with whom he thought he agreed, and Mill, +his old champion and ally, with whom he so disagreed that he +almost maligned his memory--calling one of the most interesting of +autobiographies "the life of a logic-chopping machine." In March 1876 he +attended the funeral of Lady Augusta Stanley; in the following month his +brother Aleck died in Canada; and in 1878 his brother John at Dumfries. +He seemed destined to be left alone; his physical powers were waning. As +early as 1868 he and his last horse had their last ride together; later, +his right hand failed, and he had to write by dictation. In the gathering +gloom he began to look on death as a release from the shreds of life, and +to envy the old Roman mode of shuffling off the coil. His thoughts turned +more and more to Hamlet's question of the possible dreams hereafter, and +his longing for his lost Jeannie made him beat at the iron gates of the +"Undiscovered Country" with a yearning cry; but he could get no answer +from reason, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, least +of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven "by way of mesmeric and +spiritualistic trances." His question and answer are always-- + + Strength quite a stranger to me.... Life is verily a + weariness on those terms. Oftenest I feel willing to go, were + my time come. Sweet to rejoin, were it only in eternal sleep, + those that are away. That ... is now and then the whisper + of my worn-out heart, and a kind of solace to me. "But why + annihilation or eternal sleep?" I ask too. They and I are + alike in the will of the Highest. + +"When," says Mr. Froude, "he spoke of the future and its uncertainties, +he fell back invariably on the last words of his favourite hymn-- + + Wir heissen euch hoffen." + +His favourite quotations in those days were Macbeth's "To-morrow and +to-morrow and to-morrow"; Burns's line, "Had we never lo'ed sae +kindly,"--thinking of the tomb which he was wont to kiss in the gloamin' +in Haddington Church,--the lines from "The Tempest" ending, "our little +life is rounded with a sleep," and the dirge in "Cymbeline." He lived on +during the last years, save for his quiet walks with his biographer about +the banks of the Thames, like a ghost among ghosts, his physical life +slowly ebbing till, on February 4th 1881, it ebbed away. His remains +were, by his own desire, conveyed to Ecclefechan and laid under the +snow-clad soil of the rural churchyard, beside the dust of his kin. He +had objected to be buried, should the request be made (as it was by Dean +Stanley), in Westminster Abbey:[greek: andron gar epiphanon pasa gae +taphos.] + +Of no man whose life has been so laid bare to us is it more difficult to +estimate the character than that of Thomas Carlyle; regarding no one of +equal eminence, with the possible exception of Byron, has opinion been +so divided. After his death there was a carnival of applause from his +countrymen in all parts of the globe, from Canton to San Francisco. Their +hot zeal, only equalled by that of their revelries over the memory of +Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer +than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one +perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist": +"Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, +will be heard no more": the _Scotsman_ newspaper writes of him as +"probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the volcanic +glare of his _French Revolution_ all Epics, ancient and modern, grow pale +and shadowy,... his like is not now left in the world." More recently a +stalwart Aberdonian, on helping to put a bust into a monument, exclaims +in a strain of genuine ardour, "I knew Carlyle, and I aver to you that +his heart was as large and generous as his brain was powerful; that +he was essentially a most lovable man, and that there were depths of +tenderness, kindliness, benevolence, and most delicate courtesy in him, +with all his seeming ruggedness and sternness, such as I have found +throughout my life rarely in any human being." + +On the other side, a little later, after the publication of the +_Reminiscences_, _Blackwood_ denounced the "old man eloquent" as "a +blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were the only person who knew good +from bad. ... Every one and every thing dealt with in his _History_ is +treated in the tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The _World_ +remarks that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthumous +depreciation for a factitious fame; "but the game of venomous +recrimination was begun by himself.... There is little that is +extraordinary, still less that is heroic in his character. He had no +magnanimity about him ... he was full of littleness and weakness, of +shallow dogmatism and of blustering conceit." The _Quarterly_, +after alluding to Carlyle's style "as the eccentric expression of +eccentricity," denounces his choice of "heroes" as reckless of morality. +According to the same authority, he "was not a deep thinker, but he was a +great word-painter ... he has the inspiration as well as the contortions +of the Sibyl, the strength as well as the nodosities of the oak. ... In +the _French Revolution_ he rarely condescends to plain narrative ... it +resembles a drama at the Porte St. Martin, in so many acts and tableaux. +... The raisers of busts and statues in his honour are winging and +pointing new arrows aimed at the reputation of their most distinguished +contemporaries, and doing their best to perpetuate a baneful influence." +_Fraser_, no longer edited by Mr. Froude, swells the chorus of dissent: +"Money, for which he cared little, only came in quantity after the death +of his wife, when everything became indifferent to an old and life-weary +man. Who would be great at such a price? Who would buy so much misery +with so much labour? Most men like their work. In his Carlyle seems to +have found the curse imposed upon Adam.... He cultivated contempt of the +kindly race of men." + +Ample texts for these and similar censures are to be found in the pages +of Mr. Froude, and he has been accused by Carlyle's devotees of having +supplied this material of malice prepense. No accusation was over more +ridiculously unjust. To the mind of every impartial reader, Froude +appears as one of the loyallest if one of the most infatuated of friends. +Living towards the close in almost daily communion with his master, and +in inevitable contact with his numerous frailties, he seems to have +revered him with a love that passeth understanding, and attributed to him +in good faith, as Dryden did in jest to the objects of his mock heroics, +every mental as well as every moral power, _e.g.,_ "Had Carlyle turned +his mind to it he would have been a great philologer." "A great +diplomatist was lost in Carlyle." "He would have done better as a man of +action than a man of words." By kicking the other diplomatists into the +sea, as he threatened to do with the urchins of Kirkcaldy! Froude's +panegyrics are in style and tone worthy of that put into the mouth of +Pericles by Thucydides, with which the modern biographer closes his +only too faithful record. But his claims for his hero--amounting to the +assertions that he was never seriously wrong; that he was as good as he +was great; that "in the weightier matters of the law his life had been +without speck or flaw"; that "such faults as he had were but as the +vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the +man"; that he never, in their intercourse, uttered a "trivial word, nor +one which he had better have left unuttered"--these claims will never be +honoured, for they are refuted in every third page after that on which +they appear:--_e.g._ in the Biography, vol. iv. p. 258, we are told that +Carlyle's "knowledge was not in points or lines but complete and solid": +facing the remark we read, "He liked _ill_ men like Humboldt, Laplace, +or the author of the _Vestiges_. He refused Darwin's transmutation of +species as unproved: he fought against it, though I could see he dreaded +that it might turn out true." The statement that "he always spoke +respectfully of Macaulay" is soon followed by criticisms that make us +exclaim, "Save us from such respect." The extraordinary assertion that +Carlyle was "always just in speaking of living men" is safeguarded by the +quotation of large utterances of injustice and contempt for Coleridge, +Byron, Shelley, Keats, Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and +disparaging patronage of Scott, of Jeffrey, of Mazzini, and of Mill. The +dog-like fidelity of Boswell and Eckermann was fitting to their attitude +and capacity; but the spectacle of one great writer surrendering himself +to another is a new testimony to the glamour of conversational genius. + +[Footnote: This patronage of men, some quite, others nearly on his own +level, whom he delights in calling "small," "thin," and "poor," as if he +were the only big, fat, and rich, is more offensive than spurts of merely +dyspeptic abuse. As regards the libels on Lamb, Dr. Ireland has +endeavoured to establish that they were written in ignorance of the noble +tragedy of "Elia's" life; but this contention cannot be made good as +regards the later attacks.] + +Carlyle was a great man, but a great man spoiled, that is, largely +soured. He was never a Timon; but, while at best a Stoic, he was at worst +a Cynic, emulous though disdainful, trying all men by his own standard, +and intolerant of a rival on the throne. To this result there contributed +the bleak though bracing environment of his early years, amid kindred +more noted for strength than for amenity, whom he loved, trusted, and +revered, but from whose grim creed, formally at least, he had to +tear himself with violent wrenches apart; his purgatory among the +border-ruffians of Annan school; his teaching drudgeries; his hermit +college days; ten years' struggle for a meagre competence; a lifelong +groaning under the Nessus shirt of the irritable yet stubborn +constitution to which genius is often heir; and above all his unusually +late recognition. There is a good deal of natural bitterness in reference +to the long refusal by the publishers of his first original work--an +idyll like Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_, and our finest prose poem in +philosophy. "Popularity," says Emerson, "is for dolls"; but it remains +to find the preacher, prophet, or poet wholly impervious to unjust +criticism. Neglect which crushes dwarfs only exasperates giants, but to +the latter also there is great harm done. Opposition affected Carlyle as +it affected Milton, it made him defiant, at times even fierce, to those +beyond his own inner circle. When he triumphed, he accepted his success +without a boast, but not without reproaches for the past. He was crowned; +but his coronation came too late, and the death of his wife paralysed his +later years. + +Let those who from the Clyde to the Isis, from the Dee to the Straits, +make it their pastime to sneer at living worth, compare Ben Jonson's +lines, + + Your praise and dispraise are to me alike, + One does not stroke me, nor the other strike, + +with Samuel Johnson's, "It has been delayed till most of those whom I +wished to please are sunk into the grave, and success and failure are +empty sounds," and then take to heart the following:-- + + The "recent return of popularity greater than ever," which + I hear of, seems due alone to that late Edinburgh affair; + especially to the Edinburgh "Address," and affords new proof + of the singularly dark and feeble condition of "public + judgment" at this time. No idea, or shadow of an idea, is in + that Address but what had been set forth by me tens of times + before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism + receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to + buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done + with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me + L10,000 a year and bray unanimously their hosannahs + heaven-high for the rest of my life, who now would there be + to get the smallest joy or profit from it? To me I feel as + if it would be a silent sorrow rather, and would bring me + painful retrospections, nothing else. + +We require no open-sesame, no clumsy confidence from attaches flaunting +their intimacy, to assure us that there were "depths of tenderness" in +Carlyle. His susceptibility to the softer influences of nature, of family +life, of his few chosen friends, is apparent in almost every page of his +biography, above all in the _Reminiscences_, those supreme records of +regret, remorse, and the inspiration of bereavement. There is no surge of +sorrow in our literature like that which is perpetually tossed up in +the second chapter of the second volume, with the never-to-be-forgotten +refrain-- + + Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait + not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, + think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death + sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of + the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and + beautiful, when it is too late! + +Were we asked to bring together the three most pathetic sentences in our +tongue since Lear asked the question, "And have his daughters brought him +to this pass?" we should select Swift's comment on the lock of Stella, +"Only a woman's hair"; the cry of Tennyson's Rizpah, "The bones had moved +in my side"; and Carlyle's wail, "Oh that I had you yet but for five +minutes beside me, to tell you all!" But in answer we hear only the +flapping of the folds of Isis, "strepitumque Acherontis avari." + + All of sunshine that remained in my life went out in that + sudden moment. All of strength too often seems to have + gone.... Were it permitted, I would pray, but to whom? I can + well understand the invocation of saints. One's prayer now + has to be voiceless, done with the heart still, but also + with the hands still more.... Her birthday. She not here--I + cannot keep it for her now, and send a gift to poor old + Betty, who next to myself remembers her in life-long love + and sacred sorrow. This is all I can do.... Time was to + bring relief, said everybody; but Time has not to any + extent, nor, in truth, did I much wish him + + Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua, + Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae. + +Carlyle's pathos, far from being confined to his own calamity, was ready +to awake at every touch. "I was walking with him," writes Froude, "one +Sunday afternoon in Battersea Park. In the open circle among the trees +was a blind man and his daughter, she singing hymns, he accompanying her +on some instrument. We stood listening. She sang Faber's 'Pilgrims of the +Night.' The words were trivial, but the air, though simple, had something +weird and unearthly about it. 'Take me away,' he said, after a few +minutes, 'I shall cry if I stay longer.'" + +The melancholy, "often as of deep misery frozen torpid," that runs +through his writing, that makes him forecast death in life and paint the +springs of nature in winter hue, the "hoarse sea," the "bleared skies," +the sunsets "beautiful and brief and wae," compels our compassion in a +manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne, and De Quincey, +and other colour dramatists, because we feel it is as genuine as the +melancholy of Burns. Both had the relief of humour, but Burns only of the +two was capable of gaiety. "Look up there," said Leigh Hunt, pointing to +the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony that sings with infinite +voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man." "Eh, it's a sair +sicht," was the reply. + +We have referred to a few out of a hundred instances of Carlyle's +practical benevolence. To all deserving persons in misfortune he was a +good Samaritan, and like all benefactors the dupe of some undeserving. +Charity may be, like maternal affection, a form of self-indulgence, but +it is so only to kind-hearted men. In all that relates to money Carlyle's +career is exemplary. He had too much common sense to affect to despise +it, and was restive when he was underpaid; he knew that the labourer was +worthy of his hire. But, after hacking for Brewster he cannot be said to +have ever worked for wages, his concern was rather with the quality of +his work, and, regardless of results, he always did his best. A more +unworldly man never lived; from his first savings he paid ample tributes +to filial piety and fraternal kindness, and to the end of his life +retained the simple habits in which he had been trained. He hated waste +of all kinds, save in words, and carried his home frugalities even to +excess. In writing to James Aitken, engaged to his sister, "the Craw," he +says, "remember in marriage you have undertaken to do to others as you +would wish they should do to you." But this rede he did not reck. + +"Carlyle," writes Longfellow, "was one of those men who sacrificed their +happiness to their work"; the misfortune is that the sacrifice did not +stop with himself. He seemed made to live with no one but himself. +Alternately courteous and cross-grained, all his dramatic power went into +his creations; he could not put himself into the place of those near him. +Essentially perhaps the bravest man of his age, he would not move an inch +for threat or flattery; centered in rectitude, conscience never made +him a coward. He bore great calamities with the serenity of a Marcus +Aurelius: his reception of the loss of his first volume of the _French +Revolution_ was worthy of Sidney or of Newton: his letters, when the +successive deaths of almost all that were dearest left him desolate, are +among the noblest, the most resigned, the most pathetic in biography. +Yet, says Mr. Froude, in a judgment which every careful reader must +endorse: "Of all men I have ever seen Carlyle was the least patient of +the common woes of humanity." "A positive Christian," says Mrs. Carlyle, +"in bearing others' pain, he was a roaring Thor when himself pricked by +a pin," and his biographer corroborates this: "If matters went well with +himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any +one else; and, on the other hand, if he were uncomfortable he required +all the world to be uncomfortable along with him." He did his work with +more than the tenacity of a Prescott or a Fawcett, but no man ever made +more noise over it than this apostle of silence. "Sins of passion he +could forgive, but those of insincerity never." Carlyle has no tinge of +insincerity; his writing, his conversation, his life, are absolutely, +dangerously, transparent. His utter genuineness was in the long run one +of the sources of his success. He always, if we allow for a habit of +rhetorical exaggeration, felt what he made others feel. + +Sullen moods, and "words at random sent," those judging him from a +distance can easily condone; the errors of a hot head are pardonable to +one who, in his calmer hours, was ready to confess them. "Your temptation +and mine," he writes to his brother Alexander, "is a tendency to +imperiousness and indignant self-help; and, if no wise theoretical, +yet, practical forgetfulness and tyrannical contempt of other men." His +nicknaming mania was the inheritance of a family failing, always fostered +by the mocking-bird at his side. Humour, doubtless, ought to discount +many of his criticisms. Dean Stanley, in his funeral sermon, charitably +says, that in pronouncing the population of England to be "thirty +millions, mostly fools," Carlyle merely meant that "few are chosen and +strait is the gate," generously adding--"There was that in him, in spite +of his contemptuous descriptions of the people, which endeared him to +those who knew him best. The idols of their market-place he trampled +under foot, but their joys and sorrows, their cares and hopes, were to +him revered things." Another critic pleads for his discontent that it had +in it a noble side, like that of Faust, and that his harsh judgments of +eminent men were based on the belief that they had allowed meaner to +triumph over higher impulses, or influences of society to injure their +moral fibre. This plea, however, fails to cover the whole case. Carlyle's +ignorance in treating men who moved in spheres apart from his own, as the +leaders of science, definite theological enlightenment, or even poetry +and arts, was an intellectual rather than a moral flaw; but in the +implied assertion, "what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to +regret the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous powers, +which, beginning with his student days, possessed him to the last. The +fame of Newton, Leibnitz, Gibbon, whose works he came to regard as the +spoon-meat of his "rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his +or of any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot career, as a +"rose-water imbecility," or maligned Mill's intrepid thought as that of a +mere machine, he was astray on more delicate ground, and alienated some +of his truest friends. Among the many curses of our nineteenth-century +literature denounced by its leading Censor, the worst, the want of +loyalty among literary men, he fails to denounce because he largely +shares in it. "No sadder proof," he declares, "can be given by a man of +his own littleness than disbelief in great men," and no one has done more +to retrieve from misconception the memories of heroes of the past; +but rarely does either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a good word for any +considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, +more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from _Sartor,_ of which +he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his +self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his +enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger +Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson +would he grant the privilege to hold his own. _Per contra,_ he +overestimated those who were content to be his echoes. + +Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he used +and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who had preceded him in +his lines of historical investigation, as if they had been poachers on +his premises, _e.g._ Heath, the royalist writer of the Commonwealth +time, is "carrion Heath": Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is "my +reverend imbecile friend": his predecessors in _Friedrich,_ as Schlosser, +Preuss, Ranke, Foerster, Vehse, are "dark chaotic dullards whose books +are mere blotches of printed stupor, tumbled mountains of marine stores +"--criticism valueless even when it raises the laughter due to a +pantomime. Carlyle assailed three sets of people:-- + +1. Real humbugs, or those who had behaved, or whom he believed to have +behaved, badly to him. + +2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could not understand--as +Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and the leaders of Physics and +Metaphysics. + +3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him an unrestricted +homage or an implicit following, as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc. + +The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his strictures been +always just,--so winged with humorous epigram,--they would have blasted a +score of reputations: as it is they have only served to mar his own. He +was a typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the *_oistros_ +of their ambitious competition and restless push, wanting in repose, +never like + + a gentleman at wise + With moral breadth of tomperament, + +too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call this man as +good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast +between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is +possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others +of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when +he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a +rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if +not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard at +Ecclefechan. + +Truth, in the sense of saying what he thought, was one of his ruling +passions. To one of his brothers on the birth of a daughter, he writes, +"Train her to this, as the cornerstone of all morality, to stand by the +truth, to abhor a lie as she does hell-fire." The "gates of hell" is the +phrase of Achilles; but Carlyle has no real point of contact with the +Greek love of abstract truth. He objects that "Socrates is terribly at +ease in Zion": he liked no one to be at ease anywhere. He is angry with +Walter Scott because he hunted with his friends over the breezy heath +instead of mooning alone over twilight moors. Read Scott's _Memoirs_ in +the morning, the _Reminiscences_ at night, and dispute if you like about +the greater genius, but never about the healthier, better, and larger +man. + +Hebraism, says Matthew Arnold, is the spirit which obeys the mandate, +"walk by your light"; Hellenism the spirit which remembers the other, +"have a care your light be not darkness." The former prefers doing to +thinking, the latter is bent on finding the truth it loves. Carlyle is +a Hebraist unrelieved and unretrieved by the Hellene. A man of +inconsistencies, egotisms, Alpine grandeurs and crevasses, let us take +from him what the gods or protoplasms have allowed. His way of life, +duly admired for its stern temperance, its rigidity of noble aim--eighty +years spent in contempt of favour, plaudit, or reward,--left him austere +to frailty other than his own, and wrapt him in the repellent isolation +which is the wrong side of uncompromising dignity. He was too great to +be, in the common sense, conceited. All his consciousness of power left +him with the feeling of Newton, "I am a child gathering shells on the +shore": but what sense he had of fallibility arose from his glimpse of +the infinite sea, never from any suspicion that, in any circumstances, he +might be wrong and another mortal right: Shelley's lines on Byron-- + + The sense that he was greater than his kind + Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind + By gazing on its own exceeding light. + +fit him, like Ruskin's verdict, "What can you say of Carlyle but that he +was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning?" which withers while +it immortalises. + +[Footnote: In the _Times_ of February 7th 1881, there appeared an +interesting account of Carlyle's daily routine. "No book hack could have +surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and late +in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties. +At ten o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he +took up his pen and laboured hard until three o'clock. Nothing, not even +the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then +came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends.... In the evening he +read and prepared for the work of the morrow."] + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN + +Carlyle was so essentially a Preacher that the choice of a profession +made for him by his parents was in some measure justified; but he was +also a keen Critic, unamenable to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of +the revolutionary spirit of the age, even while protesting against its +extremes: above all, he was a literary Artist. Various opinions will +continue to be held as to the value of his sermons; the excellence of his +best workmanship is universally acknowledged. He was endowed with few of +the qualities which secure a quick success--fluency, finish of style, +the art of giving graceful utterance to current thought; he had in +full measure the stronger if slower powers--sound knowledge, infinite +industry, and the sympathetic insight of penetrative imagination--that +ultimately hold the fastnesses of fame. His habit of startling his +hearers, which for a time restricted, at a later date widened their +circle. There is much, sometimes even tiresome, repetition in Carlyle's +work; the range of his ideas is limited, he plays on a few strings, with +wonderfully versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually +confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But, +after the perfunctory work for Brewster he wrote nothing wholly +commonplace; occasionally paradoxical to the verge of absurdity, he is +never dull. + +Setting aside his TRANSLATIONS, always in prose,--often in +verse,--masterpieces of their kind, he made his first mark in CRITICISM, +which may be regarded as a higher kind of translation: the great value of +his work in this direction is due to his so regarding it. Most criticism +has for its aim to show off the critic; good criticism interprets the +author. Fifty years ago, in allusion to methods of reviewing, not even +now wholly obsolete, Carlyle wrote:-- + + The first and most convenient is for the reviewer to perch + himself resolutely, as it were, on the shoulder of his + author, and therefrom to show as if he commanded him and + looked down upon him by natural superiority of stature. + Whatsoever the great man says or does the little man shall + treat with an air of knowingness and light condescending + mockery, professing with much covert sarcasm that this or + that is beyond _his_ comprehension, and cunningly + asking his readers if _they_ comprehend it. + +There is here perhaps some "covert sarcasm" directed against +contemporaries who forgot that their mission was to pronounce on the +merits of the books reviewed, and not to patronise their authors; it may +be set beside the objection to Jeffrey's fashion of saying, "I like this; +I do not like that," without giving the reason why. But in this instance +the writer did reck his own rede. The temptation of a smart critic is to +seek or select legitimate or illegitimate objects of attack; and that +Carlyle was well armed with the shafts of ridicule is apparent in his +essays as in his histories; superabundantly so in his letters and +conversation. His examination of the _German Playwrights_, of _Taylor's +German Literature_, and his inimitable sketch of Herr Doering, the hapless +biographer of Richter, are as amusing as is Macaulay's _coup de grace_ to +Robert Montgomery. But the graver critic would have us take to heart +these sentences of his essay on Voltaire:-- + + Far be it from us to say that solemnity is an essential of + greatness; that no great man can have other than a rigid + vinegar aspect of countenance, never to be thawed or warmed + by billows of mirth. There are things in this world to be + laughed at as well as things to be admired. Nevertheless, + contempt is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one if + we habitually live in it. The faculty of love, of admiration, + is to be regarded as a sign and the measure of high souls; + unwisely directed, it leads to many evils; but without it, + there cannot be any good. Ridicule, on the other hand, is + the smallest of all faculties that other men are at pains to + repay with any esteem.... Its nourishment and essence is + denial, which hovers only on the surface, while knowledge + dwells far below,... it cherishes nothing but our vanity, + which may in general be left safely enough to shift for + itself. + +[Footnote: As an estimate of Voltaire this brilliant essay is inadequate. +Carlyle's maxim, we want to be told "not what is _not_ true but what _is_ +true," prevented him from appreciating the great work of Encyclopaedists.] + +We may compare with this one of the writer's numerous warnings to young +men taking to literature, as to drinking, in despair of anything better +to do, ending with the exhortation, "Witty above all things, oh, be not +witty"; or turn to the passage in the review of Sir Walter Scott:-- + + Is it with ease or not with ease that a man shall do his + best in any shape; above all, in this shape justly named of + soul's travail, working in the deep places of thought?... Not + so, now nor at any time.... Virgil and Tacitus, were they + ready writers? The whole _Prophecies of Isaiah_ are not + equal in extent to this cobweb of a Review article. + Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity; but not till + he had thought with intensity,... no easy writer he. Neither + was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with case. + Goethe tells us he "had nothing sent to him in his sleep," no + page of his but he knew well how it came there. + Schiller--"konnte nie fertig werden"--never could get done. + Dante sees himself "growing lean" over his _Divine Comedy_; + in stern solitary death wrestle with it, to prevail over it + and do it, if his uttermost faculty may; hence too it is done + and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures for + evermore among men. No; creation, one would think, cannot be + easy; your Jove has severe pains and fire flames in the head, + out of which an armed Pallas is struggling! As for + manufacture, that is a different matter.... Write by steam + if thou canst contrive it and sell it, but hide it like + virtue. + +In these and frequent similar passages lies the secret of Carlyle's slow +recognition, long struggle, and ultimate success; also of his occasional +critical intolerance. Commander-in-chief of the "red artillery," he sets +too little store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of the +light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but contempt for the +banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and +salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with +the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he +deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt to +leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can +only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of +ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every +ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher. +Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been +inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no +amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in +"the chamber of little ease," Carlyle travestied Goethe's "worship of +sorrow" till it became a pride in pain. He forgot that rude energy +requires restraint. Hercules Furens and Orlando Furioso did more than cut +down trees; they tore them up; but to no useful end. His power is often +almost Miltonic; it is never Shakespearian; and his insistent earnestness +would run the risk of fatiguing us were it not redeemed by his +humour. But he errs on the better side; and his example is a salutary +counteractive in an age when the dust of so many skirmishers obscures the +air, and laughter is too readily accepted as the test of truth, his stern +conception of literature accounts for his exaltations of the ideal, and +denunciations of the actual, profession of letters in passages which, +from his habit of emphasising opposite sides of truth, instead of +striking a balance, appear almost side by side in contradiction. The +following condenses the ideal:-- + + If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the + high and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have + guidance, freedom, immortality? These two in all degrees + I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind + blow whither it listeth. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, + indignation, despair itself--all these like hell-hounds lie + beleaguering the souls of the poor day worker as of every + man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, + and all these are stifled--all these shrink murmuring far + off in their caves. + +Against this we have to set innumerable tirades on the crime of worthless +writing, _e.g._-- + + No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag + his pen, without saying something; he knows not what + mischief he does, past computation, scattering words without + meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease. + For thistle-down flies abroad on all winds and airs of + wind.... Ship-loads of fashionable novels, sentimental + rhymes, tragedies, farces ... tales by flood and field are + swallowed monthly into the bottomless pool; still does the + press toil,... and still in torrents rushes on the great + army of publications to their final home; and still oblivion, + like the grave, cries give! give! How is it that of all + these countless multitudes no one can ... produce ought that + shall endure longer than "snowflake on the river? Because + they are foam, because there is no reality in them. . . ." + Not by printing ink alone does man live. Literature, as + followed at present, is but a species of brewing or cooking, + where the cooks use poison and vend it by telling + innumerable lies. + +These passages owe their interest to the attestation of their sincerity +by the writer's own practice. "Do not," he counsels one of his unknown +correspondents, "take up a subject because it is singular and will get +you credit, but because you _love_ it;" and he himself acted on the +rule. Nothing more impresses the student of Carlyle's works than his +_thoroughness._ He never took a task in hand without the determination to +perform it to the utmost of his ability; consequently when he satisfied +himself that he was master of his subject he satisfied his readers; but +this mastery was only attained, as it is only attainable, by the most +rigorous research. He seems to have written down his results with +considerable fluency: the molten ore flowed freely forth, but the process +of smelting was arduous. The most painful part of literary work is not +the actual composition, but the accumulation of details, the wearisome +compilation of facts, weighing of previous criticisms, the sifting of the +grains of wheat from the bushels of chaff. This part of his task Carlyle +performed with an admirable conscientiousness. His numerous letters +applying for out-of-the-way books to buy or borrow, for every pamphlet +throwing light on his subject, bear testimony to the careful exactitude +which rarely permitted him to leave any record unread or any worthy +opinion untested about any event of which or any person of whom he +undertook to write. From Templand (1833) he applies for seven volumes of +Beaumarchais, three of Bassompierre, the Memoirs of Abbe Georgel, and +every attainable account of Cagliostro and the Countess de la Motte, to +fuse into _The Diamond Necklace._ To write the essay on _Werner_ and +the _German Playwrights_ he swam through seas of trash. He digested the +whole of _Diderot_ for one review article. He seems to have read through +_Jean Paul Richter,_ a feat to accomplish which Germans require a +special dictionary. When engaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole +shoal of obscure seventeenth-century papers from Yarmouth, the remnant of +a yet larger heap, "read hundredweights of dreary books," and endured +"a hundred Museum headaches." In grappling with _Friedrich_ he waded +through so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping +condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes and places of +which he meant to speak, from St. Ives to Prague, and explored the +battlefields. Work done after this fashion seldom brings a swift return; +but if it is utilised and made vivid by literary genius it has a claim to +permanence. Bating a few instances where his sense of proportion is +defective, or his eccentricity is in excess, Carlyle puts his ample +material to artistic use; seldom making ostentation of detail, but +skilfully concentrating, so that we read easily and readily recall what he +has written. Almost everything he has done has made a mark: his best work +in criticism is final, it does not require to be done again. He interests +us in the fortunes of his leading characters: _first_, because he feels +with them; _secondly_, because he knows how to distinguish the essence +from the accidents of their lives, what to forget and what to remember, +where to begin and where to stop. Hence, not only his set biographies, as +of Schiller and of Sterling, but the shorter notices in his Essays, are +intrinsically more complete and throw more real light on character than +whole volumes of ordinary memoirs. + +With the limitations above referred to, and in view of his antecedents, +the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation is wonderfully wide. Often +perversely unfair to the majority of his English contemporaries, the +scales seem to fall from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of +other nations. The charity expressed in the saying that we should judge +men, not by the number of their faults, but by the amount of their +deflection from the circle, great or small, that bounds their being, +enables him often to do justice to those most widely differing in creed, +sentiment, and lines of activity from one another and from himself. +When treating congenial themes he errs by overestimate rather than by +depreciation: among the qualities of his early work, which afterwards +suffered some eclipse in the growth of other powers, is its flexibility. +It was natural for Carlyle, his successor in genius in the Scotch +lowlands, to give an account of Robert Burns which throws all previous +criticism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong affinities +to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his so-called heroes: but he +is fair to the characters, if not always to the work, of Voltaire and +Diderot, slurs over or makes humorous the escapades of Mirabeau, is +undeterred by the mysticism of Novalis, and in the fervour of his worship +fails to see the gulf between himself and Goethe. + +Carlyle's ESSAYS mark an epoch, _i.e._ the beginning of a new era, in +the history of British criticism. The able and vigorous writers who +contributed to the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly +Reviews_ successfully applied their taste and judgment to such works as +fell within their sphere, and could be fairly tested by their canons; but +they passed an alien act on everything that lay beyond the range of their +insular view. In dealing with the efforts of a nation whose literature, +the most recent in Europe save that of Russia, had only begun to command +recognition, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous. If +the old formulas have been theoretically dismissed, and a conscientious +critic now endeavours to place himself in the position of his author, +the change is largely due to the influence of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._ +Previous to their appearance, the literature of Germany, to which half +of these papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir Walter +Scott's translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen,_ De Quincey's travesties, +and Taylor's renderings from Lessing) a sealed book to English readers, +save those who were willing to breathe in an atmosphere of Coleridgean +mist. Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because he was +the first fully to apprehend its meaning. The _Life of Schiller,_ which +the author himself depreciated, remains one of the best of comparatively +short biographies, it abounds in admirable passages (conspicuously the +contrast between the elder and the younger of the Dioscuri at Weimar) and +has the advantage to some readers of being written in classical English +prose. + +To the essays relating to Germany, which we may accept as the _disjecta +membra_ of the author's unpublished History, there is little to add. +In these volumes we have the best English account of the Nibelungen +Lied--the most graphic, and in the main most just analyses of the genius +of Heyne, Rchter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, who is +recorded to have said, "Carlyle is almost more at home in our literature +than ourselves." With the Germans he is on his chosen ground; but the +range of his sympathies is most apparent in the portrait gallery of +eighteenth-century Frenchmen that forms, as it were, a proscenium to his +first great History. Among other papers in the same collection the most +prominent are the _Signs of the Times_ and _Characteristics,_ in which +he first distinctly broaches some of his peculiar views on political +philosophy and life. + +The scope and some of the limitations of Carlyle's critical power are +exhibited in his second Series of Lectures, delivered in 1838, when (_aet_. +43) he had reached the maturity of his powers. The first three of these +lectures, treating of Ancient History and Literature, bring into strong +relief the speaker's inadequate view of Greek thought and civilisation:-- + + Greek transactions had never anything alive, no result for + us, they were dead entirely ... all left is a few ruined + towers, masses of stone and broken statuary.... The writings + of Socrates are made up of a few wire-drawn notions about + virtue; there is no conclusion, no word of life in him. + +[Footnote: Though a mere reproduction of the notes of Mr. Chisholm Anstey, +this posthumous publication is justified by its interest and obvious +authenticity. The appearance in a prominent periodical (while these sheets +are passing through the press) of _Wotton Reinfred_ is more open to +question. This fragment of a romance, partly based on the plan of _Wilhelm +Meister_, with shadowy love episodes recalling the manner of the "Minerva +Press," can add nothing to Carlyle's reputation.] + + +These and similar dogmatic utterances are comments of the Hebrew on the +Hellene. To the Romans, "the men of antiquity," he is more just, dwelling +on their agriculture and road-making as their "greatest work written +on the planet;" but the only Latin author he thoroughly appreciates is +Tacitus, "a Colossus on edge of dark night." Then follows an exaltation +of the Middle Ages, in which "we see belief getting the victory over +unbelief," in the strain of Newman's _Grammar of Assent_. On the +surrender of Henry to Hildebrand at Canossa his approving comment is, +"the clay that is about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its +rights; the danger is always the other way, that the spiritual part of +man will become overlaid with the bodily part." In the later struggle +between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens his sympathy is with Gregory and +Innocent. In the same vein is his praise of Peter the Hermit, whose motto +was not the "action, action" of Demosthenes, but, "belief, belief." In +the brief space of those suggestive though unequal discourses the speaker +allows awkward proximity to some of the self-contradictions which, even +when scattered farther apart, perplex his readers and render it impossible +to credit his philosophy with more than a few strains of consistent +thought. + + In one page "the judgments of the heart are of more value than those of + the head." In the next "morals in a man are the counterpart of the + intellect that is in him." The Middle Ages were "a healthy age," and + therefore there was next to no Literature. "The strong warrior disdained + to write." "Actions will be preserved when all writers are forgotten." + Two days later, apropos of Dante, he says, "The great thing which any + nation can do is to produce great men.... When the Vatican shall have + crumbled to dust, and St. Peter's and Strassburg Minster be no more; for + thousands of years to come Catholicism will survive in this sublime + relic of antiquity--the _Divina Commedia."_ + + [Footnote: It has been suggested that Carlyle may have been in this + instance a student of Vauvenargues, who in the early years of the much- + maligned eighteenth century wrote "Les graudes pensees viennent du + coeur."] + +Passing to Spain, Carlyle salutes Cervantes and the Cid,--calling Don +Quixote the "poetry of comedy," "the age of gold in self-mockery,"--pays +a more reserved tribute to Calderon, ventures on the assertion that +Cortes was "as great as Alexander," and gives a sketch, so graphic that +it might serve as a text for Motley's great work, of the way in which +the decayed Iberian chivalry, rotten through with the Inquisition, broke +itself on the Dutch dykes. After a brief outline of the rise of the +German power, which had three avatars--the overwhelming of Rome, the +Swiss resistance to Austria, and the Reformation--we have a rough +estimate of some of the Reformers. Luther is exalted even over Knox; +Erasmus is depreciated, while Calvin and Melanchthon are passed by. + +The chapter on the Saxons, in which the writer's love of the sea appears +in picturesque reference to the old rover kings, is followed by unusually +commonplace remarks on earlier English literature, interspersed with some +of Carlyle's refrains. + + The mind is one, and consists not of bundles of faculties at + all ... the same features appear in painting, singing, + fighting ... when I hear of the distinction between the poet + and the thinker, I really see no difference at all.... Bacon + sees, Shakespeare sees through,... Milton is altogether + sectarian--a Presbyterian one might say--he got his + knowledge out of Knox.... Eve is a cold statue. + +Coming to the well-belaboured eighteenth century--when much was done of +which the nineteenth talks, and massive books were written that we are +content to criticise--we have the inevitable denunciations of scepticism, +materialism, argumentation, logic; the quotation, (referred to a motto +"in the Swiss gardens"), "Speech is silvern, silence is golden," and a +loud assertion that all great things are silent. The age is commended +for Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's spinning jenny, and Whitfield's +preaching, but its policy and theories are alike belittled. The summaries +of the leading writers are interesting, some curious, and a few absurd. +On the threshold of the age Dryden is noted "as a great poet born in the +worst of times": Addison as "an instance of one formal man doing great +things": Swift is pronounced "by far the greatest man of that time, not +unfeeling," who "carried sarcasm to an epic pitch": Pope, we are told, +had "one of the finest heads ever known." Sterne is handled with a +tenderness that contrasts with the death sentence pronounced on him by +Thackeray, "much is forgiven him because he loved much,... a good simple +being after all." Johnson, the "much enduring," is treated as in the +_Heroes_ and the Essay. Hume, with "a far duller kind of sense," is +commended for "noble perseverance and Stoic endurance of failure; but his +eye was not open to faith," etc. On which follows a stupendous criticism +of Gibbon, whom Carlyle, returning to his earlier and juster view, ended +by admiring. + + With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more + futile account of human things than he has done of the + _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. + +The sketch of the Pre-Revolution period is slight, and marked by a +somewhat shallow reference to Rousseau. The last lecture on the recent +German writers is a mere _rechauffe_ of the Essays. Carlyle closes +with the famous passage from Richter, one of those which indicate the +influence in style as in thought of the German over the Scotch humorist. +"It is now the twelfth hour of the night, birds of darkness are on the +wing, the spectres uprear, the dead walk, the living dream. Thou, Eternal +Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn." The whole volume is a testimony +to the speaker's power of speech, to his often unsurpassed penetration, +and to the hopeless variance of the often rapidly shifting streams of his +thought. + +Detailed criticism of Carlyle's HISTORIES belongs to the sphere of +separate disquisitions. Here it is only possible to take note of their +general characteristics. His conception of what history should be is +shared with Macaulay. Both writers protest against its being made a mere +record of "court and camp," of royal intrigue and state rivalry, of +pageants of procession, or chivalric encounters. Both find the sources of +these outwardly obtrusive events in the underground current of national +sentiment, the conditions of the civilisation from which they were +evolved, the prosperity or misery of the masses of the people. + + The essence of history does not lie in laws, senate-houses, + or battle-fields, but in the tide of thought and action--the + world of existence that in gloom and brightness blossoms and + fades apart from these. + +But Carlyle differs from Macaulay in his passion for the concrete. The +latter presents us with pictures to illustrate his political theory; the +former leaves his pictures to speak for themselves. "Give him a fact," +says Emerson, "he loaded you with thanks; a theory, with ridicule or +even abuse." It has been said that with Carlyle History was philosophy +teaching by examples. He himself defines it as "the essence of +innumerable biographies." He individualises everything he meets; his +dislike of abstractions is everywhere extreme. Thus while other writers +have expanded biography into history, Carlyle condenses history into +biography. Even most biographies are too vague for him. He delights in +Boswell: he glides over their generalisations to pick out some previously +obscure record from Clarendon or Hume. Even in _The French Revolution,_ +where the author has mainly to deal with masses in tumult, he gives most +prominence to their leaders. They march past us, labelled with strange +names, in the foreground of the scene, on which is being enacted the +death wrestle of old Feudalism and young Democracy. This book is unique +among modern histories for a combination of force and insight only +rivalled by the most incisive passages of the seventh book of Thucydides, +of Tacitus, of Gibbon, and of Michelet. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ a comparison of Carlyle and Michelet in Dr. Oswald's +interesting and suggestive little volume of criticism and selection, +_Thomas Carlyle, ein Lebensbild und Goldkoerner aus seinen Werken._] + +_The French Revolution_ is open to the charge of being a comment and a +prophecy rather than a narrative: the reader's knowledge of the main +events of the period is too much assumed for the purpose of a school +book. Even Dryasdust will turn when trod on, and this book has been a +happy hunting field to aggressive antiquarians, to whom the mistake of a +day in date, the omission or insertion of a letter in a name, is of more +moment than the difference between vitalising or petrifying an era. The +lumber merchants of history are the born foes of historians who, like +Carlyle and Mr. Froude, have manifested their dramatic power of making +the past present and the distant near. That the excess of this power is +not always compatible with perfect impartiality may be admitted; for a +poetic capacity is generally attended by heats of enthusiasm, and is +liable to errors of detail; but without some share of it-- + + Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit + Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln. + +Mere research, the unearthing and arrangement of what Sir Philip Sidney +calls "old moth-eaten records," supplies material for the work of the +historian proper; and, occasionally to good purpose, corrects it, but, as +a rule, with too much flourish. Applying this minute criticism to _The +French Revolution,_ one reviewer has found that the author has given the +wrong number to a regiment: another esteemed scholar has discovered that +there are seven errors in the famous account of the flight to Varennes, +to wit:--the delay in the departure was due to Bouille, not to the Queen; +she did not lose her way and so delay the start; Ste. Menehould is too +big to be called a village; on the arrest, it was the Queen who asked for +hot water and eggs; the King only left the coach once; it went rather +faster than is stated; and, above all, _infandum!_ it was not painted +yellow, but green and black. This criticism does not in any degree +detract from the value of one of the most vivid and substantially +accurate narratives in the range of European literature. Carlyle's object +was to convey the soul of the Revolution, not to register its upholstery. +The annalist, be he dryasdust or gossip, is, in legal phrase, "the devil" +of the prose artist, whose work makes almost as great a demand on the +imaginative faculty as that of the poet. Historiography is related to +History as the Chronicles of Holinshed and the Voyages of Hakluyt to the +Plays of Shakespeare, plays which Marlborough confessed to have been +the main source of his knowledge of English history. Some men are born +philologists or antiquarians; but, as the former often fail to see the +books because of the words, so the latter cannot read the story for the +dates. The mass of readers require precisely what has been contemptuously +referred to as the "Romance of History," provided it leaves with them +an accurate impression, as well as an inspiring interest. Save in his +over-hasty acceptance of the French _blague_ version of "The Sinking of +the Vengeur," Carlyle has never laid himself open to the reproach of +essential inaccuracy. As far as possible for a man of genius, he was +a devotee of facts. He is never a careless, though occasionally +an impetuous writer; his graver errors are those of emotional +misinterpretation. It has been observed that, while contemning +Robespierre, he has extenuated the guilt of Danton as one of the main +authors of the September massacres, and, more generally, that "his +quickness and brilliancy made him impatient of systematic thought." But +his histories remain the best illuminations of fact in our language. _The +French Revolution_ is a series of flame-pictures; every page is on fire; +we read the whole as if listening to successive volleys of artillery: +nowhere has such a motley mass been endowed with equal life. This book +alone vindicates Lowell's panegyric: "the figures of most historians seem +like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs through any hole +that criticism may tear in them; but Carlyle's are so real that if you +prick them they bleed." + +When Carlyle generalises, as in the introductions to his Essays, he is +apt to thrust his own views on his subject and on his readers; but, +unlike De Quincey, who had a like love of excursus, he comes to the point +before the close. + +The one claimed the privilege, assumed by Coleridge, of starting from no +premises and arriving at no conclusion; the other, in his capacity as +a critic, arrives at a conclusion, though sometimes from questionable +premises. It is characteristic of his habit of concentrating, rather than +condensing, that Carlyle abandoned his design of a history of the Civil +Wars for _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches._ The events of the +period, whose issues the writer has firmly grasped, are brought into +prominence mainly as they elucidate the career of his hero; but the +"elucidations" have been accepted, with a few reservations, as final. No +other work has gone so far to reverse a traditional estimate. The old +current conceptions of the Protector are refuted out of his own mouth; +but it was left for his editor to restore life to the half-forgotten +records, and sweep away the clouds that obscured their revelations of a +great though rugged character. _Cromwell_ has been generally accepted +in Scotland as Carlyle's masterpiece--a judgment due to the fact of its +being, among the author's mature works, the least apparently opposed +to the theological views prevalent in the north of our island. In +reality--though containing some of his finest descriptions and +battle-pieces, conspicuously that of "Dunbar"--it is the least artistic +of his achievements, being overladen with detail and superabounding in +extract. A good critic has said that it was a labour of love, like +Spedding's _Bacon;_ but that the correspondence, lavishly reproduced in +both works, has "some of the defects of lovers' letters for those to whom +they are not addressed." + +[Footnote: In _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11th, 1881.] + +Carlyle has established that Oliver was not a hypocrite, "not a man of +falsehood, but a man of truth": he has thrown doubts on his being a +fanatic; but he has left it open to M. Guizot to establish that his later +rule was a practical despotism. + +In _Friedrich II._ he undertook a yet greater task; and his work +stretching over a wider arena, is, of necessity, more of a history, less +of a biography, than any of his others. In constructing and composing it +he was oppressed not only by the magnitude and complexity of his theme, +but, for the first time, by hesitancies as to his choice of a hero. +He himself confessed, "I never was admitted much to _Friedrich's_ +confidence, and I never cared very much about him." Yet he determined, +almost of malice prepense, to exalt the narrow though vivid Prussian +as "the last of the kings, the one genuine figure in the eighteenth +century," and though failing to prove his case, he has, like a loyal +lawyer, made the best of his brief. The book embodies and conveys the +most brilliant and the most readable account of a great part of the +century, and nothing he has written bears more ample testimony to the +writer's pictorial genius. It is sometimes garrulous with the fluency of +an old man eloquent; parts of the third volume, with its diffuse extracts +from the king's survey of his realm, are hard if not weary reading; but +the rest is a masterpiece of historic restoration. The introductory +portion, leading us through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy +and political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the procession +of the half-forgotten host of German worthies,--St. Adalbert and his +mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth; +Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret with the mouth; Sigismund +_supra grammaticam_; Augustus the physically strong; Albert Achilles and +Albert Alcibiades; Anne of Cleves; Mr. John Kepler,--who move on the +pages, more brightly "pictured" than those of Livy, like marionettes +inspired with life. In the main body of the book the men and women of the +Prussian court are brought before us in fuller light and shade. Friedrich +himself, at Sans Souci, with his cocked-hat, walking-stick and wonderful +gray eyes; Sophia Charlotte's grace, wit, and music; Wilhelmina and her +book; the old Hyperborean; the black artists Seckendorf and Grumkow; +George I. and his blue-beard chamber; the little drummer; the Old +Dessaner; the cabinet Venus; Graevenitz Hecate; Algarotti; Goetz in his +tower; the tragedy of Katte; the immeasurable comedy of Maupertuis, the +flattener of the earth, and Voltaire; all these and a hundred more are +summoned by a wizard's wand from the land of shadows, to march by +the central figures of these volumes; to dance, flutter, love, hate, +intrigue, and die before our eyes. It is the largest and most varied +showbox in all history; a prelude to a series of battle-pieces--Rossbach, +Leuthen, Molwitz, Zorndorf--nowhere else, save in the author's own pages, +approached in prose, and rarely rivalled out of Homer's verse. + +Carlyle's style, in the chiar-oscuro of which his Histories and +three-fourths of his Essays are set, has naturally provoked much +criticism and some objurgation. M. Taine says it is "exaggerated and +demoniacal." Hallam could not read _The French Revolution_ because of its +"abominable" style, and Wordsworth, whose own prose was perfectly limpid, +is reported to have said, "No Scotchman can write English. C---- is a pest +to the language." + +[Footnote: Carlyle with equal unfairness disparaged Hallam's _Middle +Ages:--"Eh, the poor miserable skeleton of a book," and regarded the +_Literature of Europe_ as a valley of dry bones.] + +Carlyle's style is not that of Addison, of Berkeley, or of Helps; its +peculiarities are due to the eccentricity of an always eccentric being; +but it is neither affected nor deliberately imitated. It has been +plausibly asserted that his earlier manner of writing, as in _Schiller,_ +under the influence of Jeffrey, was not in his natural voice. "They +forget," he said, referring to his critics, "that the style is the skin +of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old woman." Erratic, +metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and therefore a dangerous model, +"the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and +angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the _Birthmark_ +in Hawthorne's romance. To recast a chapter of the _Revolution_ in the +form of a chapter of Macaulay would be like rewriting Tacitus in the +form of Cicero, or Browning in the form of Pope. Carlyle is seldom +obscure, the energy of his manner is part of his matter; its abruptness +corresponds to the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often as +it were by a series of electric shocks, that threaten to break through +the formal restraints of an ordinary sentence. He writes like one who +must, under the spell of his own winged words; at all hazards, +determined to convey his meaning; willing, like Montaigne, to "despise +no phrase of those that run in the streets," to speak in strange tongues, +and even to coin new words for the expression of a new emotion. It is +his fashion to care as little for rounded phrase as for logical argument: +and he rather convinces and persuades by calling up a succession of +feelings than by a train of reasoning. He repeats himself like a +preacher, instead of condensing like an essayist. The American Thoreau +writes in the course of an incisive survey:-- + + Carlyle's ... mastery over the language is unrivalled; it + is with him a keen, resistless weapon; his power of words + is endless. All nature, human and external, is ransacked to + serve and run his errands. The bright cutlery, after all the + dross of Birmingham has been thrown aside, is his style.... + He has "broken the ice, and the torrent streams forth." He + drives six-in-hand over ruts and streams and never upsets.... + With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all + his moods and experiences, and crashes his way through + shoals of dilettante opinions. It is not in man to determine + what his style shall be, if it is to be his own. + +But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a careless or ready +writer. He weighed every sentence: if in all his works, from _Sartor_ to +the _Reminiscences_, you pencil-mark the most suggestive passages you +disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and +fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though +a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a +great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping +his pencil "in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse," now etching his +scenes with the tender touch of a Millet. + +Emerson, in one of his early letters to Carlyle, wrote, "Nothing seems +hid from those wonderful eyes of yours; those devouring eyes; those +thirsty eyes; those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine." +Men of genius, whether expressing themselves in prose or verse, on canvas +or in harmony, are, save when smitten, like Beethoven, by some malignity +of Nature, endowed with keener physical senses than other men. They +actually, not metaphorically, see more and hear more than their fellows. +Carlyle's super-sensitive ear was to him, through life, mainly a torment; +but the intensity of his vision was that of a born artist, and to' it we +owe the finest descriptive passages, if we except those of Mr. Ruskin, in +English prose. None of our poets, from Chaucer and Dunbar to Burns and +Tennyson, has been more alive to the influences of external nature. His +early letters abound in passages like the following, on the view from +Arthur's Seat:-- + + The blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills + swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags + and rude precipices at our feet (where not a hillock rears + its head unsung) with Edinburgh at their base clustering + proudly over her rugged foundations and covering with a + vapoury mantle the jagged black masses of stonework that + stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Faeryland.... + I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and + the moon's fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as + it is, was riding quietly above me. + +Compare with this the picture, in a letter to Sterling, of Middlebie +burn, "leaping into its cauldron, singing a song better than Pasta's"; or +that of the Scaur Water, that may be compared with Tennyson's verses in +the valley of Cauteretz; or the sketches of the Flemish cities in the +tour of 1842, with the photograph of the lace-girl, recalling Sterne at +his purest; or the account of the "atmosphere like silk" over the moor, +with the phrase, "it was as if Pan slept"; or the few lines written at +Thurso, where "the sea is always one's friend"; or the later memories of +Mentone, old and new, in the _Reminiscences_ (vol. ii. pp. 335-340). + +The most striking of those descriptions are, however, those in which the +interests of some thrilling event or crisis of human life or history +steal upon the scene, and give it a further meaning, as in the dim streak +of dawn rising over St. Abb's Head on the morning of Dunbar, or in the +following famous apostrophe:-- + + O evening sun of July, how at this hour thy beams fall slant + on reapers amid peaceful, woody fields; on old women + spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; + on balls at the Orangerie at Versailles, where high-rouged + dames of the palace are even now dancing with + double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring + Hell-porch of an Hotel-de-Ville. + +Carlyle is, here and there, led astray by the love of contrast; but not +even Heinrich Heine has employed antithesis with more effect than in the +familiar passage on the sleeping city in _Sartor_, beginning, "Ach mein +Lieber ... it is a true sublimity to dwell here," and ending, "But I, +mein Werther, sit above it all. I am alone with the stars." His thought, +seldom quite original, is often a resuscitation or survival, and owes +much of its celebrity to its splendid brocade. _Sartor Resartus_ itself +escaped the failure that was at first threatened by its eccentricity +partly from its noble passion, partly because of the truth of the +"clothes philosophy," applied to literature as to life. + +His descriptions, too often caricatures, of men are equally vivid. They +set the whole great mass of _Friedrich_ in a glow; they lighten the +tedium of _Cromwell's_ lumbering despatches; they give a heart of fire +to _The French Revolution_. Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_ attempts +and fulfils on a smaller what Carlyle achieved on a greater scale. The +historian makes us sympathise with the real actors, even more than the +novelist does with the imaginary characters on the same stage. From the +account of the dying Louis XV. to the "whiff of grapeshot" which closed +the last scene of the great drama, there is not a dull page. Theroigne +de Mericourt, Marat, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Robespierre, +Talleyrand, Mdme. Roland, above all Marie Antoinette--for whom Carlyle +has a strong affection--and Buonaparte, so kindle and colour the scene +that we cannot pause to feel weary of the phrases with which they are +labelled. The author's letters show the same power of baptizing, which he +used often to unfair excess. We can no more forget Count d'Orsay as the +"Phoebus Apollo of Dandyism," Daniel Webster's "brows like cliffs and +huge black eyes," or Wordsworth "munching raisins" and recognising no +poet but himself, or Maurice "attacked by a paroxysm of mental cramp," +than we can dismiss from our memories "The Glass Coachman" or "The +Tobacco Parliament." + +Carlyle quotes a saying of Richter, that Luther's words were half +battles; he himself compares those of Burns to cannon-balls; much of his +own writing is a fusilade. All three were vehement in abuse of things +and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not +sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are, +by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his +humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining +over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as +finely quaint as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's. There is in +it, as in all the highest humour, a sense of apparent contrast, even of +contradiction, in life, of matter for laughter in sorrow and tears in +joy. He seems to check himself, and as if afraid of wearing his heart +in his sleeve, throws in absurd illustrations of serious propositions, +partly to show their universal range, partly in obedience to an instinct +of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermonising and to cut the story +short. Carlyle's grotesque is a mode of his golden silence, a sort of +Socratic irony, in the indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and +at himself. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, ridicule of +his own and other ages, now in droll reference or mock heroic detail, +in an odd conception, a character sketch, an event in parody, in an +antithesis or simile,--sometimes it lurks in a word, and again in a +sentence. In direct pathos--the other side of humour--he is equally +effective. His denunciations of sentiment remind us of Plato attacking +the poets, for he is at heart the most emotional of writers, the greatest +of the prose poets of England; and his dramatic sympathy extends alike to +the actors in real events and to his ideal creations. Few more pathetic +passages occur in literature than his "stories of the deaths of kings." +The following among the less known of his eloquent passages is an +apotheosis of their burials:-- + + In this manner did the men of the Eastern Counties take up + the slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in + the village of Hoxne; seek out the severed head and + reverently reunite the same. They embalmed him with myrrh + and sweet spices, with love, pity, and all high and awful + thoughts; consecrating him with a very storm of melodious, + adoring admiration, and sun-dried showers of tears; joyfully, + yet with awe (as all deep joy has something of the awful in + it), commemorating his noble deeds and godlike walk and + conversation while on Earth. Till, at length, the very Pope + and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear of it; and they, + summing up as correctly as they well could, with _Advocatus + Diaboli_ pleadings and other forms of process, the + general verdict of mankind, declared that he had in very + fact led a hero's life in this world: and, being now gone, + was gone, as they conceived, to God above and reaping his + reward there. Such, they said, was the best judgment they + could form of the case, and truly not a bad judgment. + +Carlyle's reverence for the past makes him even more apt to be touched by +its sorrows than amused by its follies. With a sense of brotherhood he +holds out hands to all that were weary; he feels even for the pedlars +climbing the Hohenzollern valley, and pities the solitude of soul on the +frozen Schreckhorn of power, whether in a dictator of Paraguay or in +a Prussian prince. He leads us to the death chamber of Louis XV., of +Mirabeau, of Cromwell, of Sterling, his own lost friend; and we feel with +him in the presence of a solemnising mystery. Constantly, amid the din of +arms or words, and the sarcasms by which he satirises and contemns old +follies and idle strifes, a gentler feeling wells up in his pages like +the sound of the Angelus. Such pauses of pathos are the records of real +or fanciful situations, as of Teufelsdroeckh "left alone with the night" +when Blumine and Herr Towgood ride down the valley; of Oliver recalling +the old days at St. Ives; of the Electress Louisa bidding adieu to her +Elector. + +At the moment of her death, it is said, when speech had fled, he felt +from her hand, which lay in his, three slight slight pressures--farewell +thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easily to forget in this world. + +There is nothing more pathetic in the range of his works, if in that of +our literature, than the account of the relations of father and son in +the domestic history of the Prussian Court, from the first estrangement +between them--the young Friedrich in his prison at Cuestrin, the old +Friedrich gliding about seeking shelter from ghosts, mourning for +Absalom--to the reconciliation, the end, and the afterthoughts:-- + + The last breath of Friedrich Wilhelm having fled, Friedrich + hurried to a private room; sat there all in tears; looking + back through the gulfs of the Past, upon such a Father now + rapt away for ever. Sad all and soft in the moonlight of + memory--the lost Loved One all in the right as we now see, + we all in the wrong!--This, it appears, was the Son's fixed + opinion. Sever, years hence here is how Friedrich concludes + the _History_ of his Father, written with a loyal + admiration throughout: "We have left under silence the + domestic chagrins of this great Prince; readers must have + some indulgence for the faults of the children, in + consideration of the virtues of such a Father." All in + tears he sits at present, meditating these sad things. In a + little while the Old Dessauer, about to leave for Dessau, + ventures in to the Crown Prince, Crown Prince no longer; + "embraces his knees," offers weeping his condolence, his + congratulation; hopes withal that his sons and he will be + continued in their old posts, and that he the Old Dessauer + "will have the same authority as in the late reign." + Friedrich's eyes, at this last clause, flash out tearless, + strangely Olympian. "In your posts I have no thought of + making change; in your posts yes; and as to authority I + know of none there can be but what resides in the king that + is sovereign," which, as it were, struck the breath out of + the Old Dessauer; and sent him home with a painful + miscellany of feelings, astonishment not wanting among them. + At an after hour the same night Friedrich went to Berlin, + met by acclamation enough. He slept there not without + tumult of dreams, one may fancy; and on awakening next + morning the first sound he heard was that of the regiment + Glasenap under his windows, swearing fealty to the new King. + He sprang out of bed in a tempest of emotion; bustled + distractedly to and fro, wildly weeping. Poellnitz, who came + into the anteroom, found him in this state, "half-dressed, + with dishevelled hair, in tears, and as if beside himself." + "These huzzahings only tell me what I have lost," said the + new King. "He was in great suffering," suggested Poellnitz; + "he is now at rest." True, he suffered; but he was here with + us; and now----! + +Carlyle has said of Dante's _Francesco_ "that it is a thing woven as of +rainbows on a ground of eternal black." The phrase, well applied to the +_Inferno_, is a perhaps half-conscious verdict on his own tenderness as +exhibited in his life and in his works. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY + +One of the subtlest of Robert Browning's critics, in the opening sentence +of his work, quotes a saying of Hegel's, "A great man condemns the world +to the task of explaining him"; adding, "The condemnation is a double one, +and it generally falls heaviest on the great man himself who has to submit +to explanation." Cousin, the graceful Eclectic, is reported to have said +to the great Philosopher, "will you oblige me by stating the results of +your teaching in a few sentences?" and to have received the reply, "It is +not easy, especially in French." + +[Footnote: _Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher,_ by +Professor Henry Jones, of St. Andrews.] + +The retort applies, with severity, to those who attempt to systematise +Carlyle; for he himself was, as we have seen, intolerant of system. His +mathematical attainment and his antipathy to logical methods beyond +the lines of square and circle, his love of concise fact and his often +sweeping assertions are characteristic of the same contradictions in +his nature as his almost tyrannical premises and his practically +tender-hearted conclusions. A hard thinker, he was never a close +reasoner; in all that relates to human affairs he relies on nobility of +feeling rather than on continuity of thought. Claiming the full latitude +of the prophet to warn, exhort, even to command, he declines either to +preach or to accept the rubric of the partisan or of the priest. + +In praise of German literature, he remarks, "One of its chief qualities +is that it has no particular theory at all on the front of it;" and of +its leaders, "I can only speak of the revelations these men have made to +me. As to their doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be +said"; yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him "out +of the blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that +his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their +discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings, +inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of +credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or mountain air, +and found in them the key of the perennial riddle and the solution of the +insoluble mystery. But in later years the curtain to many of them became +the picture. + +When Carlyle was first recognised in London as a rising author, curiosity +was rife as to his "opinions"; was he a Chartist at heart or an +Absolutist, a Calvinist like Knox, a Deist like Hume, a Feudalist with +Scott, or a Democrat with Burns--inquisitions mostly vain. He had come +from the Scotch moors and his German studies, a strange element, into the +midst of an almost foreign society, not so much to promulgate a new set +of opinions as to infuse a new life into those already existing. He +claimed to have a "mission," but it was less to controvert any form of +creed than to denounce the insufficiency of shallow modes of belief. He +raised the tone of literature by referring to higher standards than those +currently accepted; he tried to elevate men's minds to the contemplation +of something better than themselves, and impress upon them the vacuity +of lip-services; he insisted that the matter of most consequence was the +grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to +sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty +to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only +barren but obstructive; that it is only + + When half-gods go, the gods arrive. + +But his manner of reading these important lessons admitted the retort +that he himself was content rather to dwell on what is _not_ than to +discover what _is_ true. Belief, he reiterates, is the cure for all the +worst of human ills; but belief in what or in whom? In "the eternities +and immensities," as an answer, requires definition. It means that we are +not entitled to regard ourselves as the centres of the universe; that +we are but atoms of space and time, with relations infinite beyond our +personalities; that the first step to a real recognition of our duties is +the sense of our inferiority to those above us, our realisation of the +continuity of history and life, our faith and acquiescence in some +universal law. This truth, often set forth + + By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet, + +no one has enforced with more eloquence than Carlyle; but though he +founded a dynasty of ideas, they are comparatively few; like a group of +strolling players, each with a well-filled wardrobe, and ready for many +parts. + +The difficulty of defining Carlyle results not merely from his frequent +golden nebulosity, but from his love of contradicting even himself. Dr. +Johnson confessed to Boswell that when arguing in his dreams he was often +worsted and took credit for the resignation with which he bore these +defeats, forgetting that the victor and the vanquished were one and the +same. Similarly his successor took liberties with himself which he would +allow to no one else, and in doing so he has taken liberties with his +reader. His praise and blame of the profession of letters, as the highest +priesthood and the meanest trade; his early exaltation of "the writers of +newspapers, pamphlets, books," as "the real effective working church of a +modern country"; and his later expressed contempt for journalism as +"mean and demoralising"--"we must destroy the faith in newspapers"; +his alternate faith and unfaith in Individualism; the teaching of the +_Characteristics_ and the _Signs of the Times_ that all healthy genius is +unconscious, and the censure of Sir Walter Scott for troubling himself +too little with mysteries; his commendation of "the strong warrior" for +writing no books, and his taking sides with the mediaeval monks against +the kings--there is no reconciliation of such contradictories. They are +the expression of diverse moods and emphatically of different stages of +mental progress, the later, as a rule, more negative than the earlier. + +This change is most marked in the sphere of politics. At the close of his +student days Carlyle was to all intents a Radical, and believed in +Democracy; he saw hungry masses around him, and, justly attributing some +of their suffering to misgovernment, vented his sympathetic zeal for the +oppressed in denunciation of the oppressors. + +[Footnote: Passage quoted (Chap. II.) about the Glasgow Radical rising in +1819.] + +He began not only by sympathising with the people, but by believing in +their capacity to manage best their own affairs: a belief that steadily +waned as he grew older until he denied to them even the right to choose +their rulers. As late, however, as 1830, he argued against Irving's +conservatism in terms recalled in the _Reminiscences_. "He objected +clearly to my Reform Bill notions, found Democracy a thing forbidden, +leading even to outer darkness: I a thing inevitable and obliged to lead +whithersoever it could." During the same period he clenched his theory by +taking a definite side in the controversy of the age. "This," he writes to +Macvey Napier, "this is the day when the lords are to reject the Reform +Bill. The poor lords can only accelerate (by perhaps a century) their own +otherwise inevitable enough abolition." + +The political part of _Sartor Resartus_, shadowing forth some scheme of +well-organised socialism, yet anticipates, especially in the chapter on +_Organic Filaments_, the writer's later strain of belief in dukes, earls, +and marshals of men: but this work, religious, ethical, and idyllic, +contains mere vague suggestions in the sphere of practical life. About +this time Carlyle writes of liberty: "What art thou to the valiant and +the brave when thou art thus to the weak and timid, dearer than life, +stronger than death, higher than purest love?" and agrees with the +verdict, "The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive +struggles of anarchy." But he soon passed from the mood represented +by Emily Bronte to that of the famous apostrophe of Madame Roland. He +proclaimed that liberty to do as we like is a fatal license, that the +only true liberty is that of doing what is right, which he interprets +living under the laws enacted by the wise. Mrs. Austin in 1832 wrote to +Mrs. Carlyle, "I am that monster made up of all the Whigs hate--a Radical +and an Absolutist." The expression, at the time, accurately defined +Carlyle's own political position: but he shifted from it, till the +Absolutist, in a spirit made of various elements, devoured the Radical. +The leading counsel against the aristocracy changed his brief and became +chief advocate on their side, declaring "we must recognise the hereditary +principle if there is to be any fixity in things." In 1835, he says to +Emerson:-- + + I believe literature to be as good as dead ... and nothing + but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps + three generations.... I suffer also terribly from the + solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a + kind of passion with me to feel myself among my brothers. + And then How? Alas I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay, I + feel it to be a wretched necessity unfit for me; + Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet + these two are the grand categories under which all English + spiritual activity, that so much as thinks remuneration + possible, must range itself. + +And somewhat later-- + + People accuse me, not of being an incendiary Sansculotte, + but of being a Tory, thank Heaven! + +Some one has written with a big brush, "He who is not a radical in his +youth is a knave, he who is not a conservative in his age is a fool." The +rough, if not rude, generalisation has been plausibly supported by +the changes in the mental careers of Burke, Coleridge, Southey, and +Wordsworth. But Carlyle was "a spirit of another sort," of more mixed +yarn; and, as there is a vein of Conservatism in his early Radicalism, +so there is, as also in the cases of Landor and even of Goethe, still +a revolutionary streak in his later Conservatism. Consequently, in his +instance, there is a plea in favour of the prepossession (especially +strong in Scotland) which leads the political or religious party that a +distinguished man has left still to persist in claiming him; while +that which he has joined accepts him, if at all, with distrust. Scotch +Liberals will not give up Carlyle, one of his biographers keenly +asseverating that he was to the last "a democrat at heart"; while +the representative organ of northern Conservatism on the same ground +continues to assail him--"mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst +vergebens." On all questions directly bearing on the physical welfare of +the masses of the people, his speech and action remained consistent with +his declaration that he had "never heard an argument for the corn laws +which might not make angels weep." From first to last he was an advocate +of Free Trade--though under the constant protest that the greatness of +a nation depended in a very minor degree on the abundance of its +possessions--and of free, unsectarian, and compulsory Education. while, +in theology, though remote from either, he was more tolerant of the +dogmatic narrowness of the Low Church of the lower, than of the Ritualism +of the upper, classes. His unwavering interest in the poor and his belief +that legislation should keep them in constant view, was in accord with +the spirit of Bentham's standard: but Carlyle, rightly or wrongly, +came to regard the bulk of men as children requiring not only help and +guidance but control. + +On the question of "the Suffrage" he completely revolved. It appears, +from the testimony of Mr. Froude, that the result of the Reform Bill of +1832 disappointed him in merely shifting power from the owners of land to +the owners of shops, and leaving the handicraftsmen and his own peasant +class no better off. Before a further extension became a point +of practical politics he had arrived at the conviction that the +ascertainment of truth and the election of the fittest did not lie with +majorities. These sentences of 1835 represent a transition stage:-- + + Conservatism I cannot attempt to conserve, believing it to + be a portentous embodied sham.... Whether the Tories stay + out or in, it will be all for the advance of Radicalism, + which means revolt, dissolution, and confusion and a + darkness which no man can see through. + +No one had less faith in the paean chanted by Macaulay and others on the +progress of the nation or of the race, a progress which, without faith +in great men, was to him inevitably downward; no one protested with more +emphasis against the levelling doctrines of the French Revolution. It has +been observed that Carlyle's _Chartism_ was "his first practical step in +politics"; it is more true to say that it first embodied, with more than +his usual precision, the convictions he had for some time held of the +dangers of our social system; with an indication of some of the means to +ward them off, based on the realisation of the interdependence of all +classes in the State. This book is remarkable as containing his last, +very partial, concessions to the democratic creed, the last in which he +is willing to regard a wide suffrage as a possible, though by no means +the best, expedient. Subsequently, in _Past and Present_ and the +_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, he came to hold "that with every extension of the +Franchise those whom the voters would elect would be steadily inferior +and more unfit." Every stage in his political progress is marked by a +growing distrust in the judgment of the multitude, a distrust set forth, +with every variety of metaphor, in such sentences as the following:-- + + There is a divine message or eternal regulation of the + Universe. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count + heads, ask Universal Suffrage by the ballot-box and that + will tell!" From Adam's time till now the Universe was wont + to be of a somewhat abstruse nature, partially disclosing + itself to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was + not the majority. Of what use towards the general result of + finding out what it is wise to do, can the fools be? ... If + of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common + calculation, how in the name of wonder will you ever get a + ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these + ten men? ... Only by reducing to zero nine of these votes can + wisdom ever issue from your ten. The mass of men consulted at + the hustings upon any high matter whatsoever, is as ugly an + exhibition of human stupidity as this world sees.... If the + question be asked and the answer given, I will generally + consider in any case of importance, that the said answer is + likely to be wrong, and that I have to go and do the reverse + of the same ... for how should I follow a multitude to do + evil? Cease to brag to me of America and its model + institutions.... On this side of the Atlantic or on that, + Democracy is for ever impossible! The Universe is a monarchy + and a hierarchy, the noble in the high places, the ignoble in + the low; this is in all times and in all places the Almighty + Maker's law. Democracy, take it where you will, is found a + regulated method of rebellion, it abrogates the old + arrangement of things, and leaves zero and vacuity. It is the + consummation of no-government and _laissez faire_. + +Alongside of this train of thought there runs a constant protest against +the spirit of revolt. In _Sartor_ we find: "Whoso cannot obey cannot be +free, still less bear rule; he that is the inferior of nothing can be the +superior of nothing"; and in _Chartism_-- + + Men who rebel and urge the lower classes to rebel ought to + have other than formulas to go upon, ... those to whom + millions of suffering fellow-creatures are "masses," mere + explosive masses for blowing down Bastiles with, for voting + at hustings for us--such men are of the questionable + species.... Obedience ... is the primary duty of man.... + Of all "rights of men" this right of the ignorant to be + guided by the wiser, gently or forcibly--is the + indisputablest.... Cannot one discern, across all democratic + turbulence, clattering of ballot-boxes, and infinite + sorrowful jangle, that this is at bottom the wish and prayer + of all human hearts everywhere, "Give me a leader"? + +The last sentence indicates the transition from the merely negative +aspect of Carlyle's political philosophy to the positive, which is +his HERO-WORSHIP, based on the excessive admiration for individual +greatness,--an admiration common to almost all imaginative writers, +whether in prose or verse; on his notions of order and fealty, and on a +reverence for the past, which is also a common property of poets. The +Old and Middle Ages, according to his view, had their chiefs, captains, +kings, and waxed or waned with the increase or decrease of their +Loyality. Democracy, the new force of our times, must in its turn be +dominated by leaders. Raised to independence over the arbitrary will of a +multitude, these are to be trusted and followed, if need be, to death. + + Your noblest men at the summit of affairs is the ideal world + of poets.... Other aim in this earth we have none. That + we all reverence "great men" is to me the living rock amid + all rushings down whatsoever. All that democracy ever meant + lies there, the attainment of a truer Aristocracy or + Government of the Best. Make search for the Able man. How to + get him is the question of questions. + +It is precisely the question to which Carlyle never gives, and hardly +attempts, a reply; and his failure to answer it invalidates the +larger half of his Politics. Plato has at least detailed a scheme for +eliminating his philosopher guardians, though it somewhat pedantically +suggests a series of Chinese examinations: his political, though probably +unconscious disciple has only a few negative tests. The warrior or sage +who is to rule is _not_ to be chosen by the majority, especially in our +era, when they would choose the Orators who seduce and "traduce the +State"; nor are we ever told that the election is to rest with either +Under or Upper House: the practical conclusion is that when we find a man +of great force of character, whether representing our own opinions or the +reverse, we should take him on trust. This brings us to the central maxim +of Carlyle's political philosophy, to which we must, even in our space, +give some consideration, as its true meaning has been the theme of so +much dispute. + +It is a misfortune of original thought that it is hardly ever put +in practice by the original thinker. When his rank as a teacher is +recognised, his words have already lost half their value by repetition. +His manner is aped by those who find an easy path to notoriety in +imitation; the belief he held near his heart is worn as a creed like a +badge; the truth he promulgated is distorted in a room of mirrors, half +of it is a truism, the other half a falsism. That which began as a +denunciation of tea-table morality, is itself the tea-table morality of +the next generation: an outcry against cant may become the quintessence +of cant; a revolt from tyranny the basis of a new tyranny; the +condemnation of sects the foundation of a new sect; the proclamation of +peace a bone of contention. There is an ambiguity in most general maxims, +and a seed of error which assumes preponderance over the truth when the +interpreters of the maxim are men easily led by formulae. Nowhere is this +degeneracy more strikingly manifested than in the history of some of +the maxims which Carlyle either first promulgated or enforced by his +adoption. When he said, or quoted, "Silence is better than speech," he +meant to inculcate patience and reserve. Always think before you speak: +rather lose fluency than waste words: never speak for the sake of +speaking. It is the best advice, but they who need it most are the last +to take it; those who speak and write not because they have something to +say, but because they wish to say or must say something, will continue to +write and speak as long as they can spell or articulate. Thoughtful men +are apt to misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit +still and leave the "war of words to those who like it." When Carlyle +condemned self-consciousness, a constant introspection and comparison of +self with others, he theoretically struck at the root of the morbid moods +of himself and other mental analysts; he had no intention to over-exalt +mere muscularity or to deify athletic sports. It were easy to multiply +instances of truths clearly conceived at first and parodied in their +promulgation; but when we have the distinct authority of the discoverer +himself for their correct interpretation, we can at once appeal to it. +A yet graver, not uncommon, source of error arises when a great writer +misapplies the maxims of his own philosophy, or states them in such a +manner that they are sure to be misapplied. + +Carlyle has laid down the doctrine that MIGHT IS RIGHT at various times +and in such various forms, with and without modification or caveat, that +the real meaning can only be ascertained from his own application of it. +He has made clear, what goes without saying, that by "might" he does not +intend mere physical strength. + + Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute + force; conquest of that kind does not endure. The strong man, + what is he? The wise man. His muscles and bones are not + stronger than ours; but his soul is stronger, clearer, + nobler.... Late in man's history, yet clearly at length, it + becomes manifest to the dullest that mind is stronger than + matter, that not brute Force, but only Persuasion and Faith, + is the king of this world.... Intellect has to govern this + world and will do it. + +There are sentences which indicate that he means something more than even +mental force; as in his Diary (Froude, iv. 422), "I shall have to tell +Lecky, Right is the eternal symbol of Might"; and again in _Chartism_, +"Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them +centuries to try it, and they are found to be identical. The strong thing +is the just thing. In kings we have either a divine right or a diabolic +wrong." On the other hand, we read in _Past and Present_:-- + + Savage fighting Heptarchies: their lighting is an + ascertainment who has the right to rule over them. + +And again-- + + Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: _either_ of + these, once ascertained, puts an end to battle. + +And elsewhere-- + + Rights men have none save to be governed justly.... + + Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere correctly + articulated mights.... All goes by wager of battle in this + world, and it is, well understood, the measure of all + worth.... By right divine the strong and capable govern the + weak and foolish.... Strength we may say is Justice itself. + +It is not left for us to balance those somewhat indefinite definitions. +Carlyle has himself in his Histories illustrated and enforced his own +interpretations of the summary views of his political treatises. There +he has demonstrated that his doctrine, "Might is Right," is no mere +unguarded expression of the truism that moral might is right. In his +hands it implies that virtue is in all cases a property of strength, that +strength is everywhere a property of virtue; that power of whatever sort +having any considerable endurance, carries with it the seal and signal of +its claim to respect, that whatever has established itself has, in the +very act, established its right to be established. He is never careful +enough to keep before his readers what he must himself have dimly +perceived, that victory _by right_ belongs not to the force of will +alone, apart from clear and just conceptions of worthy ends. Even in its +crude form, the maxim errs not so much in what it openly asserts as +in what it implicitly denies. Aristotle (the first among ancients to +_question_ the institution of slavery, as Carlyle has been one of the +last of moderns to defend it) more guardedly admits that strength is +in itself _a_ good,--[Greek: kai estin aei to kratoun en uperochae +agathoutinos],--but leaves it to be maintained that there are forms of +good which do not show themselves in excess of strength. Several of +Carlyle's conclusions and verdicts seem to show that he only acknowledges +those types of excellence that have already manifested themselves as +powers; and this doctrine (which, if adopted in earlier ages, would +practically have left possession with physical strength) colours all his +History and much of his Biography. Energy of any sort compels his homage. +Himself a Titan, he shakes hands with all Titans, Gothic gods, Knox, +Columbus, the fuliginous Mirabeau, burly Danton dying with "no weakness" +on his lips. The fulness of his charity is for the errors of Mohammed, +Cromwell, Burns, Napoleon I.,--whose mere belief in his own star he +calls sincerity,--the atrocious Francia, the Norman kings, the Jacobins, +Brandenburg despots; the fulness of his contempt for the conscientious +indecision of Necker, the Girondists, the Moderates of our own +Commonwealth. He condones all that ordinary judgments regard as the +tyranny of conquest, and has for the conquered only a _vae victis._ In +this spirit, he writes :-- + + M. Thierry celebrates with considerable pathos the fate of + the Saxons; the fate of the Welsh, too, moves him; of the + Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into + the mountains, whither they were not worth following. What + can we say, but that the cause which pleased the gods had in + the end to please Cato also? + +When all is said, Carlyle's inconsistent optimism throws no more light +than others have done on the apparent relapses of history, as the +overthrow of Greek civilisation, the long night of the Dark Ages, the +spread of the Russian power during the last century, or of continental +Militarism in the present. In applying the tests of success or failure we +must bear in mind that success is from its very nature conspicuous. We +only know that brave men have failed when they have had a "sacred bard." +The good that is lost is, _ipso facto_, forgotten. We can rarely tell of +greatness unrecognised, for the very fact of our being able to tell of it +would imply a former recognition. The might of evil walks in darkness: +we remember the martyrs who, by their deaths, ultimately drove the +Inquisition from England; not those whose courage quailed. "It was their +fate," as a recent writer remarks, "that was the tragedy." Reading +Carlyle's maxim between the lines of his chapter on the Reformation, +and noting that the Inquisition triumphed in Spain, while in Austria, +Bavaria, and Bohemia Protestantism was stifled by stratagem or by force; +that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was successful; and that the +revocation of the Edict of Nantes killed the France of Henry IV., we see +its limitations even in the long perspective of the past. Let us, +however, grant that in the ultimate issue the Platonic creed, +"Justice is stronger than injustice," holds good. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Mill's _Liberty_, chap. ii. pp. 52-54] + +It is when Carlyle turns to politics and regards them as history +accomplished instead of history in progress that his principle leads to +the most serious error. No one has a more withering contempt for evil as +meanness and imbecility; but he cannot see it in the strong hand. Of two +views, equally correct, "evil is weakness," such evil as sloth, and +"corruptio optimi pessima," such evil as tyranny--he only recognises the +first. Despising the palpable anarchies of passion, he has no word of +censure for the more settled form of anarchy which announced, "Order +reigns at Warsaw." He refuses his sympathy to all unsuccessful efforts, +and holds that if races are trodden under foot, they are [Greek: phusei +doulo dunamenoi allou einai] they who have allowed themselves to be +subjugated deserve their fate. The cry of "oppressed nationalities" was to +him mere cant. His Providence is on the side of the big battalions, and +forgives very violent means to an orderly end. To his credit he declined +to acknowledge the right of Louis Napoleon to rule France; but he accepted +the Czars, and ridiculed Mazzini till forced to admit, almost with +chagrin, that he had, "after all," substantially succeeded. + + Treason never prospers, what's the reason? + That when it prospers, none dare call it treason. + +Apprehending, on the whole more keenly than any of his contemporaries, +the foundations of past greatness, his invectives and teaching lay +athwart much that is best as well as much that is most hazardous in the +new ideas of the age. Because mental strength, endurance, and industry +do not appear prominently in the Negro race, he looks forward with +satisfaction to the day when a band of white buccaneers shall undo +Toussaint l'Ouverture's work of liberation in Hayti, advises the English +to revoke the Emancipation Act in Jamaica, and counsels the Americans +to lash their slaves--better, he admits, made serfs and not saleable by +auction--not more than is necessary to get from them an amount of work +satisfactory to the Anglo-Saxon mind. Similarly he derides all movements +based on a recognition of the claims of weakness to consideration and +aid. + + Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, + Doing or suffering. + +The application of the maxim, "Might is Right," to a theory of government +is obvious; the strongest government must be the best, _i.e._ that in +which Power, in the last resort supreme, is concentrated in the hands of +a single ruler; the weakest, that in which it is most widely diffused, +is the worst. Carlyle in his Address to the Edinburgh students commends +Machiavelli for insight in attributing the preservation of Rome to +the institution of the Dictatorship. In his _Friedrich_ this view is +developed in the lessons he directs the reader to draw from Prussian +history. The following conveys his final comparative estimate of an +absolute and a limited monarchy:-- + + This is the first triumph of the constitutional Principle + which has since gone to such sublime heights among + us--heights which we begin at last to suspect may be depths + leading down, all men now ask whitherwards. A much-admired + invention in its time, that of letting go the rudder or + setting a wooden figure expensively to take care of it, and + discovering that the ship would sail of itself so much the + more easily. Of all things a nation needs first to be + drilled, and a nation that has not been governed by + so-called tyrants never came to much in the world. + +Among the currents of thought contending in our age, two are +conspicuously opposed. The one says: Liberty is an end not a mere means +in itself; apart from practical results the crown of life. Freedom of +thought and its expression, and freedom of action, bounded only by +the equal claim of our fellows, are desirable for their own sakes as +constituting national vitality: and even when, as is sometimes the case, +Liberty sets itself against improvements for a time, it ultimately +accomplishes more than any reforms could accomplish without it. The fewer +restraints that are imposed from without on human beings the better: the +province of law is only to restrain men from violently or fraudulently +invading the province of other men. This view is maintained and in great +measure sustained by J.S. Mill in his _Liberty_, the _Areopagitica_ of +the nineteenth century, and more elaborately if not more philosophically +set forth in the comprehensive treatise of Wilhelm von Humboldt on _The +Sphere and Duties of Government_. These writers are followed with various +reserves by Grote, Buckle, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and by Mr. Lecky. Mill +writes:-- + + The idea of rational Democracy is not that the people + themselves govern; but that they have security for good + government. This security they can only have by retaining in + their own hands the ultimate control. The people ought to be + masters employing servants more skilful than themselves. + + [Footnote: It should be noted that Mill lays as great + stress on Individualism as Carlyle does, and a more + practical stress. He has the same belief in the essential + mediocrity of the masses of men whose "think ing is done for + them ... through the newspapers," and the same scorn for + "the present low state of society." He writes, "The + initiation of all wise and noble things comes and must come + from individuals: generally at first from some one + individual"; but adds, "I am not countenancing the sort of + 'hero-worship' which applauds the strong man of genius for + forcibly seizing on the government of the world.... All he + can claim is freedom to point out the way."] + +To this Carlyle, with at least the general assent of Mr. Froude, Mr. +Ruskin, and Sir James Stephen, substantially replies:-- + + In freedom for itself there is nothing to raise a man above + a fly; the value of a human life is that of its work done; + the prime province of law is to get from its subjects the + most of the best work. The first duty of a people is to + find--which means to accept--their chief; their second and + last to obey him. We see to what men have been brought by + "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," by the dreams of + idealogues, and the purchase of votes. + +This, the main drift of Carlyle's political teaching, rests on his +absolute belief in strength (which always grows by concentration), on his +unqualified admiration of order, and on his utter disbelief in what his +adverse friend Mazzini was wont, with over-confidence, to appeal to as +"collective wisdom." Theoretically there is much to be said for this +view: but, in practice, it involves another idealism as aerial as that of +any "idealogue" on the side of Liberty. It points to the establishment of +an Absolutism which must continue to exist, whether wisdom survives in +the absolute rulers or ceases to survive. [Greek: Kratein d' esti kai mae +dikios.] The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have been beneficent in +times of revolution; but their right to rule is apt to pass before their +power, and when the latter descends by inheritance, as from M. Aurelius +to Commodus, it commonly degenerates. It is well to learn, from a safe +distance, the amount of good that may be associated with despotism: its +worst evil is lawlessness, it not only suffocates freedom and induces +inertia, but it renders wholly uncertain the life of those under its +control. Most men would rather endure the "slings and arrows" of an +irresponsible press, the bustle and jargon of many elections, the delay +of many reforms, the narrowness of many streets, than have lived from +1814 to 1840, with the noose around all necks, in Paraguay, or even +precariously prospered under the paternal shield of the great Fritz's +extraordinary father, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. + +Carlyle's doctrine of the ultimate identity of "might and right" never +leads, with him, to its worst consequence, a fatalistic or indolent +repose; the withdrawal from the world's affairs of the soul "holding no +form of creed but contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent +optimist nor a consistent pessimist is apparent from his faith in man's +partial ability to mould his fate. Not "belief, belief," but "action, +action," is his working motto. On the title-page of the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_ he quotes from Rushworth on a colloquy of Sir David Ramsay and +Lord Reay in 1638: "Then said his Lordship, 'Well, God mend all!'--'Nay, +by God, Donald; we must help Him to mend it,' said the other." + +"I am not a Tory," he exclaimed, after the clamour on the publication of +_Chartism_, "no, but one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest of +Radicals." With the Toryism which merely says "stand to your guns" and, +for the rest, "let well alone," he had no sympathy. There was nothing +selfish in his theories. He felt for and was willing to fight for +mankind, though he could not trust them; even his "king" he defines to +be a minister or servant of the State. "The love of power," he says, "if +thou understand what to the manful heart power signifies, is a very noble +and indispensable love"; that is, the power to raise men above the "Pig +Philosophy," the worship of clothes, the acquiescence in wrong. "The +world is not here for me, but I for it." "Thou shalt is written upon life +in characters as terrible as thou shalt not"; are protests against the +mere negative virtues which religionists are wont unduly to exalt. + +Carlyle's so-called Mysticism is a part of his German poetry; in the +sphere of common life and politics he made use of plain prose, and often +proved himself as shrewd as any of his northern race. An excessively +"good hater," his pet antipathies are generally bad things. In the +abstract they are always so; but about the abstract there is no +dispute. Every one dislikes or professes to dislike shams, hypocrisies, +phantoms,--by whatever tiresomely reiterated epithet he may be pleased to +address things that are not what they pretend to be. Diogenes's toil with +the lantern alone distinguished the cynic Greek, in admiration of an +honest man. Similarly the genuine zeal of his successor appears in +painstaking search; his discrimination in the detection, his eloquence in +his handling of humbugs. Occasional blunders in the choice of objects +of contempt and of worship--between which extremes he seldom +halts,--demonstrate his fallibility, but outside the sphere of literary +and purely personal criticism he seldom attacks any one, or anything, +without a show of reason. To all gospels there are two sides; and a great +teacher who, by reason of the very fire that makes him great, disdains to +halt and hesitate and consider the _juste milieu,_ seldom guards himself +against misinterpretation or excess. Mazzini writes, "He weaves and +unweaves his web like Penelope, preaches by turns life and nothingness, +and wearies out the patience of his readers by continually carrying them +from heaven to hell." Carlyle, like Ruskin, keeps himself right not by +caveats but by contradictions of himself, and sometimes in a way least to +be expected. Much of his writing is a blast of war, or a protest against +the philanthropy that sets charity before justice. Yet in a letter to the +London Peace Congress of 1851, dated 18th July, we find:-- + + I altogether approve of your object. Clearly the less war + and cutting of throats we have among us, it will be the + better for us all. As men no longer wear swords in the + streets, so neither by and by will nations.... How many + meetings would one expedition to Russia cover the cost of? + +He denounced the Americans, in apparent ignorance of their +"Constitution," for having no Government; and yet admitted that what he +called their anarchy had done perhaps more than anything else could have +done to subdue the wilderness. He spoke with scorn of the "rights of +women," their demand for the suffrage, and the _cohue_ of female authors, +expressing himself in terms of ridiculous disparagement of writers so +eminent as George Sand and George Eliot; but he strenuously advocated +the claim of women to a recognised medical education. He reviled "Model +Prisons" as pampering institutes of "a universal sluggard and scoundrel +amalgamation society," and yet seldom passed on the streets one of the +"Devil's elect" without giving him a penny. He set himself against every +law or custom that tended to make harder the hard life of the poor: there +was no more consistent advocate of the abolition of the "Game Laws." +Emerson says of the mediaeval architects, "they builded better than they +knew." Carlyle felt more softly than he said, and could not have been +trusted to execute one of his own Rhadamanthine decrees. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ a remarkable instance of this in the best short _Life of +Carlyle_, that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147.] + +Scratch the skin of the Tartar and you find beneath the despised +humanitarian. Everything that he has written on "The Condition of England +Question" has a practical bearing, and many of his suggestions have found +a place on our code, vindicating the assertion of the _Times_ of the day +after his death, that "the novelties and paradoxes of 1846 are to a large +extent nothing but the good sense of 1881." Such are:--his insistence on +affording every facility for merit to rise from the ranks, embodied in +measures against promotion by Purchase; his advocacy of State-aided +Emigration, of administrative and civil service Reform,--the abolition of +"the circumlocution office" in Downing Street,--of the institution of a +Minister of Education; his dwelling on the duties as well as the rights +of landowners,--the theme of so many Land Acts; his enlarging on the +superintendence of labour,--made practical in Factory and Limited Hours +Bills--on care of the really destitute, on the better housing of the +poor, on the regulation of weights and measures; his general contention +for fixing more exactly the province of the legislative and the executive +bodies. Carlyle's view that we should find a way to public life for +men of eminence who will not cringe to mobs, has made a step towards +realisation in further enfranchisement of Universities. Other of his +proposals, as the employment of our army and navy in time of peace, and +the forcing of able-bodied paupers into "industrial regiments," have +become matter of debate which may pave the way to legislation. One of +his desiderata, a practical veto on "puffing," it has not yet been found +feasible, by the passing of an almost prohibitive duty on advertisements, +to realise. + +Besides these specific recommendations, three ideas are dominant in +Carlyle's political treatises. _First_--a vehement protest against +the doctrine of _Laissez faire_; which, he says, "on the part of the +governing classes will, we repeat again and again, have to cease; pacific +mutual divisions of the spoil and a would-let-well-alone will no longer +suffice":--a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the Trades Union +wars, of which he failed to see the issue. He is so strongly in favour of +_Free-trade_ between nations that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared +to make it _compulsory_. "All men," he writes in _Past and Present_, +"trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do +it. Our friends of China, who refused to trade, had we not to argue with, +them, in cannon-shot at last?" But in Free-trade between class and class, +man and man, within the bounds of the same kingdom, he has no trust: he +will not leave "supply and demand" to adjust their relations. The +result of doing so is, he holds, the scramble between Capital for larger +interest and Labour for higher wage, in which the rich if unchecked will +grind the poor to starvation, or drive them to revolt. + +_Second_.--As a corollary to the abolition of _Laissez faire_, he +advocates the _Organisation of Labour_, "the problem of the whole future +to all who will pretend to govern men." The phrase from its vagueness +has naturally provoked much discussion. Carlyle's bigoted dislike of +Political Economists withheld him from studying their works; and he seems +ignorant of the advances that have been made by the "dismal science," +or of what it has proved and disproved. Consequently, while brought in +evidence by most of our modern Social idealists, Comtists and Communists +alike, all they can say is that he has given to their protest against the +existing state of the commercial world a more eloquent expression than +their own. He has no compact scheme,--as that of St. Simon or Fourier, or +Owen--few such definite proposals as those of Karl Marx, Bellamy, Hertzka +or Gronlund, or even William Morris. He seems to share with Mill the view +that "the restraints of communism are weak in comparison with those of +capitalists," and with Morris to look far forward to some golden age; he +has given emphatic support to a copartnership of employers and employed, +in which the profits of labour shall be apportioned by some rule of +equity, and insisted on the duty of the State to employ those who are out +of work in public undertakings. + + Enlist, stand drill, and become from banditti soldiers of + industry. I will lead you to the Irish bogs ... English + foxcovers ... New Forest, Salisbury Plains, and Scotch + hill-sides which as yet feed only sheep ... thousands of + square miles ... destined yet to grow green crops and fresh + butter and milk and beef without limit:-- + +an estimate with the usual exaggeration. But Carlyle's later work +generally advances on his earlier, in its higher appreciation of +Industrialism. He looks forward to the boon of "one big railway right +across America," a prophecy since three times fulfilled; and admits that +"the new omnipotence of the steam engine is hewing aside quite other +mountains than the physical," _i.e._ bridging the gulf between races +and binding men to men. He had found, since writing _Sartor_, that dear +cotton and slow trains do not help one nearer to God, freedom, and +immortality. + +Carlyle's _third_ practical point is his advocacy of _Emigration,_ or +rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy for Over-population. +He writes of "Malthusianism" with his constant contempt of convictions +other than his own:-- + + A full formed man is worth more than a horse.... One + man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him + earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded + indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and + delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your + population in the Pampas and Savannahs--in the Curragh of + Kildare? Let there be an _Emigration Service,_ ... so + that every honest willing workman who found England too + strait, and the organisation of labour incomplete, might + find a bridge to carry him to western lands.... Our little + isle has grown too narrow for us, but the world + is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.... If + this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not + everywhere else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to + us "Come and till me, come and reap me"? + +On this follows an eloquent passage about our friendly Colonies, +"overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas." Carlyle +would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans, +and Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; but the +problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines +to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to +overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps. + +In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is +ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of +Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite +tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's +leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public +life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive +to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day +demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of +_laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to +become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one, +of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule +for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample +without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common +good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's +blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many +respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits +of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity with an +eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with equal force put to scorn the +superstition of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts, +some of which may find a mark the archer little meant. + +[Footnote: _Vide passim_ the chapter in _Liberty_ entitled "Limits to the +Authority of Society over the Individual," where Mill denounces the idea +of "the majority of operatives in many branches of industry ... that bad +workmen ought to receive the same wages as good."] + + + + +CHAPTER X + +CARLYLE'S RELIGION AND ETHICS--RELATION TO PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE + +The same advance or retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is +traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages +of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the +widest sense--faith in some supreme Power above us yet acting for us--was +the great factor of his inner life. But when we further question his +Creed, he is either bewilderingly inconsistent or designedly vague. The +answer he gives is that of Schiller: "Welche der Religionen? Keine +von allen. Warum? Aus Religion." In 1870 he writes: "I begin to think +religion again possible for whoever will piously struggle upwards and +sacredly refuse to tell lies: which indeed will mostly mean refusal to +speak at all on that topic." This and other implied protests against +intrusive inquisition are valid in the case of those who keep their own +secrets: it is impertinence to peer and "interview" among the sanctuaries +of a poet or politician or historian who does not himself open their +doors. But Carlyle has done this in all his books. A reticent writer may +veil his convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. An +avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interrogation as to his text. + +With all the evidence before us--his collected works, his friendly +confidences, his journals, his fragmentary papers, as the interesting +series of jottings entitled "Spiritual Optics," and the partial accounts +to Emerson and others of the design of the "Exodus from Hounds-ditch"--it +remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We know that he +abandoned the ministry, for which he was destined, because, at an early +date, he found himself at irreconcilable variance, not on matters of +detail but on essentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism. +We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; that he went, as +continuously as possible for a mind so liable to fits and starts, further +and further from the faith of his fathers; but that he remained to the +last so much affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early +associations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist without +dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a Puritan who had lost +his creed." We know that he revered the character of Christ, and +theoretically accepted the ideal of self-sacrifice: the injunction +to return good for evil he never professed to accept; and vicarious +sacrifice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught that every +man must "dree his weird." We know that he not only believed in God as +revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but +that he threatened, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point +to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in +free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the +greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we +desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of +exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did _not_ believe. +This process is simplified by the fact that he assailed all convictions +other than his own. + +Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all +forms of _Materialism_ and _Hedonism,_ which he brands as "worships of +Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may +lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain. +Similarly he denounces _Atheism,_ never more vehemently than in his +Journals of 1868-1869:-- + + Had no God made this world it were an insupportable place. Laws without + a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. All that is good, + generous, wise, right ... who or what could by any possibility have + given it to me, but One who first had it to give! This is not logic, it + is axiom.... Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic specialities."... + Canst _thou_ by searching find out God? I am not surprised thou canst + not, vain fool. If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered + hearts, there will be seen such a world as few are dreaming of. + +Carlyle calls evidence from all quarters, appealing to Napoleon's +question, "Who made all that?" and to Friedrich's belief that intellect +"could not have been put into him by an entity that had none of its own," +in support of what he calls the Eternal Fact of Facts, to which he clings +as to the Rock of Ages, the sole foundation of hope and of morality to +one having at root little confidence in his fellow-men. + +If people are only driven upon virtuous conduct ... by association of +ideas, and there is no "Infinite Nature of Duty," the world, I should +say, had better count its spoons to begin with, and look out for +hurricanes and earthquakes to end with. + +Carlyle hazardously confessed that as regards the foundations of his +faith and morals, with Napoleon and Friedrich II. on his side, he had +against him the advancing tide of modern _Science._ He did not attempt +to disprove its facts, or, as Emerson, to sublimate them into a new +idealism; he scoffed at and made light of them, _e.g._-- + + Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very + sublime achievement either. I often think ... it is pretty + much all that science in this age has done. ... Protoplasm + (unpleasant doctrine that we are all, soul and body, made of + a kind of blubber, found in nettles among other organisms) + appears to be delightful to many.... Yesterday there came a + pamphlet published at Lewes, a hallelujah on the advent of + Atheism.... The real joy of Julian (the author) was what + surprised me, like the shout of a hyaena on finding that the + whole universe was actually carrion. In about seven minutes + my great Julian was torn in two and lying in the place fit + for him.... Descended from Gorillas! Then where is the place + for a Creator? Man is only a little higher than the tadpoles, + says our new Evangelist.... Nobody need argue with these + people. Logic never will decide the matter, or will seem to + decide it their way. He who traces nothing of God in his own + soul, will never find God in the world of matter--mere + circlings of force there, of iron regulation, of universal + death and merciless indifference.... Matter itself is either + Nothing or else a product due to man's _mind_. ... The + fast-increasing flood of Atheism on me takes no hold--does + not even wet the soles of my feet. + + [Footnote: Cf. Othello, "Not a jot, not a jot." Carlyle writes + on this question with the agitation of one himself not quite at + ease, with none of the calmness of a faith perfectly secure.] + +"Carlyle," says one of his intimates, "speaks as if Darwin wished to rob +or to insult him." _Scepticism_ proper fares as hardly in his hands as +definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in +the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as +intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole +soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal +to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace +of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of life as "a +most melancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean Paul, +"heaven becomes a gas, God a force, and the second world a grave." He +fails to see that all such appeals are beside the question; and deserts +the ground of his answer to John Sterling's expostulation, "that is +downright Pantheism": "What if it were Pot-theism if it is _true_?" It is +the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sympathy for suffering +to override his Stoic theories; but it vitiated his reasoning, and made +it impossible for him to appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional, +religiosity of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called +_Orthodoxy_--whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High or Low; he +abhorred Puseyism, Jesuitry, spoke of the "Free Kirk and other rubbish," +and recorded his definite disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation +and in Miracles. "It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing has +ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation of God's will and +justice, and the stars in their courses are a perpetual miracle, is +his refrain. _This is not what Orthodoxy means_, and no one was more +intolerant than Carlyle of all shifts and devices to slur the difference +between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his own "Exodus from +Houndsditch" might only open the way to the wilderness, he would allow +no one else to take in hand his uncompleted task; and disliked Strauss +and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. "He spoke to me once," says +Mr. Froude, "with loathing of the _Vie de Jesus_." I asked if a true life +could be written. He said, "Yes, certainly, if it were right to do so; +but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to Emerson:-- + + You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom + I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen + were all a kind of half-way-house characters, who I thought + should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in + unbelief, in faint possible _Theism_; which I like + considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, + deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed + among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat. + +What then is left for Carlyle's Creed? Logically little, emotionally +much. If it must be defined, it was that of a Theist with a difference. A +spirit of flame from the empyrean, he found no food in the cold _Deism_ +of the eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image from its +pedestal, as by the music of the "Winter's Tale," to live among men and +inspire them. He inherited and _coute que coute_ determined to persist in +the belief that there was a personal God--"a Maker, voiceless, formless, +within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, "My belief in a +special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable"; and +later, "Some strange belief in a special Providence was always in me at +intervals." Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as good +as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days. + +"To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew +prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the God +on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is +He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's God is not a mere +"tendency that makes for righteousness"; He is a guardian and a guide, to +be addressed in the words of Pope's _Universal Prayer_, which he adopted +as his own. A personal God does not mean a great Figure Head of the +Universe,--Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before he became "a +knight" of the Holy Ghost,--it means a Supreme Power, Love, or Justice +having relations to the individual man: in this sense Carlyle believed in +Him, though more as Justice, exacting "the terriblest penalties," than +as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives. He never entered into +controversies about the efficacy of prayer; but, far from deriding, he +recommended it as "a turning of one's soul to the Highest." In 1869 he +writes:-- + + I occasionally feel able to wish, with my whole softened + heart--it is my only form of prayer--"Great Father, oh, if + Thou canst, have pity on her and on me and on all such!" In + this at least there is no harm. + +And about the same date to Erskine:-- + + "Our Father;" in my sleepless tossings, these words, that + brief and grand prayer, came strangely into my mind with an + altogether new emphasis; as if written and shining for me + in mild pure splendour on the black bosom of the night there; + when I as it were read them word by word, with a sudden + check to my imperfect wanderings, with a sudden softness of + composure which was much unexpected. Not for perhaps thirty + or forty years had I once formally repeated that prayer: nay, + I never felt before how intensely the voice of man's soul it + is, the inmost inspiration of all that is high and pious in + poor human nature, right worthy to be recommended with an + "After this manner pray ye." + +Carlyle holds that if we do our duty--the best work we can--and +faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, God will do the best +for us in this life. As regards the next we have seen that he ended with +Goethe's hope. At an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his +father's death (_Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 65) he wrote:-- + + Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told: + yet under time does there not lie eternity? ... Perhaps my + father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near + me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so + please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one + another, recognise one another. ... The possibility, nay (in + some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows + plainer to me. + +On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife: "We shall yet go to her. +God is great. God is good": and earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the +loss of his brother:-- + + "What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead. + + Your brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both + you and I are.... Perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and + the tears be wiped from all eyes. One thing is no perhaps: + surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of + us. If it be not His will, then is it not better so?" + +After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immortality came +uppermost in his mind; but his conclusions are, like those of Burns, +never dogmatic:-- + + The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us. + "In my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are + God you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do + you know more than I, or any of us? + +And later-- + + What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor + mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted + to go farther"? + +To Emerson in 1867 he writes:-- + + I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily + serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final + chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and + Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to + discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their + sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring + nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger + to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my + door against. + +There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's conviction that +he had to make war on credulity and to assail the pretences of a _formal +Belief_ (which he regards as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple +with real Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, the +Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the miracle of miracles; +sight and knowledge leave us no "less forlorn," and beneath all the +soundings of science there is a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind +that qualified him to be the exponent of the religious epochs in history. +"By this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, "he has done so much to vindicate +and bring to light the Augustan age of Christianity in England," adding +that it is the secret also of the great writer's appreciation of the +higher Teutonic literature. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of +"God in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to constrain +unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good and evil are absolute +opposites, are his links with the Puritans, whom he habitually exalts in +variations of the following strain:-- + + The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest + purpose awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts. + Not the body of heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to + die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been, + and yet shall be immortal, has, for the present, passed away. + +Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he regarded with a feeling +akin to worship, was in all essentials the reverse of a Puritan. + +To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, may be applied +the phrase made use of in reference to the greatest of all the series of +ancient books-- + + Hic liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata quaerit, + Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua. + +From passages like those above quoted--his complaints of the falling +off of old Scotch faith; his references to the kingdom of a God who has +written "in plain letters on the human conscience a Law that all may +read"; his insistence that the great soul of the world is just; his +belief in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the divine +depths of sorrow--from all these many of his Scotch disciples persist in +maintaining that their master was to the end essentially a Christian. The +question between them and other critics who assert that "he had renounced +Christianity" is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomenclature; it +is hard exactly to decide it in the case of a man who so constantly found +again in feeling what he had abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was +to the last an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's and +of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies; he attempts in vain to tear +off the husk that cannot be separated from its kernel. He believes in no +historical Resurrection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts +for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the +Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is +withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards +of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives +way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out," +and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity +Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Masson says that "Carlyle had +abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its +Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain on the other side: +but the _Metaphysic_ of Calvinism is precisely what he retained; the +alleged _Facts_ of Revelation he discarded; of the _Ethic_ of the Gospels +he accepted perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard +the teaching of Christ as final. + +[Footnote: A passage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life and Letters of Robert +Browning_, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic for +general quotation.] + +His doctrine of Renunciation (suggested by the Three Reverences in +_Wilhelm Meister's Travels_) is Carlyle's transmutation, if not +transfiguration, of Puritanism; but it took neither in him nor in Goethe +any very consistent form, save that it meant Temperance, keeping the +body well under the control of the head, the will strong, and striving, +through all the lures of sense, to attain to some ideal life. + +Both write of Christianity as "a thing of beauty," a perennial power, +a spreading tree, a fountain of youth; but Goethe was too much of a +Greek--though, as has been said, "a very German Greek"--to be, in any +proper sense of the word, a Christian; Carlyle too much of a Goth. His +Mythology is Norse; his Ethics, despite his prejudice against the race, +are largely Jewish. He proclaimed his code with the thunders of Sinai, +not in the reconciling voice of the Beatitudes. He gives or forces on us +world-old truths splendidly set, with a leaning to strength and endurance +rather than to advancing thought. He did not, says a fine critic of +morals, recognise that "morality also has passed through the straits." He +did not really believe in Content, which has been called the Catholic, +nor in Progress, more questionably styled the Protestant virtue. His +often excellent practical rule to "do the duty nearest to hand" may be +used to gag the intellect in its search after the goal; so that even his +Everlasting Yea, as a predetermined affirmation, may ultimately result in +a deeper negation. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Professor Jones's _Browning as a Philosophical and +Religious, Teacher_, pp. 66-90.] + +"Duty," to him as to Wordsworth, "stern daughter of the voice of God," +has two aspects, on each of which he dwells with a persistent iteration. +The _first_ is _Surrender_ to something higher and wider than ourselves. +That he has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the +self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly means that correct +theories of our complex life are impossible; but Matthew Arnold's +criticism, that his Ethics "are made paradoxical by his attack on +Happiness, which he should rather have referred to as the result of +Labour and of Truth," can only be rebutted by the assertion that the +pursuit of pleasure as an end defeats itself. The _second_ aspect of his +"Duty" is _Work_. His master Goethe is to him as Apollo to Hercules, as +Shakespeare to Luther; the one entire as the chrysolite, the other like +the Schreckhorn rent and riven; the words of the former are oracles, of +the latter battles; the one contemplates and beautifies truth, the other +wrestles and fights for it. Carlyle has a limited love of abstract truth; +of action his love is unlimited. His lyre is not that of Orpheus, but +that of Amphion which built the walls of Thebes. _Laborare est orare._ He +alone is honourable who does his day's work by sword or plough or pen. +Strength is the crown of toil. Action converts the ring of necessity that +girds us into a ring of duty, frees us from dreams, and makes us men. + + The midnight phantoms feel the spell, + The shadows sweep away. + +There are few grander passages in literature than some of those litanies +of labour. They have the roll of music that makes armies march, and if +they have been made so familiar as to cease to seem new, it is largely +owing to the power of the writer which has compelled them to become +common property. + +Carlyle's practical Ethics, though too little indulgent to the light and +play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the +relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his +conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical +imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in +flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite +above and around, but not _in_ the finite. He insisted on the community +of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am I my brother's +keeper?" + + All things, the minutest that man does, influence all men, + the very look of his face blesses or curses.... It is a + mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my + hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe. + +But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and so failed to +attain to the Optimism after which he often strove. He held, with +Browning, that "God's in His heaven," but not that "All's right with the +world." His view was the Zoroastrian _*athanatos machae*_, "in God's +world presided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a "divine +infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who said "The world is a +lie, but God is truth," landed him in an _impasse_; he could not answer +the obvious retort,--Did then God make and love a lie, or make it hating +it? There must have been some other power _to eteron_, or, as Mill in +his Apologia for _Theism_ puts it, a limit to the assumed Omnipotence. +Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, inconsequently halts between them; +and his prevailing view of mankind adds to his dilemma. + +[Footnote: Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist +Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer," +ejaculated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er Remit nicht diese +verdarnmte Basse."] + +He imposes an "infinite duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an +infinite punishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind sets +its hardest tasks to itself; or that, as Emerson declares, "the assertion +of our weakness and deficiency is the fine innuendo by which the soul +makes its enormous claim." Hence, according to Mazzini, "He stands between +the individual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes the +human being by comparing him with God. From, his lips, so daring, we seem +to hear every instant the cry of the Breton mariner, 'My God, protect me; +my bark is so small and Thy ocean so vast.'" Similarly, the critic of +Browning above referred to concludes of the great prose writer, whom he +has called the poet's twin: + +"He has let loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight of the +future: he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there and was +denied the view from Pisgah." + +Carlyle's Theism is defective because it is not sufficiently Pantheistic; +but, in his view of the succession of events in the "roaring loom of +time," of the diorama of majesty girt by mystery, he has found a +cosmic Pantheism and given expression to it in a passage which is the +culmination of the English prose eloquence, as surely as Wordsworth's +great Ode is the high-tide [A phrase applied by Emerson to the +Ode.] mark of the English verse, of this century:-- + + Are we not sprite shaped into a body, into an Appearance; + and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is + no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of + Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us as + round the veriest spectre is Eternity, and to Eternity + minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love + and Faith as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of + beatified Souls? And again do we not squeak and gibber and + glide, bodeful and feeble and fearful, and revel in our mad + dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the morning air + summons us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake + and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon; does the steel + host that yelled in fierce battle shouts at Issus and + Arbela remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, + even as perturbed goblins must? Napoleon, too, with his + Moscow retreats and Austerlitz campaigns, was it all other + than the veriest spectre hunt; which has now with its + howling tumult that made night hideous flitted away? + Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the + earth openly at noontide; some half hundred have vanished + from it, some half hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch + ticks once. O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider + that we not only carry each a future ghost within him, but are + in very deed ghosts. + + [Footnote: _Cf._ "Tempest," "We are such stuff as dreams are + made of."] + + These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life- + blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow; a + shadow system gathered round our _me_, wherein through some + moments or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the + Flesh. So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the + end. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a + body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night on Heaven's mission + appears. What force and fire there is in each he expends, one + grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the + giddy Alpine heights of science; one madly dashed in pieces on + the rocks of Strife in war with his fellow, and then the heaven- + sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even + to sense becomes a vanished shadow. Thus, like some wild naming, + wild thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this + mysterious Mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick- + succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God- + created fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge from the Inane, + haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again + into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas + filled up. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is + stamped; the rear of the host read traces of the earliest van. + But whence, O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not. Faith knows not; + only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. + +Volumes might be written on Carlyle's relations, of sentiment, belief, +opinion, method of thought, and manner of expression, to other thinkers. +His fierce independence, and sense of his own prophetic mission to the +exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often +unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who +impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to +acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been +wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which +exercised so marked an influence on his New England disciples. He never +realised the part played by the philosophers of Greece in moulding the +speculations of modern Europe. He knew Plato mainly through the Socratic +dialogues. There is, however, a passage in a letter to Emerson (March 13th +1853) which indicates that he had read, comparatively late in life, some +portions of _The Republic_. "I was much struck with Plato last year, and +his notions about Democracy--mere _Latter-Day Pamphlets, saxa et faces_ +... refined into empyrean radiance and the lightning of the gods." The +tribute conveyed in the comparison is just; for there is nothing but +community of political view between the bitter acorns dropped from the +gnarled border oak and the rich fruit of the finest olive in Athene's +garden. But the coincidences of opinion between the ancient and the modern +writer are among the most remarkable in literary history. We can only +refer, without comments, to a few of the points of contact in this strange +conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both +possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they +attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:--_Laissez faire_; the growth +of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, +education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian +spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, +which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of +the ages and circumstances admit. They propose the same remedies:-- +a return to simpler manners, and stricter laws, with the best men in the +State to regulate and administer them. Philosophers, says Plato, are to be +made guardians, and they are to govern, not for gain or glory, but for the +common weal. They need not be happy in the ordinary sense, for there is a +higher than selfish happiness, the love of the good. To this love they +must be _systematically educated_ till they are fit to be kings and +priests in the ideal state; if they refuse they _must_, when their turn +comes, be _made to govern_. Compare the following declarations of +Carlyle:-- + + Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teaching + class--these two sometimes combined in one, a Pontiff + King--there did not society exist without those two vital + elements, there will none exist. Whenever there are born + Kings of men you had better seek them out and _breed them + to the work_.... The few wise will have to take command + of the innumerable foolish, they _must be got to do it_. + +The Ancient and the Modern, the Greek and the Teuton, are further +curiously at one:--in their dislike of physical or mental +Valetudinarianism (cf. _Rep._ Bs. ii. and iii. and _Characteristics_); +in their protests against the morality of consequences, of rewards and +punishments as motives for the highest life (the just man, says Plato, +crucified is better than the unjust man crowned); in their contempt for +the excesses of philanthropy and the pampering of criminals (cf. +_Rep._ B. viii.); in their strange conjunctions of free-thinking and +intolerance. Plato in the Laws enacts that he who speaks against the gods +shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and at last, if he persists in his +impiety, put to death; yet he had as little belief in the national +religion as Carlyle. + +[Footnote: Rousseau, in the "Contrat Social," also assumes this position; +allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows +disrespect to the State Religion.] + +They both accept Destiny,--the Parcae or the Norns spin the threads of +life,--and yet both admit a sphere of human choice. In the Republic the +souls select their lots: with Carlyle man can modify his fate. The +juxtaposition in each of Humour and Pathos (cf. Plato's account of the +dogs in a Democracy, and Carlyle's "Nigger gone masterless among the +pumpkins," and, for pathos, the image of the soul encrusted by the world +as the marine Glaucus, or the Vision of Er and Natural Supernaturalism) is +another contact. Both held that philosophers and heroes were few, and yet +both leant to a sort of Socialism, under State control; they both assail +Poetry and deride the Stage (cf. _Rep._ B. ii. and B. x. with Carlyle on +"The Opera"), while each is the greatest prose poet of his race; they are +united in hatred of orators, who "would circumvent the gods," and in +exalting action and character over "the most sweet voices"--the one +enforcing his thesis in the "language of the gods," the other preaching +silence in forty volumes of eloquent English speech. + +Carlyle seems to have known little of Aristotle. His Stoicism was +indigenous; but he always alludes with deference to the teaching of the +Porch. Marcus Aurelius, the nearest type of the Philosophic King, must +have riveted his regard as an instance of the combination of thought and +action; and some interesting parallels have been drawn between their +views of life as an arena on which there is much to be done and little +to be known, a passage from time to a vague eternity. They have the same +mystical vein, alongside of similar precepts of self-forgetfulness, +abnegation, and the waiving of desire, the same confidence in the power +of the spirit to defy or disdain vicissitudes, ideas which brought both +in touch with the ethical side of Christianity; but their tempers and +manner are as far as possible apart. Carlyle speaks of no one with more +admiration than of Dante, recognising in the Italian his own intensity +of love and hate and his own tenacity; but beyond this there is little +evidence of the "Divina Commedia" having seriously attuned his thought: +nor does he seem to have been much affected by any of the elder English +poets. He scarcely refers to Chaucer; he alludes to Spenser here and +there with some homage, but hardly ever, excepting Shakespeare, to the +Elizabethan dramatists. + +Among writers of the seventeenth century, he may have found in Hobbes +some support of his advocacy of a strong government; but his views on +this theme came rather from a study of the history of that age. Milton +he appreciates inadequately. To Dryden and Swift he is just; the latter, +whether consciously to Carlyle or not, was in some respects his English +master, and the points of resemblance in their characters suggest +detailed examination. Their styles are utterly opposed, that of the one +resting almost wholly on its Saxon base, that of the other being a +coat of many colours; but both are, in the front rank of masters of +prose-satire, inspired by the same audacity of "noble rage." Swift's +humour has a subtler touch and yet more scathing scorn; his contempt of +mankind was more real; his pathos equally genuine but more withdrawn; +and if a worse foe he was a better friend. The comparisons already +made between Johnson and Carlyle have exhausted the theme; they remain +associated by their similar struggle and final victory, and sometimes by +their tyrannous use of power; they are dissociated by the divergence of +their intellectual and in some respects even their moral natures; both +were forces of character rather than discoverers, both rulers of debate; +but the one was of sense, the other of imagination, "all compact." The +one blew "the blast of doom" of the old patronage; the other, against +heavier odds, contended against the later tyranny of uninformed and +insolent popular opinion. Carlyle did not escape wholly from the +influence of the most infectious, if the most morbid, of French writers, +J.J. Rousseau. They are alike in setting Emotion over Reason: in +referring to the Past as a model; in subordinating mere criticism to +ethical, religious or irreligious purpose; in being avowed propagandists; +in their "deep unrest"; and in the diverse conclusions that have been +drawn from their teaching. + +Carlyle's enthusiasm for the leaders of the new German literature was, in +some measure, inspired by the pride in a treasure-trove, the regard of a +foster-father or _chaperon_ who first substantially took it by the hand +and introduced it to English society: but it was also due to the feeling +that he had found in it the fullest expression of his own perplexities, +and at least their partial solution. His choice of its representatives is +easily explained. In Schiller he found intellectually a younger brother, +who had fought a part of his own fight and was animated by his own +aspirations; in dealing with his career and works there is a shade +of patronage. Goethe, on the other hand, he recognised across many +divergencies as his master. The attachment of the belated Scotch Puritan +to the greater German has provoked endless comment; but the former has +himself solved the riddle. The contrasts between the teacher and pupil +remain, but they have been exaggerated by those who only knew Goethe as +one who had attained, and ignored the struggle of his hot youth on the +way to attainment. Carlyle justly commends him, not for his artistic +mastery alone, but for his sense of the reality and earnestness of life, +which lifts him to a higher grade among the rulers of human thought +than such more perfect artists and more passionate lyrists as Heine. He +admires above all his conquest over the world, without concession to it, +saying:-- + + With him Anarchy has now become Peace ... the once + perturbed spirit is serene and rich in good fruits.... + Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been + attained by a surrender to Necessity, or any compact with + Delusion--a seeming blessing, such as years and dispiritment + will of themselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no + blessing, since ever-continued battle is better than + captivity. Many gird on the harness, few bear it + warrior-like, still fewer put it off with triumph. Euphorion + still asserts, "To die in strife is the end of life." + +Goethe ceased to fight only when he had won; his want of sympathy with +the so-called Apostles of Freedom, the stump orators of his day, was +genuine and shared by + +Carlyle. In the apologue of the _Three Reverences_ in _Meister_ the +master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike his pupil, verges +on sentimental paradox, declaring through the lips of the Chief in that +imaginary pedagogic province--which here and there closely recalls the +_New Atlantis_--that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery and +despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine--nay, even on sin and crime to +look not as hindrances, but to honour them, as furtherances of what is +holy." In answer to Emerson's Puritanic criticisms Carlyle replies:-- + + Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than + I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John + Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable + _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty + was infinite,--Knox would have passed on wondering, not + reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like + Goethe. His is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, + that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it + was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold + even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when + all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that + man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you + love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is + not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse + to bear than bad, and on the whole whether the glorious + serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane--as + Light, the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning. + +Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in accord with Carlyle +was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of sayings--as "There is but one temple +in the universe, and that is the body of man," "Who touches a human hand +touches God"--that especially commended themselves to his commentator. +Among philosophers proper, Fichte, in his assertion of the Will as a +greater factor of human life and a nearer indication of personality than +pure Thought, was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The _Vocation of the Scholar_ +and _The Way to a Blessed Life_ anticipated and probably suggested much +of the more speculative part of _Sartor_. But to show their relation +would involve a course of Metaphysics. + +We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life +and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man +with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter--_Jean Paul +der einzige_, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted +on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of +humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a +lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have +influenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of queer +titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, and endless +digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream in the first _Flower Piece_ +from the life of Siebenkaes, and that on _New Year's Eve_, are like +pre-visions of _Sartor_, and we find in the fantasies of both authors +much of the same machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of +_Schmelzle's Journey to Flaetz_ might pass current for Carlyle's own; and +it is evident that the latter was saturated with _Quintus Fixlein_. The +following can hardly be a mere coincidence. Richter writes of a dead +brother, "For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself +among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him, +melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sank his heart of fire +amid the ice and waves"; while in _Cui Bono_ we have-- + + What is life? a thawing ice-board + On a sea with sunny shore. + +Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of _Fixlein_, especially the +passage, "Then begun the AEolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest +pathos of _Sartor_. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common +"reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness, +and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the _Foreign +Quarterly_ of 1830 might be taken for a criticism of himself. + +Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magnanimity in estimating +his English contemporaries; but the deliberate judgments of his essays +were often more genial than those of his letters and conversation; and +perhaps his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew round +him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful than his severity; it is +good for no man to live with satellites. His practical severance from +Mazzini was mainly a personal loss: the widening of the gulf between +him and Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been better +qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other. Carlyle was the +greater genius; but the question which was the greater mind must be +decided by the conflict between logic and emotion. They were related +proximately as Plato to Aristotle, the one saw what the other missed, and +their hold on the future has been divided. Mill had "the dry light," and +his meaning is always clear; he is occasionally open to the charge +of being a formalist, allowing too little for the "infusion of the +affections," save when touched, as Carlyle was, by a personal loss; yet +the critical range indicated by his essay on "Coleridge" on the one side, +that on "Bentham" on the other, is as wide as that of his friend; and +while neither said anything base, Mill alone is clear from the charge of +having ever said anything absurd. His influence, though more indirect, +may prove, save artistically, more lasting. The two teachers, in their +assaults on _laissez faire,_ curiously combine in giving sometimes +undesigned support to social movements with which the elder at least had +no sympathy. + +Carlyle's best, because his most independent, friend lived beyond the +sea. He has been almost to weariness compared with Emerson, initial +pupil later ally, but their contrasts are more instructive than their +resemblances. They have both at heart a revolutionary spirit, marked +originality, uncompromising aversion to illusions, disdain of traditional +methods of thought and stereotyped modes of expression; but in Carlyle +this is tempered by greater veneration for the past, in which he holds +out models for our imitation; while Emerson sees in it only fingerposts +for the future, and exhorts his readers to stay at home lest they should +wander from themselves. The one loves detail, hates abstraction, delights +to dwell on the minutiae of biography, and waxes eloquent even on dates. +The other, a brilliant though not always a profound generaliser, tells +us that we must "leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and +study the sentiment as it appeared in hope not in history ... with the +ideal is the rose of joy. But grief cleaves to names and persons, and +the partial interests of to-day and yesterday." The one is bent under a +burden, and pores over the riddle of the earth, till, when he looks up at +the firmament of the unanswering stars, he can but exclaim, "It is a sad +sight." The other is blown upon by the fresh breezes of the new world; +his vision ranges over her clear horizons, and he leaps up elastic under +her light atmosphere, exclaiming, "Give me health and a day and I will +make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a half-Germanised +Scotchman, living near the roar of the metropolis, with thoughts of +Weimar and reminiscences of the Covenanting hills. Emerson studies +Swedenborg and reads the _Phaedo_ in his garden, far enough from the din +of cities to enable him in calm weather to forget them. "Boston, London, +are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke; so is society, so is the world." +The one is strong where the other is weak. Carlyle keeps his abode in +the murk of clouds illumined by bolts of fire; he has never seen the sun +unveiled. Emerson's "Threnody" shows that he has known the shadow; but he +has fought with no Apollyons, reached the Celestial City without crossing +the dark river, and won the immortal garland "without the dust and heat." +Self-sacrifice, inconsistently maintained, is the watchword of the one: +self-reliance, more consistently, of the other. The art of the two +writers is in strong contrast. The charm of Emerson's style is its +precision; his sentences are like medals each hung on its own string; the +fields of his thought are combed rather than ploughed: he draws outlines, +as Flaxman, clear and colourless. Carlyle's paragraphs are like streams +from Pactolus, that roll nuggets from their source on their turbid way. +His expressions are often grotesque, but rarely offensive. Both writers +are essentially ascetic,--though the one swallows Mirabeau, and the other +says that Jane Eyre should have accepted Eochester and "left the world in +a minority." But Emerson is never coarse, which Carlyle occasionally is; +and Carlyle is never flippant, as Emerson often is. In condemning the +hurry and noise of mobs the American keeps his temper, and insists on +justice without vindictiveness: wars and revolutions take nothing from +his tranquillity, and he sets Hafiz and Shakespeare against Luther and +Knox. Careless of formal consistency--"the hobgoblin of little minds"--he +balances his aristocratic reserve with a belief in democracy, in +progression by antagonism, and in collective wisdom as a limit to +collective folly. Leaving his intellectual throne as the spokesman of a +practical liberty, Emerson's wisdom was justified by the fact that he was +always at first on the unpopular, and ultimately on the winning, side. +Casting his rote for the diffusion of popular literature, a wide +suffrage, a mild penal code, he yet endorsed the saying of an old +American author, "A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will +sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is +a raft that will never sink, but then your feet are always in water." + +[Footnote: Carlyle, on the other hand, holds "that," as has been said, "we +are entitled to deal with criminals as relics of barbarism in the midst of +civilisation." His protest, though exuberated, against leniency in dealing +with atrocities, emphatically requisite in an age apt to ignore the rigour +of justice, has been so far salutary, and may be more so.] + +Maintaining that the State exists for its members, he holds that the +enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular +governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law +need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men, +"to educate whom the State exists"; but he regards them as inspired +mouthpieces rather than controlling forces: their prime mission is to +"fortify our hopes," their indirect services are their best. The career +of a great man should rouse us to a like assertion of ourselves. We ought +not to obey, but to follow, sometimes by not obeying, him. "It is the +imbecility not the wisdom of men that is always inviting the impudence of +power." + +It is obvious that many of these views are in essential opposition to the +teaching of Carlyle; and it is remarkable that two conspicuous men so +differing and expressing their differences with perfect candour should +have lived so long on such good terms. Their correspondence, ranging +over thirty-eight years (begun in 1834, after Emerson's visit to +Craigenputtock, and ending in 1872, before his final trip to England), +is on the whole one of the most edifying in literary history. The +fundamental accord, unshaken by the ruffle of the visit in 1847, is a +testimony to the fact that the common preservation of high sentiments +amid the irksome discharge of ordinary duties may survive and override +the most distinct antagonisms of opinion. Matthew Arnold has gone so far +as to say that he "would not wonder if Carlyle lived in the long run by +such an invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson +and not by his works." This is paradoxical; but the volumes containing +it are in some respects more interesting than the letters of Goethe and +Schiller, as being records of "two noble kinsmen" of nearer intellectual +claims. The practical part of the relationship on the part of Emerson is +very beautiful; he is the more unselfish, and on the whole appears the +better man, especially in the almost unlimited tolerance that passes with +a smile even such violences as the "Ilias in nuce"; but Carlyle shows +himself to be the stronger. Their mutual criticisms were of real benefit. +Emerson succeeded in convincing his friend that so-called anarchy might +be more effective in subduing the wilderness than any despotism; while +the advice to descend from "Himalaya peaks and indigo skies" to concrete +life is accepted and adopted in the later works of the American, _Society +and Solitude_ and the _Conduct of Life,_ which Carlyle praises without +stint. Keeping their poles apart they often meet half-way; and in matters +of style as well as judgment tinge and tend to be transfused into each +other, so that in some pages we have to look to the signature to be sure +of the writer. Towards the close of the correspondence Carlyle in this +instance admits his debt. + + I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can + speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him. + Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes + to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world + there were still but this one voice that responded + intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all + hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive. + My blessings on you, good Ralph Waldo. + +Emerson answers in 1872, on receipt of the completed edition of his +friend's work: "You shall wear the crown at the Pan-Saxon games, with no +competitor in sight ... well earned by genius and exhaustive labour, and +with nations for your pupils and praisers." + +The general verdict on Carlyle's literary career assigns to him the first +place among the British authors of his time. No writer of our generation, +in England, has combined such abundance with such power. Regarding his +rank as a writer there is little or no dispute: it is admitted that the +irregularities and eccentricities of his style are bound up with its +richness. In estimating the value of his thought we must discriminate +between instruction and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has +taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answer must be, +"few." This is a perhaps inevitable result of the manner of his writing, +or rather of the nature of his mind. Aside from political parties, he +helped to check their exaggerations by his own; seeing deeply into the +under-current evils of the time, even when vague in his remedies he +was of use in his protest against leaving these evils to adjust +themselves--what has been called "the policy of drifting"--or of dealing +with them only by catchwords. No one set a more incisive brand on the +meanness that often marks the unrestrained competition of great cities; +no one was more effective in his insistence that the mere accumulation +of wealth may mean the ruin of true prosperity; no one has assailed with +such force the mammon-worship and the frivolity of his age. Everything he +writes comes home to the individual conscience: his claim to be regarded +as a moral exemplar has been diminished, his hold on us as an ethical +teacher remains unrelaxed. It has been justly observed that he helped +to modify "the thought rather than the opinion of two generations." His +message, as that of Emerson, was that "life must be pitched on a higher +plane." Goethe said to Eckermann in 1827 that Carlyle was a moral force +so great that he could not tell what he might produce. His influence has +been, though not continuously progressive, more marked than that of any +of his compeers, among whom he was, if not the greatest, certainly the +most imposing personality. It had two culminations; shortly after the +appearance of _The French Revolution,_ and again towards the close of the +seventh decade of the author's life. To the enthusiastic reception of his +works in the Universities, Mr. Froude has borne eloquent testimony, and +the more reserved Matthew Arnold admits that "the voice of Carlyle, +overstrained and misused since, sounded then in Oxford fresh and +comparatively sound," though, he adds, "The friends of one's youth cannot +always support a return to them." In the striking article in the _St. +James' Gazette_ of the date of the great author's death we read: "One who +had seen much of the world and knew a large proportion of the remarkable +men of the last thirty years declared that Mr. Carlyle was by far the +most impressive person he had ever known, the man who conveyed most +forcibly to those who approached him [best on resistance principles] +that general impression of genius and force of character which it is +impossible either to mistake or to define." Thackeray, as well as Ruskin +and Froude, acknowledged him as, beyond the range of his own _metier_, +his master, and the American Lowell, penitent for past disparagement, +confesses that "all modern Literature has felt his influence in the right +direction"; while the Emersonian hermit Thoreau, a man of more +intense though more restricted genius than the poet politician, +declares--"Carlyle alone with his wide humanity has, since Coleridge, +kept to us the promise of England. His wisdom provokes rather than +informs. He blows down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light, +like the Joethuns, to throw the old woman Time; in his work there is too +much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay-making under the sun. He +makes us act rather than think: he does not say, know thyself, which is +impossible, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, no clear +goal, but an endless Atlantic horizon. He exaggerates. Yes; but he makes +the hour great, the picture bright, the reverence and admiration strong; +while mere precise fact is a coil of lead." Our leading journal on the +morning after Carlyle's death wrote of him in a tone of well-tempered +appreciation: "We have had no such individuality since Johnson. Whether +men agreed or not, he was a touchstone to which truth and falsehood were +brought to be tried. A preacher of Doric thought, always in his pulpit +and audible, he denounced wealth without sympathy, equality without +respect, mobs without leaders, and life without aim." To this we may add +the testimony of another high authority in English letters, politically +at the opposite pole: "Carlyle's influence in kindling enthusiasm for +virtues worthy of it, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one +hand and the unreality on the other, of all that men can do and suffer, +has not been surpassed by any teacher now living. Whatever later teachers +may have done in definitely shaping opinion ... here is the friendly +fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark; here the prophet who +first smote the rock." Carlyle, writes one of his oldest friends, "may +be likened to a fugleman; he stood up in the front of Life's Battle and +showed in word and action his notion of the proper attitude and action of +men. He was, in truth, a prophet, and he has left his gospels." To those +who contest that these gospels are for the most part negative, we may +reply that to be taught what not to do is to be far advanced on the way +to do. + +In nothing is the generation after him so prone to be unjust to a fresh +thinker as with regard to his originality. A physical discovery, as +Newton's, remains to ninety-nine out of a hundred a mental miracle; but a +great moral teacher "labours to make himself forgotten." When he begins +to speak he is suspected of insanity; when he has won his way he receives +a Royal Commission to appoint the judges; as a veteran he is shelved for +platitude. So Horace is regarded as a mere jewelry store of the Latin, +Bacon in his _Essays_, of the English, wisdom, which they each in +fact helped to create. Carlyle's paradoxes have been exaggerated, his +partialities intensified, in his followers; his critical readers, not his +disciples, have learnt most from him; he has helped across the Slough of +Despond only those who have also helped themselves. When all is said of +his dogmatism, his petulance, his "evil behaviour," he remains the master +spirit of his time, its Censor, as Macaulay is its Panegyrist, and +Tennyson its Mirror. He has saturated his nation with a wholesome tonic, +and the practice of any one of his precepts for the conduct of life is +ennobling. More intense than Wordsworth, more intelligible than Browning, +more fervid than Mill, he has indicated the pitfalls in our civilisation. +His works have done much to mould the best thinkers in two continents, +in both of which he has been the Greatheart to many pilgrims. Not a +few could speak in the words of the friend whose memory he has so +affectionately preserved, "Towards me it is still more true than towards +England that no one has been and done like you." A champion of ancient +virtue, he appeared in his own phrase applied to Fichte, as "a Cato Major +among degenerate men." Carlyle had more than the shortcomings of a Cato; +he had all the inconsistent vehemence of an imperfectly balanced mind; +but he had a far wider range and deeper sympathies. The message of the +modern preacher transcended all mere applications of the text _delenda +est._ He denounced, but at the same time nobly exhorted, his age. A +storm-tossed spirit, "tempest-buffeted," he was "citadel-crowned" in his +unflinching purpose and the might of an invincible will. + + + + +APPENDIX + +CARLYLE'S RELIGION + +The _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11, 1881, writes:-- + +"It is obvious that from an early age he entirely ceased to believe, in +its only true sense, the creed he had been taught. He never affected +to believe it in any other sense, for he was far too manly and +simple-hearted to care to frame any of those semi-honest transmutations +of the old doctrines into new-fangled mysticism which had so great a +charm for many of his weaker contemporaries. On the other hand, it is +equally true that he never plainly avowed his unbelief. The line he took +up was that Christianity, though not true in fact, had a right to be +regarded as the noblest aspiration after a theory of the Universe and of +human life ever formed: and that the Calvinistic version of Christianity +was on the whole the best it ever assumed; and the one which represented +the largest proportion of truth and the least amount of error. He also +thought that the truths which Calvinism tried to express, and succeeded +in expressing in an imperfect or partially mistaken manner, were the +ultimate governing principles of morals and politics, of whose systematic +neglect in this age nothing but evil could come. + +"Unwilling to take up the position of a rebel or revolutionist by stating +his views plainly--indeed if he had done so sixty years ago he might have +starved--the only resource left to him was that of approaching all the +great subjects of life from the point of view of grim humour, irony, and +pathos. This was the real origin of his unique style; though no doubt its +special peculiarities were due to the wonderful power of his imagination, +and to some extent--to a less extent we think than has been usually +supposed--to his familiarity with German. + +"What then was his creed? What were the doctrines which in his view +Calvinism shadowed forth and which were so infinitely true, so ennobling +to human life? First, he believed in God; secondly, he believed in an +absolute opposition between good and evil; thirdly, he believed that +all men do, in fact, take sides more or less decisively in this great +struggle, and ultimately turn out to be either good or bad; fourthly, he +believed that good is stronger than evil, and by infinitely slow degrees +gets the better of it, but that this process is so slow as to be +continually obscured and thrown back by evil influences of various +kinds--one of which he believed to be specially powerful in the present +day. + +"God in his view was not indeed a personal Being, like the Christian +God--still less was He in any sense identified with Jesus Christ; who, +though always spoken of with rather conventional reverence in his +writings, does not appear to have specially influenced him. The God in +which Mr. Carlyle believed is, as far as can be ascertained, a +Being possessing in some sense or other will and consciousness, and +personifying the elementary principles of morals--Justice, Benevolence +(towards good people), Fortitude, and Temperance--to such a pitch that +they may be regarded, so to speak, as forming collectively the will of +God.... That there is some one who--whether by the earthquake, or +the fire, or the still small voice--is continually saying to +mankind--'_Discite justitiam moniti'_; and that this Being is the +ultimate fact at which we can arrive ... is what Mr. Carlyle seems to +have meant by believing in God. And if any one will take the trouble to +refer to the first few sentences of the Westminster Confession, and to +divest them of their references to Christianity and to the Bible, he will +find that between the God of Calvin and of Carlyle there is the closest +possible similarity.... The great fact about each particular man is the +relation, whether of friendship or enmity, in which he stands to God. In +the one case he is on the side which must ultimately prevail, ... in the +other ... he will, in due time, be crushed and destroyed.... Our relation +to the universe can be ascertained only by experiment. We all have to +live out our lives.... One man is a Cromwell, another a Frederick, a +third a Goethe, a fourth a Louis XV. God hates Louis XV. and loves +Cromwell. Why, if so, He made Louis XV., and indeed whether He made him +or not, are idle questions which cannot be answered and should not be +asked. There are good men and bad men, all pass alike through this +mysterious hall of doom called life: most show themselves in their true +colours under pressure. The good are blessed here and hereafter; the bad +are accursed. Let us bring out as far as may be possible such good as a +man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the +hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr. +Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and +morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in +either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might +regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the +inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival of +the fittest has much in common with the doctrine of election, and +philosophical necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution, +comes practically to much the same result as predestination." + + + + INDEX + + Aberdour + Addiscombe + Addison + AEschylus + Ailsa Craig + Airy (the astronomer) + Aitken, James + Aitken, Mary + Aitken, Mrs. + Aix-la-Chapelle + Albert, Prince + Alison + Alma + America + Annan + Annandale + Annual Register + Antoinette, Marie + Aristotle + Arndt + Arnold, Dr. + Arnold, Matthew + Ashburton, Lord and Lady + Assaye + Atheism + _Athenaeum_ + Augustenburg + Austerlitz + Austin + Austin, Mrs. + Azeglio + + Bacon + Badams + Badcort + Balaclava + Balzac + Bamford, Samuel + Barbarossa + Baring, see Ashburton + Bassompierre + Beaconsfield, Lord + Beaumarchais + Beethoven + Belgium + Bellamy + Bentham + Berkeley + Berlin + Bernstoff, Count + Biography (by Froude) + Birmingham + Bismarck + _Blackwood,_ + Boehm + Bohemia + Bolingbroke + Bonn + Boston + Boswell + Breslau + Brewster, Sir David + Bright + Brocken, spectre of the + Bromley, Miss + Bronte, Emily + Brougham + Brown, Prof. + Browne, Sir Thomas + Browning + Bryant _note_ + Buckle + Buller, Charles + Buller, Mrs. + Bunsen + Burke + Burness, William + Burns + Byron + + Caesar + _Cagliostro, Count_ + Cairnes + Calderon + Calvin + Campbell, Macleod + Campbell, Thomas + Carleton + Carlyle (family) + Carlyle, Alexander + Carlyle, James (brother) + Carlyle, James (father) + Carlyle, John, Dr. + Carlyle, Margaret (mother) + Carlyle, Margaret (sister) + Carlyle, Mrs. (Jane Welsh)(wife) + Carlyle, Thomas (grandfather) + Carlyle, Thomas, + birth; + education; + studies German; + lives in Edinburgh and takes pupils; + studies law; + tutor to the Bullers; + goes to London; + at Hoddam Hill; + marriage; + Edinburgh life; + married life; + life at Craigenputtock; + second visit to London; + publishes _Sartor_; + takes house in Chelsea; + life and work in London; + loss of first volume of _French Revolution_; + rewrites first volume of _French Revolution_; + lectures; + founds London Library; + publishes _Chartism_; + writes _Past and Present_; + writes _Life of Cromwell_; + visits Ireland; + visits Paris; + writes _History of Friedrich II._; + excursions to Germany; + nominated Lord Rector of Glasgow; + success of _Friedrich II._; + Lord Rector of Edinburgh; + death of his wife; + writes his _Reminiscences_; + defends Governor Eyre; + writes on Franco-German War; + writes on Russo-Turkish War; + honours; + declining years; + death; + Appreciation of; + authorities for his life; + complaints; + contemporary history; + conversation; + critic, as; + descriptive passages; + domestic troubles; + dreams; + dyspepsia; + elements of his character; + estimates (his) of contemporaries; + ethics; + financial affairs; + friends; + genius; historian, as; + ignorance; + influence; + journal; + jury, serves on a; + letters; + literary artist + mission + nicknaming + mania + noises + opinions + paradoxes + polities + popularity and praise + preacher, as, + rank as a writer + relations to other thinkers + religion + routine + scepticism + sound-proof room, + style + teaching + translations + travels, and visits + truth + verses + views, change of + walks + worker, as + Cassel + Castlebar + Cato + Cavaignac, General + Cervantes + Chalmers, Dr. + Changarnier, General + _Characteristics,_ + Charlemagne + _Chartism,_ + Chatham + Chaucer + Chelsea + Cheyne Row + China + Chotusitz + Christianity + Church, English + Cicero + Cid, the + Civil War + Civil War (American) + Clare, Lady + Clarendon + Clerkenwell explosions + Clough, Arthur + Cobden + Coblenz + Cockburn + Colenso, Bishop + Coleridge + Colonies + Columbus + Comte + Conservatism + Conway, Moncure + Cooper, Thomas + Cornelius + _Correspondence,_ + Cortes + Cousin + Craigcrook + Craigenputtock + Crimean War + Cromwell + _Cromwell, Life and Letters of,_ + Crystal Palace Exhibition + Cushman, Miss + Cuestrin + Cuvier + Czars, the + + Dante + Danton + Dardanelles + Darwin + David II. + _Deism,_ + Democracy, + De Morgan + Demosthenes + De Quincey + Derby, Countess of + Desmoulins + _Dial, The,_ + _Diamond Necklace,_ + Dickens + Diderot + Diogenes + Disraeli. _See_ Beaconsfield + Dobell + _Don Quixote,_ + Doering, Herr + Dresden + Drogheda + Drumclog + Dryden + Duffy, Sir C. Gavan + Dumfries + Dunbar + Dunbar (poet) + Duty + + Ecclefechan + Eckermann + Edinburgh + _Edinburgh Encyclopaedia_ + _Edinburgh Review_ + Education + Eisenach + Eldin, Lord + Eliot, George + Emerson + _Emigration_ + Ems + England + _English Traits_ (Emerson's) + Erasmus + Erfurt + Erskine + _Essay on Proportion_ + _Essays_ (Carlyle's) + Everett, Alexander + _Examiner,_ + "Exodus from Houndsditch," + Eyre, Governor + Eyre, Jane + + Faber + Factory Acts + Faust + Fawcett + Fergusson, Dr. John + Fichte + FitzGerald, Edward + Flaxman + _Foreign Quarterly Preview_ + _Foreign Review_ + Foerster + Forster, John + Forster, W.E. + Fouque + Fourier + Foxton, Mr. + France + Franchise + Francia, Dr. + Frankenstein + Frankfort + _Fraser_ + Free Trade + French Directory + French literature + _French Revolution_ + Friedrich II. + _Friedrich II., History of_ + Fritz. _See_ Friedrich + Fritz (Carlyle's horse) + Froude, Mr. + Fryston + Fuchs, Reinecke + + Galileo + Gallipoli + Galway + Game Laws + Gavazzi, Father + Georgel, Abbe + German literature + German worthies + Germany + Gibbon + Gladstone, Sir T + Gladstone, W. E. + Glasgow + _Glasgow Herald_ + Goethe + Goldsmith + Gordon, Margaret + Gordon (quadroon preacher) + Gotha + Grant, J. + Greek thought + Grimm's law + Gronlund + Grote + Guizot + Gully, Dr. + Gully, Miss + Guntershausen + + Haddington + Hafiz + Hakluyt + Hallam + Hallam, Arthur + Hamburg + Hamilton, Sir William + Hare, Archdeacon + Harrison, Frederick + _Harvard Discourse_ (Emerson's) + Hawthorne + Hayti + Heath (royalist writer) + Hedonism + Hegel + Heine, Heinrich + _Helena_ + Helps + Henry VIII. + _Hero-Worship_ (and _On Heroes_} + Herrnhut + Hertzka + Heyne + Hildebrand + Hill, Lord George + _Histories_ (Carlyle's) + History, definition of + _History_ review of + Hobbes + Hochkirk + Hoddam Hill + Hoffmann + Holinshed + Homburg + Homer + Home Rule + Horace + Home, E.H. + Houghton, Lord + Hudson (Railway King) + Hughes, T. + Hugo, Victor + Humboldt + Hume + Hunef + Hunt, Leigh + Huxley, Professor + + "Ilias Americana in nuce" + Immortality + Inkermann + _In Memoriam_ (Tennyson's) + Inquisition + Ireland + Ireland, Mrs. + Irish Question + Irving, Edward + + Jamaica + Jeffrey + Jena + Jerrold, Douglas + Jewsbury, Geraldine + _Jocelin de Brakelond_ + Johnson + _Johnson_ Review of Boswell's + Johnston, James + Jomini + Jonson, Ben + Journalism, definition of + Judengasse + Junius + Juvenal + + Kant + Keats + Keble + Kingsley, Charles + Kingsley, Henry + Kinnaird + Kirkcakly + Knox + Kolin + Koerner + Kossuth + Kunersdorf + + Lamb + Landor + Landshut + Lanin, M. + Laplace + Larkin + _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ + Law, Carlyle's study of + Lawson, Mr., James Carlyle's estimate of + _Lectures_ + Legendre + Leibnitz + Leipzig + Leith + Leslie, Prof. + Leuthen + Leyden + "Liberal Association" + Liberalism + Liegnitz + Literature as a profession + Liverpool + Livy + Lobositz + Locke + "Locksley Hall" + London + London Library + _London Magazine_ + London Peace Congress + Longfellow + Longmans (the publisher) + Louis XIV. + Louis XV. + Louis XVIII. + Louisa, Electress + Lowell + Lucilius + Luichart, Loch + "Luria" + Luther + + Macaulay + Macbeth + Machiavelli + Mackenzie, Miss Stuart + Mahon, Lord + Mainhill + Mainz + Malthusianism + Malvern + Marat + Marburg + Marcus Aurelius + Marlborough + _Marseillaise_ + Marshall + Mavtineau, Miss H. + Marx, Carl + Massou, Prof. + _Materialism_ + Mathematics + Maurice, F. D. + Mazzini + M'Crie + _Meister, Wilhelm_ + Melanchthen + Mentone + Meredith, George + Mericourt + Merimee, Prosper + Metaphysics, Scotch + Michelet + Middle Ages + Mill, J.S. + Millais + Milman + Milton + Mirabeau + _Miscellanies_ + Mitchell, Robert + Mitchell (Young Ireland leader) + Model Prisons + Mohammed + Molesworth + Molwitz + Montague, Basil + Montaigne + Montgomery, Robert + More, Sir Thomas + Morris, William + Motley + Motte, Countess de la + Muirkirk + Murchison, Sir R. + Murray (the publisher) + Murray, Thomas + Musaeus + + Napier, Macvey + Napoleon I. + Napoleon III. + Naseby + Nassau + Necker + Negroes + Nelson + "Nero" (Mrs. Carlyle's dog) + Neuberg + New England + Newman, Cardinal + Newspapers + Newton + Nibelungen Lied + Nicholas the Czar + "Nigger Question" + Noble (biographer of Cromwell) + North, Christopher + Norton, Charles E. + _Norway, Early Kings of_ + Novalis + + O'Brien, Smith + O'Connell + Optimism + Orsay, Count d' + Orthodoxy vetoed + Ossoli, Countess (Margaret Fuller) + Owen + Oxford + Oxford, Bishop of + + Paraguay + Pardubitz + Paris + _Past and Present_ + Paton, Noel + Paulets, the + Peel + Pericles + Peter the Hermit + Philanthropy + Philip of Hesse + Plato + Playfair + Political economy + Political philosophy + Pope + Popes + Prague + Prayer + Prescott + Preuss + _Prinzenraub_ + Procter + Procter, Mrs. Anne + Puritanism + Pusey + Putbus + + _Quarterly Review_ + Queen Victoria + + Radicalism + Railways + Raleigh + Ranke + Ranch + "Reading of Books" + Redwood + Reform Bills + _Reminiscences_ + Renan + Rennie, George + Revolution years + Rhine + Ricardo + Richter + Riesen-Gebirge + Riquetti + Ritualism + Robertson + Robespierre + Roland, Madame + Rolandseck + Romans + Rome, cause of its preservation + Romilly, Sir Samuel + Rossbach + Rossetti, Dante + Rotterdam + Rousseau + Rugby + Ruegen + Rushworth + Ruskin + Russell, Lord John + Russell, Mrs., at Thornhill + Russia + Russo-Turkish War + + Sadowa + St. Andrews + St. Ives + _St. James's Gazette_ + St. Simon + Samson, Abbot + Sand, George + _Sartor Resartus_ + Saunders and Otley (publishers) + Saxons + Scepticism + Schiller + Schlosser + Science + Scotland + Scotsbrig + _Scotsman_ newspaper + Scott, W.B. + Scott, Sir Walter + Sedan + Sepoy rebellion + Seven Years' War + Shaftesbury, Lord + Shakespeare + Shelley + _Shooting Niagara_ + Sidney, Sir Philip + _Signs of the Times_ + Simon de Montfort + Sinclair, Sir George + Slavery + Sloane, Sir Hans + Smail, Tom + Smith, Adam + Smith, Goldwin + Smith, Sydney + Smollett + Snowdon + Socrates + Sophocles + Southey + Spain + Spedding + Spencer, Herbert + Spenser + Stanley, Dean + Stanley, Lady Augusta + Stanleys (of Alderley) + Steele + Stein + Stephen, Fitzjames + Stephen, Sir James + Sterling + _Sterling, Life of_ + Sterne + Stewart, Dugald + Stodart, Miss Eliza + Stonehenge + Strachey, Mr. + Strachey, Mrs. + Stralsund + Strauss + Stuart, Mary + Sturge + _Sun,_ newspaper + Swift + Swinburne + Switzerland + + Tacitus + Taine, M. + _Tale of a Tub_ (Swift's) + Talleyrand + Talma + Taylor, Henry + Taylor's _German Literature_ + Taylor, Mrs. + Tennyson + Teufelsdroeckh + Thackeray + Theism + Thierry, M. + Thiers + Thirlwall, Bishop + Thoreau + Thucydides + Tieck + _Times,_ the + Toplitz + Torgau + Trafalgar + Turgot + Turks + Turner + Tyndall + + _Unto this Last_ (Ruskin's) + Usedom, Baron + + Varennes + Vauvenargues + Vehse + Verses (Carlyle's) + Verses (Mrs. Carlyle's) + Virginia + Voltaire + + _Wanderjahre_ + Wartburg + Washington + Waterloo + Watts, G. F. + Webster, Daniel + Weimar + Weissenfels + Wellington (Duke of) + Welsh, Jane. _See_ Mrs. Carlyle + Welsh, Mrs. + _Werner_ + _Werther_ (Goethe's) + Westminster Abbey + Westminster Confession + _Westminster Review_ + Westport + Wilberforce (Bishop) + William the Conqueror + William the Silent + Willis's Rooms + Wilson + Wolseley + Worcester + Wordsworth + _Work_ + Working classes + _World_ (newspaper) + _Wotton Reinfred_ + + Yarmouth + + Zittau + Zorndorf + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thomas Carlyle, by John Nichol + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS CARLYLE *** + +This file should be named 7carl10.txt or 7carl10.zip +Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 7carl11.txt +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 7carl10a.txt + +Produced by Jayam Subramanian, Robert Connal +and PG Distributed Proofreaders + +Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US +unless a copyright notice is included. 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Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: Thomas Carlyle + Biography + +Author: John Nichol + +Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9784] +[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] +[This file was first posted on October 15, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS CARLYLE *** + + + + +Produced by Jayam Subramanian, Robert Connal, +and PG Distributed Proofreaders + + + + +THOMAS CARLYLE + +BY + +JOHN NICHOL, LL. D, M.A., BALLIOL, OXON + + +1904 + + + +PREFATORY NOTE + +The following record of the leading events of Carlyle's life and attempt +to estimate his genius rely on frequently renewed study of his work, on +slight personal impressions--"vidi tantum"--and on information supplied +by previous narrators. Of these the great author's chosen literary +legatee is the most eminent and, in the main, the most reliable. Every +critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligations to Mr. Froude as +every critic of Byron to Moore or of Scott to Lockhart. The works of +these masters in biography remain the ample storehouses from which every +student will continue to draw. Each has, in a sense, made his subject his +own, and each has been similarly arraigned. + +I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the +persistent, often virulent, attacks directed against a loyal friend, +betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith and the defective reticence that +often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr. +Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on _Sir Walter Scott_ +requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with +explicit authority; that the restrictions under which he was at first +entrusted with the MSS. of the _Reminiscences_ and the _Letters and +Memorials_ (annotated by Carlyle himself, as if for publication) were +withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a +practical injunction to communicate the whole. The worst that can be said +is that, in the last years of Carlyle's career, his own judgment as to +what should be made public of the details of his domestic life may have +been somewhat obscured; but, if so, it was a weakness easily hidden from +a devotee. + +My acknowledgments are due to several of the Press comments which +appeared shortly after Carlyle's death, more especially that of the _St. +James's Gazette_, giving the most philosophical brief summary of his +religious views which I have seen; and to the kindness of Dr. Eugene +Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in supplying me with valuable +hints on matters relating to German History and Literature. I have also +to thank the Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_ for permitting me to +reproduce the substance of my article in its columns of February 1881. +That article was largely based on a contribution on the same subject, in +1859, to Mackenzie's _Imperial Dictionary of Biography_. + +I may add that in the distribution of material over the comparatively +short space at my command, I have endeavoured to give prominence to facts +less generally known, and passed over slightly the details of events +previously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs. Carlyle and the +incidents of her death. To her inner history I have only referred in so +far as it had a direct bearing on her husband's life. As regards the +itinerary of Carlyle's foreign journeys, it has seemed to me that it +might be of interest to those travelling in Germany to have a short +record of the places where the author sought his "studies" for his +greatest work. + + + +CONTENTS + +CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY + +CHAPTER II 1795-1826 ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH + +CHAPTER III 1826-1834 CRAIGENPUTTOCK (from Marriage to London) + +CHAPTER IV 1834-1842 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Mrs. Welsh) + +CHAPTER V 1842-1853 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Carlyle's Mother) + +CHAPTER VI 1853-1866 THE MINOTAUR--(To death of Mrs. Carlyle) + +CHAPTER VII 1866-1881 DECADENCE + +CHAPTER VIII CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN + +CHAPTER IX CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY + +CHAPTER X ETHICS--PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE + +APPENDIX ON CARLYLE'S RELIGION + +INDEX + + + + +THOMAS CARLYLE + + + + +CHAPTER I + +INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY + +Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all +in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the +spirit of four successive generations. They are leading links in an +intellectual chain. + +DAVID HUME (1711-1776) remains the most salient type in our island of the +scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary, +which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some +points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid +temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking +Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau. + +ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796), last of great lyrists inspired by a local +genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people, +spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge +between two eras. Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was +also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the +century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master +musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good +and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or +paralysing caution. + +WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), broadest and most generous, if not loftiest of +the group--"no sounder piece of British manhood," says Carlyle himself +in his inadequate review, "was put together in that century"--the great +revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with a magic +glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was also, like Burns, the +humorist of contemporary life. Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the +manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours, +the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von +Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany. + +THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from +the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening +to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams, +some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill +twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The +reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are +everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to +extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his +thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range. + +Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain +atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant +image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the +relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite +his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle +was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of +the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with +the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could +never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, +dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. +He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, +self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost +mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one +exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with +reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself, +violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation to the great poet, +in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent +inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord +Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other +was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than +Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely +different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge +Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the +other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society. +Both had hot hearts, big brains, and an exhaustless store of winged +and fiery words; both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made +constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of Optimism; +Carlylism is the prose rather than "the male of Byronism." The contrasts +are no less obvious: the author of _Sartor Resartus_, however vaguely, +defended the System of the Universe; the author of _Cain_, with an +audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it. +In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there +is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere," +in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous +incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering +belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the +citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient +name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and, +only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained it. His +career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth, +from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown. +Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence": at his death, in a +sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deafening was the +Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every original thinker is +accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells as it runs till it ends +in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from +America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching came home to +their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland, where, for good or ill, +passions are in extremes, he was long howled down, lampooned, preached +at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a +sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion; and was, often +by the very men who had tried and condemned him for blasphemy, as +senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the +builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the +pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists +whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism. +In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate +successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers +of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass +by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder +and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village +churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets +his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so honoured. + +Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events he celebrates in +his earliest History. In its opening pages, we are made to listen to the +feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace," +where Louis XV. and the _ancien régime_ lay dying; later to the ticking +of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the +steeples that roused the singers of the _Marseillaise_ to march from +"their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last +bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian +characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a commander." +Already, over little more than the space of the author's life--for he was +a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the death of Burns, +Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four, Byron's by seven +years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse of the +"cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea. Two +whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms. +"Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old policies, +governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been +sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig, +Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was +seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory +and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires, +two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions, +revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During his life our sway in +the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Italian +without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Continent, while another +across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes +alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated +and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of the world's most +restless, if not its wisest, age. In the internal affairs of the leading +nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a +pantomime. The Art and Literature of those eighty-six years--stirred to +new thought and form at their commencement by the so-called Romantic +movement, more recently influenced by the Classic reaction, the +Pre-Raphaelite protest, the Aesthetic _mode,_--followed various, even +contradictory, standards. But, in one line of progress, there was no +shadow of turning. Over the road which Bacon laid roughly down and +Newton made safe for transit, Physical Science, during the whole period, +advanced without let and beyond the cavil of ignorance. If the dreams +of the _New Atlantis_ have not even in our days been wholly realised, +Science has been brought from heaven to earth, and the elements made +ministers of Prospero's wand. This apparent, and partially real, conquest +of matter has doubtless done much to "relieve our estate," to make life +in some directions run more smoothly, and to multiply resources to meet +the demands of rapidly-increasing multitudes: but it is in danger of +becoming a conquest of matter over us; for the agencies we have called +into almost fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's miscreated +goblin, to beat us down to the same level. Sanguine spirits who + + throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring, + With, at every mile run taster, O the wondrous, wondrous age, + +are apt to forget that the electric light can do nothing to dispel the +darkness of the mind; that there are strict limits to the power of +prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a +great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable, +accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He +swallows formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes +analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him +by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed +to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by +syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of +Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will--essential Calvinist +or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist, +practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is +consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of +the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was +among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the +link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an +expert in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously subserves +physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a +physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms +of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or +rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with +unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in +his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern +Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously +of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit +the battle-fields of Friedrich II.-- + +Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admiring.... +The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still +infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged flight through +immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of bright? You unfortunate, +you grin as an ape would at such a question: you do not know that unless +you can reach thither in some effectual most veritable sense, you are +lost, doomed to Hela's death-realm and the abyss where mere brutes are +buried. I do not want cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I want what +Novalis calls "God, Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift railways and +sacrifices to Hudson help me towards that? + +The ECONOMIC AND MECHANICAL SPIRIT of the age, faith in mere steel or +stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The others were INSINCERITY in +Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY +without Sense. In our time these two last powers have made such strides +as to threaten the Reign of Law. The Democrat without a ruler, who +protests that one man is by nature as good as another, according to +Carlyle is "shooting Niagara." In deference to the mandate of the +philanthropist the last shred of brutality, with much of decision, +has vanished from our code. Sentiment is in office and Mercy not only +tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When Sir Samuel Romilly began his +beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was at school, talkers of treason were +liable to be disembowelled before execution; now the crime of treason is +practically erased, and the free use of dynamite brings so-called reforms +"within the range of practical politics." Individualism was still a mark +of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi" +survived in Mirabeau's "never name to me that _bête_ of a word +'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador, +"I will break your empire like this vase"; in Nelson turning his blind +eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres +Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found +perhaps its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck. + +This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided +sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men +who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to +the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not +inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute +to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents +may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the +_Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :-- + +"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous +fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated, +formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful +and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy +of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen +Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress, +there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero +that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that +produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble +the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a +fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built _Sartor Resartus_ and the +Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the +earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern +thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally +accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are +denied the faculty of producing nations." + +_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary +of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied +assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that +Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted +Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism +extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three +volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of +revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an +assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly, +every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and +one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr. +Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful +and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results, +but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius, who has thrown Hoods of light on +the inter-relations of the organic world. But there are whole troops +of serfs, "addicti jururo in verba magistri," who, accepting, without +attempt or capacity to verify the conclusions of the master mind, think +to solve all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word +"Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's +divining rod, and you answer "Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart +and sick in head, I were referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to +Grimm's Law or to the Magnetic Belt. + +Let us grant that Cæsar was evolved from the currents in the air about +the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and +Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William +I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame +from the altar of the mediæval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to +masterdom in German woods, or later--not to heap up figures whose +memories still possess the world--that Columbus was a Genoan breeze, +Bacon a _réchauffé_ of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch +dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or Corsican +Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at all events, +were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied and +dominated. + +So much, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistence that great men +are creators as well as creatures of their age. Doubtless, as we advance +in history, direct personal influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In +an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education, +when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised +to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest +civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead +the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be +accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a +mere "matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence of the +matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain +that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become +civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more," +preludes, though over a long interval, the cynic comment of the second +"Locksley Hall" on the "increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier +date "Luria" had protested against the arrogance of mere majorities. + + A people is but the attempt of many + To rise to the completer life of one; + And those who live as models to the mass + Are singly of more value than they all. + +Carlyle set these notes to Tennyson and to Browning in his +_Hero-Worship_--a creed, though in thought, and more in action, older +than Buddha or than Achilles, which he first launched as a dogma on our +times, clenching it with the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau +and Napoleon, mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of +Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made remains marked on the minds of +the men of light who _lead_, and cannot be wholly effaced by the clamour +of the men of words who _orate_. If he leans unduly to the exaltation +of personal power, Carlyle is on the side of those whose defeat can be +beneficent only if it be slow. Further to account for his attitude, +we must refer to his life and to its surroundings, _i.e._ to the +circumstances amid which he was "evolved." + + + + +CHAPTER II + +ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH + +[1795-1826] + +In the introduction to one of his essays, Carlyle has warned us against +giving too much weight to genealogy: but all his biographies, from the +sketch of the Riquetti kindred to his full-length _Friedrich_, prefaced +by two volumes of ancestry, recognise, if they do not overrate, inherited +influences; and similarly his fragments of autobiography abound in +suggestive reference. His family portraits are to be accepted with the +deductions due to the family fever that was the earliest form of his +hero-worship. Carlyle, says the _Athenaeum_ critic before quoted, divides +contemporary mankind into the fools and the wise: the wise are the +Carlyles, the Welshes, the Aitkens, and Edward Irving; the fools all the +rest of unfortunate mortals: a Fuseli stroke of the critic rivalling any +of the author criticised; yet the comment has a grain of truth. + +[Footnote: Even the most adverse critics of Carlyle are often his +imitators, their hands taking a dye from what they work in.] + +The Carlyles are said to have come, from the English town somewhat +differently spelt, to Annandale, with David II.; and, according to a +legend which the great author did not disdain to accept, among them was a +certain Lord of Torthorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The +churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the graves of the +family, all with coats of arms--two griffins with adders' stings. More +definitely we find Thomas, the author's grandfather, settled in that +dullest of county villages as a carpenter. In 1745 he saw the rebel +Highlanders on their southward march: he was notable for his study of +_Anson's Voyages_ and of the _Arabian Nights_: "a fiery man, his stroke +as ready as his word; of the toughness and springiness of steel; an +honest but not an industrious man;" subsequently tenant of a small farm, +in which capacity he does not seem to have managed his affairs with +much effect; the family were subjected to severe privations, the mother +having, on occasion, to heat the meal into cakes by straw taken from the +sacks on which the children slept. In such an atmosphere there grew and +throve the five sons known as the five fighting masons--"a curious +sample of folks," said an old apprentice of one of them, "pithy, bitter +speaking bodies, and awfu' fighters." The second of the group, James, +born 1757, married--first, a full cousin, Janet Carlyle (the sole issue +of which marriage was John, who lived at Cockermouth); second, Margaret +Aitken, by whom he had four sons--THOMAS, 1795-1881; Alexander, +1797-1876; John (Dr. Carlyle, translator of Dante), 1801-1879; and James, +1805-1890; also five daughters, one of whom, Jane, became the wife of her +cousin James Aitken of Dumfries, and the mother of Mary, the niece who +tended her famous uncle so faithfully during the last years of his life. +Nowhere is Carlyle's loyalty to his race shown in a fairer light than in +the first of the papers published under the name of _Reminiscences_. +It differs from the others in being of an early date and free from all +offence. From this pathetic sketch, written when on a visit to London in +1832 he had sudden news of his father's death, we may, even in our brief +space, extract a few passages which throw light on the characters, _i.e._ +the points of contact and contrast of the writer and his theme:-- + +In several respects I consider my father as one of the most interesting +men I have known, ... of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of +any it has been my lot to converse with. None of you will ever forget +that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, +full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all +manner of potent words.... Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to +render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Emphatic I have +heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: his words +were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that +he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet in description, and +for the sake chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man of rigid, even +scrupulous veracity.... He was never visited with doubt. The old Theorem +of the Universe was sufficient for him ... he stood a true man, while +his son stands here on the verge of the new.... A virtue he had which +I should learn to imitate: he never spoke of what was disagreeable and +past. His was a healthy mind. He had the most open contempt for all +"clatter."... He was irascible, choleric, and we all dreaded his wrath, +but passion never mastered him.... Man's face he did not fear: God he +always feared. His reverence was, I think, considerably mixed with +fear--rather awe, as of unutterable depths of silence through which +flickered a trembling hope.... Let me learn of him. Let me write my books +as he built his houses, and walk as blamelessly through this shadow +world.... Though genuine and coherent, living and life-giving, he was +nevertheless but half developed. We had all to complain that we durst not +freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in: he had not the free +means to unbosom himself.... It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear +repelled us from him. To me it was especially so. Till late years I was +ever more or less awed and chilled by him. + +James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. The failings of +both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. They were at one in their +integrity, independence, fighting force at stress, and their command of +winged words; but the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a +broader spirit; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he was a +better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a grimmer Calvinist. +"Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, "is doing very well, and has given us no +more paraphrases." He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged, under +the narrowing influences of the Covenanting land; but he remained stable +and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built with his own hands. James +Carlyle hammered on at Ecclefechan, making in his best year £100, till, +after the first decade of the century, the family migrated to Mainhill, +a bleak farm two miles from Lockerbie, where he so throve by work and +thrift that he left on his death in 1832 about £1000. Strong, rough, and +eminently _straight,_ intolerant of contradiction and ready with words +like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the +Brontës on the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle of +Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological theory as strict as +her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her +favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her +heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a +fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late +in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they +talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she +was to the last proud of the genius which grew in large measure under the +unfailing sunshine of her anxious love. + +Book II. of _Sartor_ is an acknowledged fragment of autobiography, mainly +a record of the author's inner life, but with numerous references to +his environment. There is not much to identify the foster parents of +Teufelsdröckh, and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the +place of ancestry: Entepfuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, where the ducks +are paddling in the ditch that has to pass muster for a stream, to-day as +a century gone: the severe frugality which (as in the case of Wordsworth +and Carlyle himself) survived the need for it, is clearly recalled; also +the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, "In an orderly house, +where the litter of children's sports is hateful, your training is rather +to bear than to do. I was forbid much, wishes in any measure bold I had +to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of obedience inflexibly held me +down. It was not a joyful life, yet ... a wholesome one." The following +oft-quoted passage is characteristic of his early love of nature and the +humorous touches by which he was wont to relieve his fits of sentiment:-- + +On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread crumb boiled +in milk) and eat it out of doors. On the coping of the wall, which I +could reach by climbing, my porringer was placed: there many a sunset +have I, looking at the distant mountains, consumed, not without relish, +my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of world's +expectation as day died, were still a Hebrew speech for me: nevertheless +I was looking at the fair illumined letters, and had an eye for the +gilding. + +In all that relates to the writer's own education, the Dichtung of +_Sartor_ and the Wahrheit of the _Reminiscences_ are in accord. By +Carlyle's own account, an "insignificant portion" of it "depended on +schools." Like Burns, he was for some years trained in his own parish, +where home influences counted for more than the teaching of not very +competent masters. He soon read eagerly and variously. At the age of +seven he was, by an Inspector of the old order, reported to be "complete +in English." In his tenth year (1805) he was sent to the Grammar School +of Annan, the "Hinterschlag Gymnasium," where his "evil days" began. +Every oversensitive child finds the life of a public school one long +misery. Ordinary boys--those of the Scotch borderland being of the most +savage type--are more brutal than ordinary men; they hate singularity as +the world at first hates originality, and have none of the restraints +which the later semi-civilisation of life imposes. "They obey the impulse +of rude Nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any stricken hart, the +duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all +hands the strong tyrannise over the weak." Young Carlyle was mocked for +his moody ways, laughed at for his love of solitude, and called "Tom the +Tearful" because of his habit of crying. To add much to his discomfort, +he had made a rash promise to his pious mother, who seems, in contrast to +her husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles--a promise +to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well +broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he +refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew +Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty +called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by +appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge +of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began +to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright +prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend. +On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University, +despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, "Educate a +boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." "Thou hast not +done so," said old James in after years, "God be thanked for it;" and the +son pays due tribute to the tolerant patience and substantial generosity +of the father: "With a noble faith he launched me forth into a world +which he himself had never been permitted to visit." Carlyle walked +through Moffat all the way to Edinburgh with a senior student, Tom Smail +(who owes to this fact the preservation of his name), with eyes open +to every shade on the moors, as is attested in two passages of the +_Reminiscences_. The boys, as is the fashion still, clubbed together in +cheap lodgings, and Carlyle attended the curriculum from 1809 to 1814. +Comparatively little is known of his college life, which seems to +have been for the majority of Scotch students much as it is now, a +compulsorily frugal life, with too little variety, relaxation, or society +outside Class rooms; and, within them, a constant tug at Science, mental +or physical, at the gateway to dissecting souls or bodies. We infer, from +hints in later conversations and memorials, that Carlyle lived much with +his own fancies, and owed little to any system. He is clearly thinking +of his own youth in his account of Dr. Francia: "Josè must have been a +loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn reflection, probably +to crying humours, with fits of vehement ill nature--subject to the +terriblest fits of hypochondria." His explosion in _Sartor,_ "It is my +painful duty to say that out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of +all hitherto discovered Universities," is the first of a long series of +libels on things and persons he did not like. The Scotch capital was +still a literary centre of some original brilliancy, in the light of +the circle of Scott, which followed that of Burns, in the early fame of +Cockburn and of Clerk (Lord Eldin), of the _Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh +Reviews,_ and of the elder Alison. The Chairs of the University were +conspicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of ability required +from Professors, some of them--conspicuously Brown (the more original if +less "sound" successor of Dugald Stewart), Playfair, and Leslie--rising +to a higher rank. But great Educational Institutions must adapt +themselves to the training of average minds by requirements and +restrictions against which genius always rebels. Biography more than +History repeats itself, and the murmurs of Carlyle are, like those +of Milton, Gibbon, Locke, and Wordsworth, the protests or growls of +irrepressible individuality kicking against the pricks. He was never in +any sense a classic; read Greek with difficulty--Aeschylus and Sophocles +mainly in translations--and while appreciating Tacitus disparaged Horace. +For Scotch Metaphysics, or any logical system, he never cared, and in his +days there was written over the Academic entrances "No Mysticism." He +distinguished himself in Mathematics, and soon found, by his own vaunt, +the _Principia_ of Newton prostrate at his feet: he was a favourite pupil +of Leslie, who escaped the frequent penalty of befriending him, but he +took no prizes: the noise in the class room hindered his answers, and he +said later to Mr. Froude that thoughts only came to him properly when +alone. + +[Footnote: He went so far as to say in 1847 that "the man who had mastered +the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he +had done before."] + +The social leader of a select set of young men in his own rank, by choice +and necessity _integer vitae_, he divided his time between the seclusion +of study and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was perhaps +the most prolific writer of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed his course +without taking a degree, did some tutorial work, and, in the same year, +accepted the post of Mathematical Usher at Annan as successor to Irving, +who had been translated to Haddington. Still in formal pursuit of the +ministry, though beginning to fight shy of its fences, he went up twice a +year to deliver addresses at the Divinity Hall, one of which, "on the uses +of affliction," was afterwards by himself condemned as flowery; another +was a Latin thesis on the theme, "num detur religio naturalis." The +posthumous publication of some of his writings, e.g. of the fragment of +the novel _Wotton Reinfred_, reconciles us to the loss of those which have +not been recovered. + +In the vacations, spent at Mainhill, he began to study German, and +corresponded with his College friends. Many of Carlyle's early letters, +reproduced in the volumes edited by Mr. Charles E. Norton, are written in +that which, according to Voltaire, is the only unpermissible style, "the +tiresome"; and the thought, far from being precocious, is distinctly +commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell on the fall of Napoleon; +or the following to his parents: "There are few things in this world more +valuable than knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it"; or +to James Johnstone the trite quotation, "Truly pale death overturns with +impartial foot the hut of the poor man and the palace of the king." +Several are marred by the egotism which in most Scotch peasants of +aspiring talent takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves +with others; refrains of the ambition against which the writer elsewhere +inveighs as the "kettle tied to the dog's tail." In a note to Thomas +Murray he writes:-- + +Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known +has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! bestow coronets and crowns and +principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and +noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart unyielding +to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary +fame. + +That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is +ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of +Leyden :-- + + Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye, + For that was a day + When we stood in our array + Like the lion's might at bay. + +"Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell consumes +almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have not, then I +desire you read it (_sic_) and tell me what you think of _him_," etc. +Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the +lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been previously travestied +in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns. "Many of his +opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to refer all the +modifications of national character to the influence of moral causes. +Might it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those which +he denominates moral causes originate from physical circumstances?" The +whole first volume of this somewhat overexpanded collection overflows +with ebullitions of bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of +Byron's early romances seems philanthropy, e.g.-- + +How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this +world. For what are its inhabitants? Its great men and its little, its +fat ones and its lean ... pitiful automatons, despicable Yahoos, yea, +they are altogether an insufferable thing. "O for a lodge in some vast +wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where the scowl of the +purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of the coxcomb, the bray of the +ninny and the clodpole might never reach me more!" + +On the other hand, there are frequent evidences of the imperial +intrepidity, the matchless industry, and the splendid independence of +the writer. In his twenty-first year Carlyle again succeeded his Annan +predecessor (who seems to have given dissatisfaction by some vagaries of +severity) as mathematical teacher in the main school of Kirkcaldy. The +_Reminiscences_ of Irving's generous reception of his protégé present one +of the pleasantest pictures in the records of their friendship. The same +chapter is illustrated by a series of sketches of the scenery of the +east coast rarely rivalled in descriptive literature. It is elsewhere +enlivened, if also defaced, by the earliest examples of the cynical +criticisms of character that make most readers rejoice in having escaped +the author's observation. + +During the two years of his residence in Fifeshire, Carlyle encountered +his first romance, in making acquaintance with a well-born young lady, +"by far the brightest and cleverest" of Irving's pupils--Margaret +Gordon--"an acquaintance which might easily have been more" had not +relatives and circumstances intervened. Doubtless Mr. Froude is right in +asserting this lady to have been the original of _Sartor's_ "Blumine"; +and in leaving him to marry "Herr Towgood," ultimately governor of Nova +Scotia, she bequeathed, though in antithetical style, advice that attests +her discrimination of character. "Cultivate the milder dispositions of +the heart, subdue the mere extravagant visions of the brain. Genius +will render you great. May virtue render you beloved. Remove the awful +distance between you and other men by kind and gentle manners. Deal +gently with their inferiority, and be convinced that they will respect +you as much and like you more." To this advice, which he never even +tried to take, she adds, happily perhaps for herself, "I give you not my +address, because I dare not promise to see you." In 1818 Carlyle, always +intolerant of work imposed, came to the conclusion that "it were better +to perish than to continue schoolmastering," and left Kirkcaldy, with £90 +saved, for Edinburgh, where he lived over three years, taking private +pupils, and trying to enter on his real mission through the gates of +literature--gates constantly barred; for, even in those older days of +laxer competition, obstinate eccentricity unredeemed by any social +advantages led to failure and rebuff. Men with the literary form of +genius highly developed have rarely much endurance of defeat. Carlyle, +even in his best moods, resented real or fancied injuries, and at this +stage of his career complained that he got nothing but vinegar from his +fellows, comparing himself to a worm that trodden on would "turn into a +torpedo." He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, which "gnawed +like a rat" at its life-long tenement, his stomach, and by sleeplessness, +due in part to internal causes, but also to the "Bedlam" noises of men, +machines, and animals, which pestered him in town and country from first +to last. He kept hesitating about his career, tried law, mathematical +teaching, contributions to magazines and dictionaries, everything but +journalism, to which he had a rooted repugnance, and the Church, which he +had definitely abandoned. How far the change in his views may have been +due to his reading of Gibbon, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc., how far to self- +reflection, is uncertain; but he already found himself unable, in any +plain sense, to subscribe to the Westminster Confession or to any +"orthodox" Articles, and equally unable by any philosophical +reconciliation of contraries to write black with white on a ground of +neutral gray. + +[Footnote: He refers to Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ as "of all books the +most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. +His winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing, were +often admirably potent and illustrative to me."] + +Mentally and physically adrift he was midway in the valley of the shadow, +which he represents as "The Everlasting No," and beset by "temptations in +the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, "The biographies of men of +letters are the wretchedest chapters in our history, except perhaps the +Newgate Calendar," a remark that recalls the similar cry of Burns, "There +is not among the martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the +poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness +to the absence of a popularity which he yet professes to scorn.--I was +entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles; solitary eating my own heart, +misgivings as to whether there shall be presently anything else to eat, +fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles and miseries ... three +weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free of noise, +... wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual questions unanswered, +etc. + +What is this but Byron's cry, "I am not happy," which his afterwards +stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-jack? + +Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same dismal mood. +"Mainhill," says his biographer, "was never a less happy home to him than +it was this summer (1819). He could not conceal the condition of his +mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a +matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have +seemed as if possessed." + +Returning to Edinburgh in the early winter, he for a time wrote hopefully +about his studies. "The law I find to be a most complicated subject, +yet I like it pretty well. Its great charm in my eyes is that no mean +compliances are requisite for prospering in it." But this strain soon +gave way to a fresh fit of perversity, and we have a record of his +throwing up the cards in one of his most ill-natured notes. + +I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and +converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But +it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere +denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as +wages for all that bogpool of disgust. + +The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radical rising in +Glasgow against the poverty which was the natural aftermath of the great +war, oppressions, half real, half imaginary, of the military force, and +the yeomanry in particular. Carlyle's contribution to the reminiscences +of the time is doubly interesting because written (in the article on +Irving, 1836) from memory, when he had long ceased to be a Radical. A +few sentences suffice to illustrate this phase or stage of his political +progress:-- + +A time of great rages and absurd terrors and expectations, a very fierce +Radical and anti-Radical time. Edinburgh, endlessly agitated by it all +around me ... gentry people full of zeal and foolish terror and fury, and +looking _disgustingly busy and important_.... One bleared Sunday morning +I had gone out for my walk. At the Riding-house in Nicolson Street was a +kind of straggly group, with red-coats interspersed. They took their way, +not very dangerous-looking men of war; but there rose from the little +crowd the strangest shout I have heard human throats utter, not very +loud, but it said as plain as words, and with infinitely more emphasis of +sincerity, "May the devil go with you, ye peculiarly contemptible, and +dead to the distresses of your fellow-creatures!" Another morning ... I +met an advocate slightly of my acquaintance hurrying along, musket in +hand, towards the Links, there to be drilled as item of the "gentlemen" +volunteers now afoot. "You should have the like of this," said he, +cheerily patting his musket "Hm, yes; but I haven't yet quite settled on +which side"--which probably he hoped was quiz, though it really expressed +my feeling ... mutiny and revolt being a light matter to the young. + +This period is illustrated by numerous letters from Irving, who had +migrated to Glasgow as an assistant to Dr. Chalmers, abounding in sound +counsels to persevere in some profession and make the best of practical +opportunities. Carlyle's answers have in no instance been preserved, but +the sole trace of his having been influenced by his friend's advice is his +contribution (1820-1823) of sixteen articles to the _Edinburgh +Encyclopedia_ under the editorship of Sir David Brewster. The scant +remuneration obtained from these was well timed, but they contain no +original matter, and did nothing for his fame. Meanwhile it appears from +one of Irving's letters that Carlyle's thoughts had been, as later in his +early London life, turning towards emigration. He says, writes his friend, +"I have the ends of my thoughts to bring together ... my views of life to +reform, my health to recover, and then once more I shall venture my bark +on the waters of this wide realm, and if she cannot weather it I shall +steer west and try the waters of another world." + +[Footnote: The subjects of these were--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, +Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker, +Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, +Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord Chatham, William Pitt. These articles, on +the whole judiciously omitted from the author's collected works, are +characterised by marks of great industry, commonplace, and general +fairness, with a style singularly formal, like that of the less im +pressive pages of Johnson. The following, among numerous passages, are +curious as illustrating the comparative orthodoxy of the writer's early +judgments: "The brilliant hints which Montesquieu scatters round him with +a liberal hand have excited or assisted the speculations of others in +almost every department of political economy, and he is deservedly +mentioned as a principal founder of that important science." "Mirabeau +confronted him (Necker) like his evil genius; and being totally without +scruple in the employment of any expedient, was but too successful in +overthrowing all reasonable proposals, and conducting the people to that +state of anarchy out of which his own ambition was to be rewarded," etc. +Similarly the verdicts on Pitt, Chatham, Nelson, Park, Lady Montagu, etc., +are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of conscientious research, +fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as +in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend +itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to +show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be +united with a coarse and ignoble heart."] + +The resolves, sometimes the efforts, of celebrated Englishmen,--"nos manet +oceanus,"--as Cromwell, Burns, Coleridge, and Southey (allured, some +critic suggests, by the poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough, +Richard Hengist Horne, and Browning's "Waring," to elude "the fever and +the fret" of an old civilisation, and take refuge in the fancied freedom +of wild lands--when more than dreams--have been failures. + +[Footnote: Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his +New York Press and "plant him where the red deer feed, in the green +forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's banished Duke.] + +Puritan patriots, it is true, made New England, and the scions of the +Cavaliers Virginia; but no poet or imaginative writer has ever been +successfully transplanted, with the dubious exception of Heinrich Heine. +It is certain that, despite his first warm recognition coming from across +the Atlantic, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ would have found +the "States" more fruitful in food for cursing than either Edinburgh or +London. + +The spring of 1820 was marked by a memorable visit to Irving, on +Carlyle's way to spend as was his wont the summer months at home. His +few days in Glasgow are recorded in a graphic sketch of the bald-headed +merchants at the Tontine, and an account of his introduction to Dr. +Chalmers, to whom he refers always with admiration and a respect but +slightly modified. The critic's praise of British contemporaries, other +than relatives, is so rare that the following sentences are worth +transcribing:-- + +He (Chalmers) was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honesty, and +kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination.... He had a +burst of genuine fun too.... His laugh was ever a hearty, low guffaw, +and his tones in preaching would reach to the piercingly pathetic. No +preacher ever went so into one's heart. He was a man essentially of +little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. Such an intellect, +professing to be educated, and yet ... ignorant in all that lies beyond +the horizon in place or time I have almost nowhere met with--a man +capable of so much soaking indolence, lazy brooding ... as the first +stage of his life well indicated, ... yet capable of impetuous activity +and braying audacity, as his later years showed. I suppose there will +never again be such a preacher in any Christian church. "The truth of +Christianity," he said, "was all written in us already in sympathetic +ink. Bible awakens it, and you can read"--a sympathetic image but of no +great weight as an argument addressed to doubting Thomas. Chalmers, whose +originality lay rather in his quick insight and fire than in his mainly +commonplace thought, had the credit of recognising the religious side of +Carlyle's genius, when to the mass of his countrymen he was a rock of +offence. One of the great preacher's criticisms of the great writer is +notably just: "He is a lover of earnestness more than a lover of truth." + +There follows in some of the early pages of the _Reminiscences_ an +account of a long walk with Irving, who had arranged to accompany Carlyle +for the first stage, _i.e._ fifteen miles of the road, of his for the +most part pedestrian march from Glasgow to Ecclefechan, a record among +many of similar excursions over dales and hills, and "by the beached +margent," revived for us in sun and shade by a pen almost as magical as +Turner's brush. We must refer to the pages of Mr. Froude for the +picture of Drumclog moss,--"a good place for Cameronian preaching, and +dangerously difficult for Claverse _(sic)_ and horse soldiery if the +suffering remnant had a few old muskets among them,"--for the graphic +glimpse of Ailsa Craig, and the talk by the dry stone fence, in the +twilight. "It was just here, as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from +me by degrees, in the softest manner, that I did not think as he of the +Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or +should. This, if this was so, he had pre-engaged to take well of me, like +an elder brother, if I would be frank with him. And right loyally he did +so." They parted here: Carlyle trudged on to the then "utterly quiet +little inn" at Muirkirk, left next morning at 4 A.M., and reached +Dumfries, a distance of fifty-four miles, at 8 P.M., "the longest walk I +ever made." He spent the summer at Mainhill, studying modern +languages, "living riotously with Schiller and Goethe." at work on the +_Encyclopedia_ articles, and visiting his friend at Annan, when he was +offered the post of tutor to the son of a Yorkshire farmer, an offer +which Irving urged him to accept, saying, "You live too much in an ideal +world," and wisely adding, "try your hand with the respectable illiterate +men of middle life. You may be taught to forget ... the splendours and +envies ... of men of literature." + +This exhortation led to a result recorded with much humour, egotism, and +arrogance in a letter to his intimate friend Dr. John Fergusson, of Kelso +Grammar School, which, despite the mark "private and confidential," was +yet published, several years after the death of the recipient and shortly +after that of the writer, in a gossiping memoir. We are therefore at +liberty to select from the letter the following paragraphs:-- + + I delayed sending an answer till I might have it in my power + to communicate what seemed then likely to produce a + considerable change in my stile (_sic_) of life, a + proposal to become a "travelling tutor," as they call it, to + a young person in the North Riding, for whom that exercise + was recommended on account of bodily and mental weakness. + They offered me £150 per annum, and withal invited me to + come and examine things on the spot before engaging. I went + accordingly, and happy was it I went; from description I was + ready to accept the place; from inspection all Earndale + would not have hired me to accept it. This boy was a dotard, + a semi-vegetable, the elder brother, head of the family, a + two-legged animal without feathers, intellect, or virtue, + and all the connections seemed to have the power of eating + pudding but no higher power. So I left the barbarous + people....York is but a heap of bricks. Jonathan Dryasdust + (see _Ivanhoe_) is justly named. York is the Boetia of + Britain.... Upon the whole, however, I derived great + amusement from my journey, ... I conversed with all kinds of + men, from graziers up to knights of the shire, argued with + them all, and broke specimens from their souls (if any), + which I retain within the museum of my cranium. I have no + prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown + from another planet on this dark terrestrial ball, an alien, + a pilgrim ... and life is to me like a pathless, a waste, + and a howling wilderness. Do not leave your situation if + you can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a + fearful thing to be swept in by the roaring surge of life, + and then to float alone undirected on its restless, + monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet you may, or if you + must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the waves without + a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cock-boats, yet hold + fast by the Manilla ship, _and do not let go the painter_. + +Towards the close of this year Irving, alarmed by his friend's +despondency, sent him a most generous and delicately-worded invitation to +spend some months under his roof; but Carlyle declined, and in a letter +of March 1821 he writes to his brother John: "Edinburgh, with all its +drawbacks, is the only scene for me," on which follows one of his finest +descriptions, that of the view from Arthur Seat. + +According to the most probable chronology, for many of Carlyle's dates +are hard to fix, the next important event of his life, his being +introduced, on occasion of a visit to Haddington, to Miss Jane Welsh by +her old tutor, Edward Irving--an event which marks the beginning of a new +era in his career--took place towards the close of May or in the first +week of June. To June is assigned the incident, described in _Sartor_ as +the transition from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea, a sort of +revelation that came upon him as he was in Leith Walk--Rue St. Thomas de +l'Enfer in the Romance--on the way to cool his distempers by a plunge in +the sea. The passage proclaiming this has been everywhere quoted; and it +is only essential to note that it resembled the "illuminations" of St. +Paul and of Constantine merely by its being a sudden spiritual impulse. +It was in no sense a conversion to any belief in person or creed, it was +but the assertion of a strong manhood against an almost suicidal mood +of despair; a condition set forth with superabundant paraphernalia of +eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of Teufelsdröckh had +darkened into disbelief in divine or human justice, freedom, or himself. +If there be a God, He sits on the hills "since the first Sabbath," +careless of mankind. Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire +and fear"; virtue "some bubble of the blood," absence of vitality +perhaps. + +What in these days are terrors of conscience to diseases of the liver? +Not on morality but on cookery let us build our stronghold.... Thus has +the bewildered wanderer to stand, shouting question after question into +the Sibyl cave, and receiving for answer an echo. + +From this scepticism, deeper than that of _Queen Mab,_ fiercer than that +of _Candide,_ Carlyle was dramatically rescued by the sense that he was a +servant of God, even when doubting His existence. + + After all the nameless woe that inquiry had wrought me, + I nevertheless still loved truth, and would hate no jot of my + allegiance....Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me + for following her; no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubberland + were the price of apostacy. + +With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough of despond and +asserts himself: + + Denn ich bin ein Mensch gewesen + Und das heisst ein Kämpfer seyn. + +He finds in persistent action, energy, and courage a present strength, +and a lamp of at least such partial victory as he lived to achieve. + + He would not make his judgment blind; + He faced the spectres of the mind,-- + +but he never "laid them," or came near the serenity of his master, +Goethe; and his teaching, public and private, remained half a wail. He +threw the gage rather in the attitude of a man turning at bay than that of +one making a leap. + + Death? Well, Death ... let it come then, and I will + meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream + of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from + that time the temper of my misery was changed; not ... + whining sorrow ... but grim defiance. + +Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:-- + +I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce, +upon myself and all things earthly....The year is closing. This time +eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago.... + + Oh! little did my mother think, + That day she cradled me, + The lands that I should travel in, + The death I was to dee. + +My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in +a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain. +How have I deserved this? I know not. Then why don't you kill yourself, +sir? Is there not arsenic? Is there not ratsbane of various kinds? And +hemp, and steel? Most true, Sathanas...but it will be time enough to +use them when I have _lost_ the game I am but _losing_, ... and while +my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not +breaking their hearts would still remain....I want health, health, +health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious: my torments are +greater than I am able to bear. + +Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is there any excess of +Optimism; but after the Leith Walk inspiration he had resolved on "no +surrender"; and that, henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have +proof in its more regular, if not more rapid progress. His last hack +service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless we add a +translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's Geometry, begun, +according to some reports, in the Kirkcaldy period, finished in 1822, +and published in 1824. For this task, prefixed by an original _Essay on +Proportion_, much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respectable sum +of £50. Two subsequent candidatures for Chairs of Astronomy showed that +Carlyle had not lost his taste for Mathematics; but this work was his +practical farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an +author were those of an interpreter. His complete mastery of German has +been said to have endowed him with "his sword of sharpness and shoes of +swiftness"; it may be added, in some instances also, with the "fog-cap." +But in his earliest substantial volume, the _Life of Schiller_, there is +nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. This work began to +appear in the _London Magazine_ in 1823, was finished in 1824, and in +1825 published in a separate form. Approved during its progress by an +encouraging article in the _Times_, it was, in 1830, translated into +German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced the work by an +important commendatory preface, and so first brought the author's name +conspicuously before a continental public. Carlyle himself, partly +perhaps from the spirit of contradiction, was inclined to speak +slightingly of this high-toned and sympathetic biography: "It is," said +he, "in the wrong vein, laborious, partly affected, meagre, bombastic." +But these are sentences of a morbid time, when, for want of other +victims, he turned and rent himself. _Pari passu_, he was toiling at his +translation of _Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship_. This was published in +Edinburgh in 1824. Heartily commended in _Blackwood_, it was generally +recognised as one of the best English renderings of any foreign author; +and Jeffrey, in his absurd review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks +in high terms of the skill displayed by the translator. The virulent +attack of De Quincey--a writer as unreliable as brilliant--in the _London +Magazine_ does not seem to have carried much weight even then, and has +none now. The _Wanderjahre_, constituting the third volume of the English +edition, first appeared as the last of four on German Romance--a series +of admirably selected and executed translations from Musæus, Fouqué, +Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Goethe, prefaced by short biographical and +critical notices of each--published in Edinburgh in 1827. This date is +also that of the first of the more elaborate and extensive criticisms +which, appearing in the Edinburgh and Foreign reviews, established +Carlyle as the English pioneer of German literature. The result of these +works would have been enough to drive the wolf from the door and to +render their author independent of the oatmeal from home; while another +source of revenue enabled him not only to keep himself, but to settle +his brother Alick in a farm, and to support John through his University +course as a medical student. This and similar services to the family +circle were rendered with gracious disclaimers of obligation. "What any +brethren of our father's house possess, I look on as a common stock from +which all are entitled to draw." + +For this good fortune he was again indebted to his friend of friends. +Irving had begun to feel his position at Glasgow unsatisfactory, and +at the close of 1821 he was induced to accept an appointment to the +Caledonian Chapel at Hatton Garden. On migrating to London, to make a +greater, if not a safer, name in the central city, and finally, be lost +in its vortex, he had invited Carlyle to follow him, saying, "Scotland +breeds men, but England rears them." Shortly after, introduced by Mrs. +Strachey, one of his worshipping audience, to her sister Mrs. Buller, he +found the latter in trouble about the education of her sons. Charles, the +elder, was a youth of bright but restive intelligence, and it was desired +to find some transitional training for him on his way from Harrow to +Cambridge. Irving urged his being placed, in the interim, under Carlyle's +charge. The proposal, with an offer of £200 a year, was accepted, and the +brothers were soon duly installed in George Square, while their tutor +remained in Moray Place, Edinburgh. The early stages of this relationship +were eminently satisfactory; Carlyle wrote that the teaching of the +Bullers was a pleasure rather than a task; they seemed to him "quite +another set of boys than I have been used to, and treat me in another +sort of manner than tutors are used. The eldest is one of the cleverest +boys I have ever seen." There was never any jar between the teacher and +the taught. Carlyle speaks with unfailing regard of the favourite pupil, +whose brilliant University and Parliamentary career bore testimony to the +good practical guidance he had received. His premature death at the +entrance on a sphere of wider influence made a serious blank in his old +master's life. + +[Footnote: Charles Buller became Carlyle's pupil at the age of fifteen. +He died as Commissioner of the Poor in 1848 (_aet_. forty-two).] + +But as regards the relation of the employer and employed, we are wearied +by the constantly recurring record of kindness lavishly bestowed, +ungraciously received, and soon ungratefully forgotten. The elder +Bullers--the mother a former beauty and woman of some brilliancy, the +father a solid and courteous gentleman retired from the Anglo-Indian +service--came to Edinburgh in the spring of the tutorship, and +recognising Carlyle's abilities, welcomed him to the family circle, and +treated him, by his own confession, with a "degree of respect" he "did +not deserve"; adapting their arrangements, as far as possible, to his +hours and habits; consulting his convenience and humouring his whims. +Early in 1823 they went to live together at Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld, +when he continued to write letters to his kin still praising his patrons; +but the first note of discord is soon struck in satirical references to +their aristocratic friends and querulous complaints of the servants. +During the winter, for greater quiet, a room was assigned to him in +another house near Kinnaird; a consideration which met with the award: +"My bower is the most polite of bowers, refusing admittance to no wind +that blows." And about this same time he wrote, growling at his fare: "It +is clear to me that I shall never recover my health under the economy of +Mrs. Buller." + +In 1824 the family returned to London, and Carlyle followed in June by +a sailing yacht from Leith. On arrival he sent to Miss Welsh a letter, +sneering at his fellow passengers, but ending with a striking picture of +his first impressions of the capital:-- + + We were winding slowly through the forest of masts in the + Thames up to our station at Tower Wharf. The giant bustle, + the coal heavers, the bargemen, the black buildings, the ten + thousand times ten thousand sounds and movements of that + monstrous harbour formed the grandest object I had ever + witnessed. One man seems a drop in the ocean; you feel + annihilated in the immensity of that heart of all the world. + +On reaching London he first stayed for two or three weeks under Irving's +roof and was introduced to his friends. Of Mrs. Strachey and her young +cousin Kitty, who seems to have run the risk of admiring him to excess, +he always spoke well: but the Basil Montagues, to whose hospitality and +friendship he was made welcome, he has maligned in such a manner as to +justify the retaliatory pamphlet of the sharp-tongued eldest daughter +of the house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By letter and +"reminiscence" he is equally reckless in invective against almost all the +eminent men of letters with whom he then came in contact, and also, +in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, +Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in +some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being +addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of +well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain +on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he +writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in +the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature." +And a fortnight later, from Irving's house at Pentonville, he sends to +his mother an account of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him +two alternatives--to go with the family to France or to remain in the +country preparing the eldest boy for Cambridge. He declined both, and +they parted, shaking hands with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a +sentence that recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge, "that I have done +with them ... I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for £200 a +year." + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_ (1st ed. 1851), chap. viii. +p. 79.] + +There followed eight weeks of residence in or about Birmingham, with a +friend called 'Badams, who undertook to cure dyspepsia by a new method +and failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others, +as the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the toiling +squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from radical democracy to +Platonic autocracy, continued to take a deep interest; on other days +they had pleasant excursions to the green fields and old towers of +Warwickshire. On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De +Quincey's review of _Meister_, and in recounting the event credits +himself with the philosophic thought, "This man is perhaps right on some +points; if so let him be admonitory." + +But the description that follows of "the child that has been in hell," +however just, is less magnanimous. Then came a trip, in company with Mr. +Strachey and Kitty and maid, by Dover and Calais along Sterne's route to +Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis XVIII. was then +lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments are mainly acid remarks on the +Palais Royal, with the refrain, "God bless the narrow seas." But he met +Legendre and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and saw Talma act, and, what +was of more moment, had his first glimpse of the Continent and the city +of one phase of whose history he was to be the most brilliant recorder. +Back in London for the winter, where his time was divided between +Irving's house and his own neighbouring room in Southampton Street, +he was cheered by Goethe's own acknowledgment of the translation of +_Meister_, characteristically and generously cordial. + +In March 1825 Carlyle again set his face northward, and travelling by +coach through Birmingham, Manchester, Bolton, and Carlisle, established +himself, in May, at Hoddam Hill; a farm near the Solway, three miles from +Mainhill, which his father had leased for him. His brother Alexander +farmed, while Thomas toiled on at German translations and rode about on +horseback. For a space, one of the few contented periods of his life, +there is a truce to complaining. Here free from the noises which are the +pests of literary life, he was building up his character and forming the +opinions which, with few material changes, he long continued to hold. +Thus he writes from over a distance of forty years :-- + + With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam + Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now + like a not ignoble russet-coated idyll in my memory; one of + the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly + important of my life.... I found that I had conquered all my + scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with + the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch, + and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of + ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory.... Once + more, thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and + still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, + in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep road + before me, the first of the moderns. Bodily health itself + seemed improving.... Nowhere can I recollect of myself such + pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact + and Nature as in these poor Annandale localities. The sound + of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday mornings from + Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, was + strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen + hundred years. + +Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid +storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his +tyrannous love of liberty:-- + + It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of + consciousness--of inward dignity--I have gained since I came + within the walls of this poor cottage--my own four walls. + They simply admit that I am _Herr im Hause_, and act on + this conviction. There is no grumbling about my habitudes + and whims. If I choose to dine on fire and brimstone, they + will cook it for me to their best skill, thinking only that + I am an unintelligible mortal, _fâcheux_ to deal with, + but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own four walls. + +The last words form the refrain of a set of verses, the most +characteristic, as Mr. Froude justly observes, of the writer, the actual +composition of which seems, however, to belong to the next chapter of his +career, beginning-- + + Wild through the wind the huntsman calls, + As fast on willing nag I haste + Home to my own four walls. + +The feeling that inspires them is clenched in the defiance-- + + King George has palaces of pride, + And armed grooms must ward those halls; + With one stout bolt I safe abide + Within my own four walls. + + Not all his men may sever this; + It yields to friends', not monarchs' calls; + My whinstone house my castle is-- + I have my own four walls. + + When fools or knaves do make a rout, + With gigmen, dinners, balls, cabals, + I turn my back and shut them out; + These are my own four walls. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +CRAIGENPUTTOCK + +[1826-1834] + +"Ah, when she was young, she was a fleein', dancin", light-heartit thing, +Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a' at +ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher; and +he cam' aboot her. Then there was Maister ----. Then there was Maister +Carlyle himsel', and _he_ cam' to finish her off like."--HADDINGTON +NURSE. + +"My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at a +furlong's distance."--T. CARLYLE, from Craigenputtock, Oct. 1830. + +During the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the verge of a crisis +of his career, _i.e._ his making a marriage, for the chequered fortune of +which he was greatly himself to blame. + +No biography can ignore the strange conditions of a domestic life, +already made familiar in so many records that they are past evasion. +Various opinions have been held regarding the lady whom he selected to +share his lot. Any adequate estimate of this remarkable woman belongs to +an account of her own career, such as that given by Mrs. Ireland in her +judicious and interesting abridgment of the material amply supplied. Jane +Baillie Welsh (_b.1801, d. 1866_)--descended on the paternal side from +Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of John Knox; on the maternal owning to +an inheritance of gipsy blood--belonged to a family long esteemed +in the borders. Her father, a distinguished Edinburgh student, and +afterwards eminent surgeon at Haddington, noted alike for his humanity +and skill, made a small fortune, and purchased in advance from his father +his inheritance of Craigenputtock, a remnant of the once larger family +estate. He died in 1819, when his daughter was in her eighteenth year. To +her he left the now world-famous farm and the bulk of his property. Jane, +of precocious talents, seems to have been, almost from infancy, the +tyrant of the house at Haddington, where her people took a place of +precedence in the small county town. Her grandfathers, John of +Penfillan and Walter of Templand, also a Welsh, though of another--the +gipsy--stock, vied for her baby favours, while her mother's quick and +shifty tempers seem at that date to have combined in the process of +"spoiling" her. The records of the schooldays of the juvenile Jane all +point to a somewhat masculine strength of character. Through life, +it must be acknowledged, this brilliant creature was essentially "a +mockingbird," and made game of every one till she met her mate. The +little lady was learned, reading Virgil at nine, ambitious enough to +venture a tragedy at fourteen, and cynical; writing to her life-long +friend, Miss Eliza Stodart, of Haddington as a "bottomless pit of +dulness," where "all my little world lay glittering in tinsel at my +feet." She was ruthless to the suitors--as numerous, says Mr. Froude, +"as those of Penelope "--who flocked about the young beauty, wit, and +heiress. Of the discarded rivals there was only one of note--George +Rennie, long afterwards referred to by Carlyle as a "clever, decisive, +very ambitious, but quite unmelodious young fellow whom we knew here (in +Chelsea) as sculptor and M.P." She dismissed him in 1821 for some cause +of displeasure, "due to pride, reserve, and his soured temper about the +world"; but when he came to take leave, she confesses, "I scarcely heard +a word he said, my own heart beat so loud." Years after, in London, she +went by request of his wife to Rennie's death-bed. + +Meanwhile she had fallen under the spell of her tutor, Edward Irving, +and, as she, after much _finesse_ and evasion, admitted, came to love him +in earnest. Irving saw her weak points, saying she was apt to turn +her powers to "arts of cruelty which satire and scorn are," and "to +contemplate the inferiority of others rather from the point of view +of ridicule and contempt than of commiseration and relief." Later she +retaliated, "There would have been no 'tongues' had Irving married me." +But he was fettered by a previous engagement, to which, after some +struggle for release, he held, leaving in charge of his pupil, as guide, +philosopher, and friend, his old ally and successor, Thomas Carlyle. +Between this exceptional pair there began in 1821 a relationship of +constant growth in intimacy, marked by frequent visits, conversations, +confidences, and a correspondence, long, full, and varied, starting with +interchange of literary sympathies, and sliding by degrees into the +dangerous friendship called Platonic. At the outset it was plain that +Carlyle was not the St. Preux or Wolmar whose ideas of elegance Jane +Welsh--a hasty student of Rousseau--had set in unhappy contrast to the +honest young swains of Haddington. Uncouth, ungainly in manner and +attire, he first excited her ridicule even more than he attracted her +esteem, and her written descriptions of him recall that of Johnson by +Lord Chesterfield. "He scrapes the fender, ... only his tongue should be +left at liberty, his other members are most fantastically awkward"; but +the poor mocking-bird had met her fate. The correspondence falls under +two sections, the critical and the personal. The critical consists of +remarks, good, bad, and indifferent, on books and their writers. Carlyle +began his siege by talking German to her, now extolling Schiller and +Goethe to the skies, now, with a rare stretch of deference, half +conniving at her sneers. Much also passed between them about English +authors, among them comments on Byron, notably inconsistent. Of him +Carlyle writes (April 15th 1824) as "a pampered lord," who would care +nothing for the £500 a year that would make an honest man happy; but +later, on hearing of the death at Mesolonghi, more in the vein of his +master Goethe, he exclaims:-- + + Alas, poor Byron! the news of his death came upon me like + a mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful + twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. O + God! that so many souls of mud and clay should fill up + their base existence to the utmost bound; and this, the + noblest spirit in Europe, should sink before half his course + was run.... Late so full of fire and generous passion and + proud purposes, and now for ever dumb and cold.... Had he + been spared to the age of threescore and ten what might he + not have been! what might he not have been! ... I dreamed of + seeing him and knowing him; but ... we shall go to him, he + shall not return to us. + +This in answer to her account of the same intelligence: "I was told it +all alone in a room full of people. If they had said the sun or the moon +was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of +a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words 'Byron is +dead.'" Other letters of the same period, from London, are studded or +disfigured by the incisive ill-natured sarcasms above referred to, or +they relate to the work and prospects of the writer. Those that bear +on the progress of his suit mark it as the strangest and, when we look +before and after, one of the saddest courtships in literary history. As +early as 1822 Carlyle entertained the idea of making Jane Welsh his wife; +she had begun to yield to the fascinations of his speech--a fascination +akin to that of Burns--when she wrote, "I will be happier contemplating +my beau-ideal than a real, substantial, eating, drinking, sleeping, +honest husband." In 1823 they were half-declared lovers, but there were +recalcitrant fits on both sides. On occasion of a meeting at Edinburgh +there was a quarrel, followed by a note of repentance, in which she +confessed, "Nothing short of a devil could have tempted me to torment +you and myself as I did on that unblessed day." Somewhat earlier she had +written in answer to his first distinct avowal, "My friend, I love you. +But were you my brother I should love you the same. No. Your friend I +will be ... while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife never, +though you were as rich as Croesus, as honoured and renowned as you yet +shall be." To which Carlyle answered with characteristic pride, "I have +no idea of dying in the Arcadian shepherd's style for the disappointment +of hopes which I never seriously entertained, and had no right to +entertain seriously." There was indeed nothing of Corydon and Phyllis in +this struggle of two strong wills, the weaker giving way to the stronger, +the gradual but inexorable closing of an iron ring. Backed by the natural +repugnance of her mother to the match, Miss Welsh still rebelled, bracing +herself with the reflection, "Men and women may be very charming without +having any genius;" and to his renewed appeal (1825), "It lies with +you whether I shall be a right man or only a hard and bitter Stoic," +retorting, "I am not in love with you ... my affections are in a state of +perfect tranquillity." But she admitted he was her "only fellowship and +support," and confiding at length the truth about Irving, surrendered in +the words, "Decide, and woe to me if your reason be your judge and not +your love." In this duel of Puck and Theseus, the latter felt he had won +and pressed his advantage, offering to let her free and adding warnings +to the blind, "Without great sacrifices on both sides, the possibility +of our union is an empty dream." At the eleventh hour, when, in her own +words, she was "married past redemption," he wrote, "If you judge fit, I +will take you to my heart this very week. If you judge fit, I will this +very week forswear you for ever;" and replied to her request that her +widowed mother might live under their wedded roof in terms that might +have become Petruchio: "It may be stated in a word. The man should bear +rule in the house, not the woman. This is an eternal axiom, the law of +nature which no mortal departs from unpunished. . . . Will your mother +consent to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to her +daughter's husband!" + + Was ever woman in this humour woo'd, + Was ever woman in this humour won? + +Miss Welsh at length reluctantly agreed to come to start life at +Scotsbrig, where his family had migrated; but Carlyle pushed another +counter: "Your mother must not visit mine: the mere idea of such a visit +argued too plainly that you _knew nothing_ of the family circle in which +for my sake you were willing to take a place." It being agreed that Mrs. +Welsh was to leave Haddington, where the alliance was palpably unpopular, +Carlyle proposed to begin married life in his mother-in-law's vacant +house, saying in effect to his fiancée that as for intrusive visitors he +had "nerve enough" to kick her old friends out of doors. At this point, +however, her complaisance had reached its limit. The bridegroom-elect had +to soothe his sense of partial retreat by a scolding letter. As regards +difficulties of finance he pointed out that he had £200 to start with, +and that a labourer and his wife had been known to live on £14 a year. + +On the edge of the great change in her life, Jane Welsh writes, "I am +resolved in spirit, in the face of every horrible fate," and says she has +decided to put off mourning for her father, having found a second father. +Carlyle proposed that after the "dreaded ceremony" he and his bride and +his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach from Dumfries +to Edinburgh. In "the last dying speech and marrying words" she objects +to this arrangement, and after the event (October 17th 1826) they drove +in a post-chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself settled +at Templand, had furnished a house for them. Meanwhile the Carlyle family +migrated to Scotsbrig. There followed eighteen comparatively tranquil +months, an oasis in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in +some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social +gatherings--Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their +brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the +northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster, +John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey, +a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as Irving himself. +Procter had introduced Carlyle to the famous editor, who, as a Scotch +cousin of the Welshes, took from the first a keen interest in the still +struggling author, and opened to him the door of the _Edinburgh Review_. +The appearance, of the article on _Richter_, 1827, and that, in the +course of the same year, on _The State of German Literature,_ marks +the beginning of a long series of splendid historical and critical +essays--closing in 1855 with the _Prinzenraub_--which set Carlyle in the +front of the reviewers of the century. The success in the _Edinburgh_ +was an "open sesame;" and the conductors of the _Foreign_ and _Foreign +Quarterly_ Reviews, later, those of _Fraser_ and the _Westminster_, were +ready to receive whatever the new writer might choose to send. + +To the _Foreign Review_ he contributed from Comely Bank the _Life and +Writings of Werner_, a paper on _Helena_, the leading episode of the +second part of "Faust," and the first of the two great Essays on +_Goethe_, which fixed his place as the interpreter of Germany to England. +In midsummer 1827 Carlyle received a letter from Goethe cordially +acknowledging the _Life of Schiller_, and enclosing presents of books for +himself and his wife. This, followed by a later inquiry as to the +author of the article on _German Literature_, was the opening of a +correspondence of sage advice on the one side and of lively gratitude +on the other, that lasted till the death of the veteran in 1832. Goethe +assisted, or tried to assist, his admirer by giving him a testimonial in +a candidature for the Chair (vacant by the promotion of Dr. Chalmers) of +Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Jeffrey, a frequent visitor and host +of the Carlyles, still regarded as "a jewel of advocates ... the most +lovable of little men," urged and aided the canvass, but in vain. The +testimonials were too strong to be judicious, and "it was enough that" +the candidate "was described as a man of original and extraordinary gifts +to make college patrons shrink from contact with him." Another failure, +about the same date and with the same backing, was an application for a +Professorship in London University, practically under the patronage of +Brougham; yet another, of a different kind, was Carlyle's attempt +to write a novel, which having been found--better before than after +publication--to be a failure, was for the most part burnt. "He could +not," says Froude, "write a novel any more than he could write poetry. He +had no _invention._" + +[Footnote: Carlyle's verses also demonstrate that he had no metrical ear. +The only really good lines he ever wrote, save in translations where the +rhythm was set to him, are those constantly quoted about the dawn of +"another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud Hapsburg," and to +Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of Macaulay's school-boy, "Non di +non homines;" but it took much hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact, +and when persuaded he concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of +cymbals!] + +"His genius was for fact; to lay hold on truth, with all his intellect and +all his imagination. He could no more invent than he could lie." + +The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are few: a visit from +his mother; a message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter +Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in +Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new +Annual Register, designed to be a literary _résumé_ of the year, make up +the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic +life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox +honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom +saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined together and +read _Don Quixote_ in Spanish. The husband was half forgotten in the +author beginning to prophesy: he wrote alone, walked alone, thought +alone, and for the most part talked alone, _i.e._ in monologue that did +not wait or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, but +there was little companionship. Meanwhile, despite the _Review_ articles, +Carlyle's other works, especially the volumes on German romance, were not +succeeding, and the mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful +whether he could afford to live in Edinburgh; he craved after greater +quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh inheritance, fell +vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His wife yielding, though with a +natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the +Jeffreys kindly assisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of +the Hawks. + +Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British +dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy +straths of grass around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid +bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in +front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or +apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. Here Carlyle +allowed his wife to serve him through six years of household drudgery; +an offence for which he was never quite forgiven, and to estimate its +magnitude here seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother, +and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he was as unfit, +and for some of the same reasons, to make "a happy fireside clime" as was +Jonathan Swift; and less even than Byron had he a share of the mutual +forbearance which is essential to the closest of all relations. + +"Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked everything and +spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, +nor himself." With a slight change of phrase the same may be said of +Carlyle's devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain in +his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of literature as +a profession, nor are there wiser words than those in which the veteran +warns the young men, whose questions he answers with touching solicitude, +against its adoption. "It should be," he declares, "the wine not the food +of life, the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread of +action parches up nature and makes strong souls like Byron dangerous, +the weak despicable." But it was nevertheless the profession of his +deliberate choice, and he soon found himself bound to it as Ixion to his +wheel. The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was +great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out +the heart of the mystery, be it of himself, as in _Sartor_; of Germany, +as in his Goethes and Richters; the state of England, as in _Chartism_ +and _Past and Present;_ of _Cromwell_ or of _Friedrich,_ he faced all +obstacles and overthrew them. Dauntless and ruthless, he allowed nothing +to divert or to mar his designs, least of all domestic cares or even +duties. "Selfish he was,"--I again quote from his biographer,--"if it +be selfish to be ready to sacrifice every person dependent on him as +completely as he sacrificed himself." What such a man wanted was a +housekeeper and a nurse, not a wife, and when we consider that he had +chosen for the latter companionship a woman almost as ambitious as +himself, whose conversation was only less brilliant than his own, of +delicate health and dainty ways, loyal to death, but, according to Mr. +Froude, in some respects "as hard as flint," with "dangerous sparks of +fire," whose quick temper found vent in sarcasms that blistered and words +like swords, who could declare during the time of the engagement, to +which in spite of warnings manifold she clung, "I will not marry to live +on less than my natural and artificial wants"; who, ridiculing his accent +to his face and before his friends, could write, "apply your talents to +gild over the inequality of our births"; and who found herself obliged +to live sixteen miles from the nearest neighbour, to milk a cow, scour +floors and mend shoes--when we consider all this we are constrained to +admit that the 17th October 1826 was a _dies nefastus,_ nor wonder that +thirty years later Mrs. Carlyle wrote, "I married for ambition, Carlyle +has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him, and I am +miserable,"--and to a young friend, "My dear, whatever you do, never +marry a man of genius." + +Carlyle's own references to the life at Craigenputtock are marked by all +his aggravating inconsistency. "How happy we shall be in this Craig o' +Putta," he writes to his wife from Scotsbrig, April 17th 1827; and later +to Goethe:-- + + Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of + Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here + to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good results. + But I came here solely with the design to simplify my way of + life, and to secure the independence through which I could + be enabled to be true to myself. This bit of earth is our + own; here we can live, write, and think as best pleases + ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the + monarch of literature. From some of our heights I can descry, + about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola + and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I + was born, and there both father and mother still live to + love me.... The only piece of any importance that I have + written since I came here is an Essay on Burns. + +This Essay,--modified at first, then let alone, by Jeffrey,--appeared in +the _Edinburgh_ in the autumn of 1828. We turn to Carlyle's journal +and find the entry, "Finished a paper on Burns at this Devil's Den," +elsewhere referred to as a "gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he +confesses, when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I have +really had enough." + + Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Romam. + +Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and in the town for +the moor. During the first twenty years of his London life, in what he +called "the Devil's oven," he is constantly clamouring to return to the +den. His wife, more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently +disliked it; little wonder, between sluttish maid-servants and owl-like +solitude: and she expressed her dislike in the pathetic verses, "To a +Swallow Building under our Eaves," sent to Jeffrey in 1832, and ending-- + + God speed thee, pretty bird; may thy small nest + With little ones all in good time be blest; + I love thee much + For well thou managest that life of thine, + While I! Oh, ask not what I do with mine, + Would I were such! + + _The Desert._ + +The monotony of the moorland life was relieved by visits of relations and +others made and repaid, an excursion to Edinburgh, a residence in London, +and the production of work, the best of which has a chance of living with +the language. One of the most interesting of the correspondences of this +period is a series of letters, addressed to an anonymous Edinburgh friend +who seems to have had some idea of abandoning his profession of the Law +for Literature, a course against which Carlyle strenuously protests. From +these letters, which have only appeared in the columns of the _Glasgow +Herald_, we may extract a few sentences:-- + + Don't disparage the work that gains your bread. What is all + work but a drudgery? no labour for the present joyous, but + grievous. A man who has nothing to admire except himself is + in the minimum state. The question is, Does a man really + love Truth, or only the market price of it? Even literary + men should have something else to do. Katnes was a lawyer, + Roscoe a merchant, Hans Sachs a cobbler, Burns a gauger, + etc. + +The following singular passage, the style of which suggests an imitation +of Sterne, is the acme of unconscious self-satire:-- + + You are infinitely unjust to Blockheads, as they are called. + Ask yourself seriously within your own heart--what right + have you to live wisely in God's world, and they not to live + a little less wisely? Is there a man more to be condoled + with, nay, I will say to be cherished and tenderly treated, + than a man that has no brain? My Purse is empty, it can be + filled again; the Jew Rothschild could fill it; or I can + even live with it very far from full. But, gracious heavens! + What is to be done with my _empty Head_? + +Three of the visits of this period are memorable. Two from the Jeffreys +(in 1828 and 1830) leave us with the same uncomfortable impression of +kindness ungrudgingly bestowed and grudgingly received. Jeffrey had a +double interest in the household at Craigenputtock--an almost brotherly +regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by the range of a keen +though limited appreciation, in the powers of the husband, to whom he +wrote: "Take care of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so +entirely to you," and with a half truth, "You have no mission upon earth, +whatever you may fancy, half so important as to be innocently happy." And +again: "Bring your blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek +shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the "banner with a +strange device," and was either deaf or indignant. The visits passed, +with satirical references from both host and hostess; for Mrs. Carlyle, +who could herself abundantly scoff and scold, would allow the liberty to +no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary of well-doing. Previous to +his promotion as Lord Advocate and consequent transference to London, +he tried to negotiate for Carlyle's appointment as his successor in the +editorship of the _Review,_ but failed to make him accept the necessary +conditions. The paper entitled _Signs of the Times_ was the last +production that he had to revise for his eccentric friend. Those +following on Taylor's _German Literature_ and the _Characteristics_ were +brought out in 1831 under the auspices of Macvey Napier. The other visit +was from the most illustrious of Carlyle's English-speaking friends, +in many respects a fellow-worker, yet "a spirit of another sort," and +destined, though a transcendental mystic, to be the most practical of his +benefactors. Twenty-four hours of Ralph Waldo Emerson (often referred to +in the course of a long and intimate correspondence) are spoken of by +Mrs. Carlyle as a visit from the clouds, brightening the prevailing gray. +He came to the remote inland home with "the pure intellectual gleam" of +which Hawthorne speaks, and "the quiet night of clear fine talk" remained +one of the memories which led Carlyle afterwards to say, "Perhaps our +happiest days were spent at the Craig." Goethe's letters, especially +that in which he acknowledges a lock of Mrs. Carlyle's hair, "eine +unvergleichliche schwarze Haar locke," were also among the gleams of +1829. The great German died three years later, after receiving the +birthday tribute, in his 82nd year, from English friends; and it is +pleasant to remember that in this instance the disciple was to the end +loyal to his master. To this period belong many other correspondences. "I +am scribble scribbling," he says in a letter of 1832, and mere scribbling +may fill many pages with few headaches; but Carlyle wrestled as he wrote, +and not a page of those marvellous _Miscellanies_ but is red with his +life's blood. Under all his reviewing, he was set on a work whose +fortunes were to be the strangest, whose result was, in some respects, +the widest of his efforts. The plan of _Sartor Resartus_ is far from +original. Swift's _Tale of a Tub_ distinctly anticipates the Clothes +Philosophy; there are besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs, +Jean Paul Richter, and other German authors: but in our days originality +is only possible in the handling; Carlyle has made an imaginary German +professor the mere mouthpiece of his own higher aspirations and those of +the Scotland of his day, and it remains the most popular as surely as +his _Friedrich_ is the greatest of his works. The author was abundantly +conscious of the value of the book, and super-abundantly angry at the +unconsciousness of the literary patrons of the time. In 1831 he resolved +if possible to go up to London to push the prospects of this first-born +male child. The _res angusta_ stood in the way. Jeffrey, after asking his +friend "what situation he could get him that he would detest the least," +pressed on him "in the coolest, lightest manner the use of his purse." +This Carlyle, to the extent of £50 as a loan (carefully returned), was +induced ultimately to accept. It has been said that "proud men never +wholly forgive those to whom they feel themselves obliged," but their +resenting benefits is the worst feature of their pride. Carlyle made +his second visit to London to seek types for _Sartor_, in vain. Always +preaching reticence with the sound of artillery, he vents in many pages +the rage of his chagrin at the "Arimaspian" publishers, who would not +print his book, and the public which, "dosed with froth," would not +buy it. The following is little softened by the chiaroscuro of +five-and-thirty years:-- + + Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and + August 1830, _Teufelsdröckh_ was ready, and I decided + to make for London; night before going, how I remember it.... + The beggarly history of poor _Sartor_ among the + blockheadisms is not worth recording or remembering, least + of all here! In short, finding that I had got £100 (if + memory serve) for _Schiller_ six or seven years before, + and for _Sartor_, at least twice as good, I could not + only not get £200, but even get no Murray or the like to + publish it on half profits. Murray, a most stupendous + object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the evidently + strong wish to say "Yes" and "No,"--my first signal + experience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will + make it "No," then; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for + some two years from one terrified owl to another; published + at last experimentally in _Fraser_, and even then + mostly laughed at, nothing coming of the volume except what + was sent by Emerson from America. + +This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, on Jeffrey's +recommendation, to accept the book; but on finding that Carlyle had +carried the MS. to Longmans and another publisher, in hopes of a better +bargain, and that it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the +matter to his "reader," and the negotiation closed. _Sartor_ struggled +into half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already +contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published +with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a +nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to +justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in +general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense," +pronounced the _Sun_. "Stop that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of +_Fraser's_ constituents. "When is that stupid series of articles by the +crazy tailor going to end?" cried another. At this time Carlyle used +to say there were only two people who found anything in his book worth +reading--Emerson and a priest in Cork, who said to the editor that he +would take the magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of +_Sartor_. The volume was only published in 1838, by Saunders and Otley, +after the _French Revolution_ had further raised the writer's name, and +then on a guarantee from friends willing to take the risk of loss. +It does not appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some +slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in the +_Reminiscences: "I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends, +from not one of whom did I get the smallest whisper even of receipt--a +thing disappointing more or loss to human nature, and which has silently +and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book to +Edinburgh.... The plebs of literature might be divided in their verdicts +about me; though by count of heads I always suspect the guilty clear had +it; but the conscript fathers declined to vote at all." + +[Footnote: _Tempora mutantur_. A few months before Carlyle's death a cheap +edition of _Sartor_ was issued, and 30,000 copies were sold within a few +weeks.] + +In America _Sartor_ was pieced together from _Fraser_, published in +a volume introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by Emerson as "A +criticism of the spirit of the age in which we live; exhibiting in the +most just and novel light the present aspect of religion, politics, +literature, and social life." The editors add: "We believe no book has +been published for many years ... which discovers an equal mastery over +all the riches of the language. The author makes ample amends for the +occasional eccentricity of his genius not only by frequent bursts of pure +splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him." + +Americans are intolerant of honest criticism on themselves; but they are, +more than any other nation, open to appreciate vigorous expressions +of original views of life and ethics--all that we understand by +philosophy--and equally so to new forms of art. The leading critics of +the New England have often been the first and best testers of the fresh +products of the Old. A land of experiment in all directions, ranging from +Mount Lebanon to Oneida Creek, has been ready to welcome the suggestions, +physical or metaphysical, of startling enterprise. Ideas which filter +slowly through English soil and abide for generations, flash over the +electric atmosphere of the West. Hence Coleridge, Carlyle and Browning +were already accepted as prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen +were still examining their credentials. To this readiness, as of a +photographic plate, to receive, must be added the fact that the message +of _Sartor_ crossed the Atlantic when the hour to receive it had struck. +To its publication has been attributed the origin of a movement that was +almost simultaneously inaugurated by Emerson's _Harvard Discourse_. It +was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in +theory, and precedent in Art that gave birth to the Transcendentalism of +_The Dial_--a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a +place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous, +almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally +obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of +the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory +of his critic--to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable +of slightly erring men--with more than the force of a boomorang. A sheaf +of sharp sayings of the same date owe their sting to their half truth, +_e.g._ to a man who excused himself for profligate journalism on the +old plea, "I must live, sir." "No, sir, you need not live, if your body +cannot be kept together without selling your soul." Similarly he was +abusing the periodicals--"mud," "sand," and "dust magazines"--to which +he had contributed, _inter alia_, the great Essay on _Voltaire_ and the +consummate sketch of _Novalis_; with the second paper on _Richler_ to the +_Foreign Review_, the reviews of _History_ and of _Schiller_ to _Fraser_, +and that on _Goethe's Works_ to the _Foreign Quarterly_. During this +period he was introduced to Molesworth, Austin, and J.S. Mill. On his +summons, October 1st 1832, Mrs. Carlyle came up to Ampton Street, where +he then resided, to see him safe through the rest of his London time. +They lamented over the lapse of Irving, now lost in the delirium of +tongues, and made a league of friendship with Mill, whom he describes as +"a partial disciple of mine," a friendship that stood a hard test, but +was broken when the author of _Liberty_ naturally found it impossible to +remain a disciple of the writer of _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Mill, like +Napier, was at first staggered by the _Characteristics_, though he +afterwards said it was one of Carlyle's greatest works, and was +enthusiastic over the review of Boswell's _Johnson_, published in +_Fraser_ in the course of this year. Meanwhile Margaret, Carlyle's +favourite sister, had died, and his brightest, Jean, "the Craw," had +married her cousin, James Aitken. In memory of the former he wrote as a +master of threnody: to the bridegroom of the latter he addressed a letter +reminding him of the duties of a husband, "to do as he would be done by +to his wife"! In 1832 John, again by Jeffrey's aid, obtained a situation +at £300 a year as travelling physician to Lady Clare, and was enabled, +as he promptly did, to pay back his debts. Alexander seems to have been +still struggling with an imperfectly successful farm. In the same year, +when Carlyle was in London, his father died at Scotsbrig, after a +residence there of six years. His son saw him last in August 1831, when, +referring to his Craigenputtock solitude, he said: "Man, it's surely +a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of +Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak." + +The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic services, baking +bread, preserving eggs, and brightening grates till her eyes grew dim; he +to work at his _Diderot_, doing justice to a character more alien to his +own than even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, to +complete the essay; then at _Count Cagliostro_, also for _Fraser_, a link +between his last Craigenputtock and his first London toils. The period +is marked by shoals of letters, a last present from Weimar, a visit to +Edinburgh, and a candidature for a University Chair, which Carlyle +thought Jeffrey could have got for him; but the advocate did not, +probably could not, in this case satisfy his client. In excusing himself +he ventured to lecture the applicant on what he imagined to be the +impracticable temper and perverse eccentricity which had retarded and +might continue to retard his advancement. + +[Footnote: The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.] + +Carlyle, never tolerant of rebuke however just, was indignant, and though +an open quarrel was avoided by letters, on both sides, of courteous +compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and Jeffrey has a +niche in the _Reminiscences_ as a "little man who meant well but did not +see far or know much." Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the +_Diamond Necklace,_ which is a proem to the _French Revolution,_ but inly +growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any +promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his +own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr übel: all dim, misty, squally, +disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather +than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede. +He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His _Sartor_ is indeed more +contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's +_Confessions,_ or the _Sorrows of Werther,_ or the first two cantos of +_Childe Harold:_ but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay +and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in +the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through +glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At +last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for _me_," and his brave wife +approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his ships and seek his +fortune sink or swim--in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the +initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to +London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in +Chelsea near the Thames. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +CHEYNE ROW + +[1834-1842] + +The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills, +and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds, +as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea, +dotted with brown-sailed ships and holiday boats in place of the +excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle +Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a +stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square." Turning up the row, we find over No. +24, formerly No. 5, the Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house +where the Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men, +lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his headquarters, +but he was a frequent wanderer. About half the time was occupied in trips +almost yearly to Scotland, one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France, +and two to Germany; besides, in the later days, constant visits to +admiring friends, more and more drawn from the higher ranks in English +society, the members of which learnt to appreciate his genius before he +found a hearing among the mass of the people. + +The whole period falls readily under four sections, marking as many phases +of the author's outer and inner life, while the same character is +preserved throughout:-- + +I. 1834-1842--When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the late success of +Carlyle's work relieved him from a long, sometimes severe, struggle with +narrow means. It is the period of the _French Revolution, The Lectures_, +and _Hero-Worship_, and of _Chartism_, the last work with a vestige of +adherence to the Radical creed. + +II. 1842-1853--When the death of his mother loosened his ties to the +North. This decade of his literary career is mainly signalised by the +writing and publication of the _Life and Letters of Cromwell_, of +Carlyle's political works, _Past and Present_ and the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_, and of the _Life of Sterling_, works which mark his now +consummated disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration of +adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed of Christendom." + +III. 1853-1866--When the laurels of his triumphant speech as Lord Rector +at Edinburgh were suddenly withered by the death of his wife. This period +is filled with the _History of Friedrick II._, and marked by a yet more +decidedly accentuated trust in autocracy. + +IV. 1866-1881.--Fifteen years of the setting of the sun. + +The Carlyles, coming to the metropolis in a spirit of rarely realised +audacity on a reserve fund of from £200 to £300 at most, could not +propose to establish themselves in any centre of fashion. In their +circumstances their choice of abode was on the whole a fortunate one. +Chelsea, + + Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite + Beyond it, + +was, even in those days of less constant communication, within measurable +distance of the centres of London life: it had then and still preserves a +host of interesting historic and literary traditions. Among the men who in +old times lived or met together in that outlying region of London, we have +memories of Sir Thomas More and of Erasmus, of the Essayists Addison and +Steele, and of Swift. Hard by is the tomb of Bolingbroke and the Square of +Sir Hans Sloane; Smollett lived for a time in Laurence Street; nearer our +own day, Turner resided in Cheyne Walk, later George Eliot, W.B. Scott, +Dante Rossetti, Swinburne for a season, and George Meredith. When Carlyle +came to settle there, Leigh Huntin Upper Cheyne Row, an almost next-door +neighbour, was among the first of a series of visitors; always welcome, +despite his "hugger-mugger" household and his borrowing tendencies, his +"unpractical messages" and "rose-coloured reform processes," as a bright +"singing bird, musical in flowing talk," abounding in often subtle +criticisms and constant good humour. To the Chelsea home, since the Mecca +of many pilgrims, there also flocked other old Ampton Street friends, +drawn thither by genuine regard, Mrs. Carlyle, by the testimony of Miss +Cushman and all competent judges, was a "_raconteur_ unparalleled." To +quote the same authority, "that wonderful woman, able to live in the full +light of Carlyle's genius without being overwhelmed by it," had a peculiar +skill in drawing out the most brilliant conversationalist of the age. +Burns and Wilson were his Scotch predecessors in an art of which the close +of our century--when every fresh thought is treasured to be printed and +paid for--knows little but the shadow. Of Carlyle, as of Johnson, it might +have been said, "There is no use arguing with him, for if his pistol +misses fire he knocks you down with the butt": both men would have +benefited by revolt from their dictation, but the power to contradict +either was overborne by a superior power to assert. Swift's occasional +insolence, in like manner, prevailed by reason of the colossal strength +that made him a Gulliver in Lilliput. Carlyle in earlier, as in later +times, would have been the better of meeting his mate, or of being +overmatched; but there was no Wellington found for this "grand Napoleon of +the realms" of prose. His reverence for men, if not for things, grew +weaker with the strengthening of his sway, a sway due to the fact that men +of extensive learning are rarely men of incisive force, and Carlyle--in +this respect more akin to Johnson than to Swift--had the acquired material +to serve as fuel for the inborn fire. Hence the least satisfactory of his +criticisms are those passed on his peers. Injustices of conversation +should be pardoned to an impulsive nature, even those of correspondence in +the case of a man who had a mania for pouring out his moods to all and +sundry; but where Carlyle has carefully recarved false estimates in cameo, +his memory must abide the consequence. Quite late in life, referring to +the Chelsea days, he says, "The best of those who then flocked about us +was Leigh Hunt," who never seriously said him nay; "and the worst Lamb," +who was not among the worshippers. No one now doubts that Carlyle's best +adviser and most candid critic might have been John Stuart Mill, for whom +he long felt as much regard as it was possible for him to entertain +towards a proximate equal. The following is characteristic: "He had taken +a great attachment to me (which lasted about ten years and then suddenly +ended, I never knew how), an altogether clear, logical, honest, amicable, +affectionate young man, and respected as such here, though sometimes felt +to be rather colourless, even aqueous, no religion in any form traceable +in him." And similarly of his friend, Mrs. Taylor, "She was a will-o'-the- +wispish iridescence of a creature; meaning nothing bad either"; and again +of Mill himself, "His talk is sawdustish, like ale when there is no wine +to be had." Such criticisms, some ungrateful, others unjust, may be +relieved by reference to the close of two friendships to which (though +even these were clouded by a touch of personal jealousy) he was faithful +in the main; for the references of both husband and wife to Irving's +"delirations" are the tears due to the sufferings of errant minds. Their +last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days was in October 1834, when +he came on horseback to the door of their new home, and left with the +benediction to his lost Jane, "You have made a little Paradise around +you." He died in Glasgow in December of the same year, and his memory is +pathetically embalmed in Carlyle's threnody. The final phases of another +old relationship were in some degree similar. During the first years of +their settlement, Lord Jeffrey frequently called at Cheyne Row, and sent +kind letters to his cousin, received by her husband with the growl, "I am +at work stern and grim, not to be interrupted by Jeffrey's theoretic +flourish of epistolary trumpeting." Carlyle, however, paid more than one +visit to Craigcrook, seeing his host for the last time in the autumn of +1849, "worn in body and thin in mind," "grown lunar now and not solar any +more." Three months later he heard of the death of this benefactor of his +youth, and wrote the memorial which finds its place in the second volume +of the _Reminiscences_. + +[Footnote: Cf. Byron's account of the same household at Pisa. Carlyle +deals very leniently with the malignant volume on Byron which amply +justified the epigram of Moore. But he afterwards spoke more slightly of +his little satellite, attributing the faint praise, in the _Examiner_, of +the second course of lectures to Hunt's jealousy of a friend now +"beginning to be somebody."] + +The work "stern and grim" was the _French Revolution_, the production +of which is the dominant theme of the first chapter of Carlyle's London +life. Mr. Froude, in the course of an estimate of this work which leaves +little room for other criticism, dwells on the fact that it was written +for a purpose, _i.e._ to show that rulers, like those of the French +in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the pleasures and +oblivious of the duties of life, must end by being "burnt up." This, +doubtless, is one of the morals of the _French Revolution_--the other +being that anarchy ends in despotism--and unquestionably a writer who +never ceased to be a preacher must have had it in his mind. But Carlyle's +peculiarity is that he combined the functions of a prophet and of an +artist, and that while now the one, now the other, was foremost, he never +wholly forgot the one in the other. In this instance he found a theme +well fit for both, and threw his heart into it, though under much +discouragement. Despite the Essays, into each of which he had put work +enough for a volume, the Reviews were shy of him; while his _Sartor_ had, +on this side of the Atlantic, been received mainly with jeers. Carlyle, +never unconscious of his prerogative and apostolic primogeniture, felt +like an aspirant who had performed his vigils, and finding himself still +ignored, became a knight of the rueful countenance. Thoroughly equipped, +adept enough in ancient tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German +and a fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from +Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "tragically hard," +exclaiming, "I could learn to do all things I have seen done, and am +forbidden to try any of them." The efforts to keep the wolf from his own +doors were harder than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed in +London with his £200 reserve, he could easily have made way in the +usual ruts; but he would have none of them, and refused to accept the +employment which is the most open, as it is the most lucrative, to +literary aspirants. To nine out of ten the "profession of literature" +means Journalism; while Journalism often means dishonesty, always +conformity. Carlyle was, in a sense deeper than that of the sects, +essentially a nonconformist; he not only disdained to write a word he +did not believe, he would not suppress a word he did believe--a rule +of action fatal to swift success. During these years there began an +acquaintance, soon ripening into intimacy, the memories of which are +enshrined in one of the most beautiful of biographies. Carlyle's relation +to John Sterling drew out the sort of affection which best suited +him--the love of a master for a pupil, of superior for inferior, of the +benefactor for the benefited; and consequently there is no line in the +record of it that jars. Sterling once tried to benefit his friend, and +perhaps fortunately failed. He introduced Carlyle to his father, then the +chief writer in the _Times_, and the Editor invited the struggling author +to contribute to its columns, but, according to Mr. Froude, "on the +implied conditions ... when a man enlists in the army, his soul as well +as his body belong to his commanding officer." Carlyle talked, all his +life, about what his greatest disciple calls "The Lamp of Obedience"; but +he himself would obey no one, and found it hard to be civil to those who +did not see with his eyes. Ho rejected--we trust in polite terms--the +offer of "the Thunderer." "In other respects also," says our main +authority, "he was impracticable, unmalleable, and as independent and +wilful as if he were the heir to a peerage. He had created no 'public' of +his own; the public which existed could not understand his writings +and would not buy them; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more +neglected than he had been in Scotland." Welcome to a limited range of +literary society, he astonished and amused by his vehement eloquence, +but when crossed he was not only "sarcastic" but rude, and speaking of +people, as he wrote of them, with various shades of contempt, naturally +gave frequent offence. Those whose toes are trodden on, not by accident, +justifiably retaliate. "Are you looking for your t-t-turban?" Charles +Lamb is reported to have said in some entertainer's lobby after listening +for an evening to Carlyle's invectives, and the phrase may have rankled +in his mind. Living in a glass case, while throwing stones about, +super-sensitive to criticism though professing to despise critics, he +made at least as many enemies as friends, and by his own confession +became an Ishmaelite. In view of the reception of _Sartor_, we do not +wonder to find him writing in 1833-- + + It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the + craft of literature, and yet I know no fault I have + committed.... I am tempted to go to America.... I shall quit + literature, it does not invite me. Providence warns me to + have done with it. I have failed in the Divine Infernal + Universe; + +or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world +like Teufelsdröckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet +all the time, with incomparable naiveté, he was asserting:-- + + The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my + feeling of natural superiority to them.... The literary + world here is a thing which I have no other course left me + but to defy.... I can reverence no existing man. With health + and peace for one year, I could write a better book than + there has been in this country for generations. + +All through his journal and his correspondence there is a perpetual +alternation of despair and confidence, always closing with the refrain, +"Working, trying is the only remover of doubt," and wise counsels often +echoed from Goethe, "Accomplish as well as you can the task on hand, and +the next step will become clear;" on the other hand--A man must not only +be able to work but to give over working.... If a man wait till he has +entirely brushed off his imperfections, he will spin for ever on his +axis, advancing no whither.... The _French Revolution_ stands pretty +fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to +splash down what I know in large masses of colours, that it may look like +a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance. + +The progress of this work was retarded by the calamity familiar to every +reader, but it must be referred to as throwing one of the finest lights +on Carlyle's character. His closest intellectual link with J.S. Mill was +their common interest in French politics and literature; the latter, +himself meditating a history of the Revolution, not only surrendered in +favour of the man whose superior pictorial genius he recognised, but +supplied him freely with the books he had accumulated for the enterprise. +His interest in the work was unfortunately so great as to induce him to +borrow the MS. of the first volume, completed in the early spring of +1835, and his business habits so defective as to permit him to lend it +without authority; so that, as appears, it was left lying about by Mrs. +Taylor and mistaken by her servant for waste paper: certainly it was +destroyed; and Mill came to Cheyne Row to announce the fact in such a +desperate state of mind that Carlyle's first anxiety seems to have been +to console his friend. According to Mrs. Carlyle, as reported by Froude, +"the first words her husband uttered as the door closed were, 'Well, +Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him +how very serious this business is to us.'" This trait of magnanimity under +the first blow of a disaster which seemed to cancel the work of years +should be set against his nearly contemporaneous criticisms of Coleridge, +Lamb, Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Macaulay, etc. + +[Footnote: Carlyle had only been writing the volume for five months; but +he was preparing for it during much of his life at Craigenputtock.] + +Mill sent a cheque of £200 as "the slightest external compensation" for +the loss, and only, by urgent entreaty, procured the acceptance of half +the sum. Carlyle here, as in every real emergency, bracing his resolve +by courageous words, as "never tine heart or get provoked heart," set +himself to re-write the volume with an energy that recalls that of Scott +rebuilding his ruined estate; but the work was at first so "wretched" +that it had to be laid aside for a season, during which the author +wisely took a restorative bath of comparatively commonplace novels. The +re-writing of the first volume was completed in September 1835; the whole +book in January 1837. The mood in which it was written throws a light on +the excellences as on the defects of the history. The _Reminiscences_ +again record the gloom and defiance of "Thomas the Doubter" walking +through the London streets "with a feeling similar to Satan's stepping +the burning marl," and scowling at the equipages about Hyde Park Corner, +sternly thinking, "Yes, and perhaps none of you could do what I am at. I +shall finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and +withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." In an adjacent page he reports +himself as having said to his wife-- + + What they will do with this book none knows, my lass; but + they have not had for two hundred years any book that came + more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample + it under foot and hoof as they see best.... "They cannot + trample that," she would cheerily answer. + +This passage points at once to the secret of the writer's spell and to +the limits of his lasting power. His works were written seldom with +perfect fairness, never with the dry light required for a clear +presentation of the truth; they have all "an infusion from the will and +the affections"; but they were all written with a whole sincerity and +utter fervour; they rose from his hot heart, and rushed through the air +"like rockets druv' by their own burnin'." Consequently his readers +confess that he has never forgot the Horatian maxim-- + + Si vis me flere, dolendum est + Primum ipsi tibi. + +About this time Carlyle writes, "My friends think I have found the art of +living upon nothing," and there must, despite Mill's contribution, have +been "bitter thrift" in Cheyne REow during the years 1835-1837. He +struggled through the unremunerative interval of waiting for the sale +of a great work by help of fees derived from his essay on the _Diamond +Necklace_ (which, after being refused by the _Foreign Quarterly,_ +appeared in _Fraser,_ 1837), that on _Mirabeau_ in the _Westminster,_ +and in the following year, for the same periodical, the article on _Sir +Walter Scott._ To the last work, undertaken against the grain, he refers +in one of the renewed wails of the year: "O that literature had never +been devised. I am scourged back to it by the whip of necessity." The +circumstance may account for some of the manifest defects of one of the +least satisfactory of Carlyle's longer' reviews. Frequent references in +previous letters show that he never appreciated Scott, to whom he refers +as a mere Restaurateur. + +Meanwhile the appearance of the _French Revolution_ had brought the +name of its author, then in his forty-third year, for the first time +prominently before the public. It attracted the attention of Thackeray, +who wrote a generous review in the _Times,_ of Southey, Jeffrey, +Macaulay, Hallam, and Brougham, who recognised the advent of an equal, if +sometimes an adverse power in the world of letters. But, though the book +established his reputation, the sale was slow, and for some years the +only substantial profits, amounting to about £400, came from America, +through the indefatigable activity and good management of Emerson. It +is pleasant to note a passage in the interesting volumes of their +_Correspondence_ which shows that in this instance the benefited +understood his financial relation to the benefactor: "A reflection I +cannot but make is that, at bottom, this money was all yours; not a penny +of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful friend-ship.... I +could not examine it (the account) without a kind of crime." Others +who, at this period, made efforts to assist "the polar Bear" were less +fortunate. In several instances good intentions paved the palace of +Momus, and in one led a well-meaning man into a notoriously false +position. Mr. Basil Montagu being in want of a private secretary offered +the post to his former guest, as a temporary makeshift, at a salary of +£200, and so brought upon his memory a torrent of contempt. Undeterred by +this and similar warnings, the indefatigable philanthropist, Miss Harriet +Martineau, who at first conciliated the Carlyles by her affection for +"this side of the street," and was afterwards an object of their joint +ridicule, conceived the idea of organising a course of lectures to an +audience collected by canvass to hoar the strange being from the moors +talk for an hour on end about literature, morals, and history. He was +then an object of curiosity to those who knew anything about him at all, +and lecturing was at that time a lucrative and an honourable employment. +The "good Harriet," so called by Cheyne Row in its condescending mood, +aided by other kind friends of the Sterling and Mill circles--the former +including Frederick Denison Maurice--made so great a success of the +enterprise that it was thrice repeated. The _first_ course of six +lectures on "German Literature," May 1837, delivered in Willis's Rooms, +realised £135; the _second_ of twelve, on the "History of European +Literature," at 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, had a net result of +£300; the _third,_ in the same rooms, on "Revolutions," brought £200; the +_fourth,_ on "Heroes," the same. In closing this course Carlyle appeared +for the last time on a public platform until 1866, when he delivered +his Inaugural Address as Lord Rector to the students of Edinburgh. The +impression he produced on his unusually select audiences was that of a +man of genius, but roughly clad. The more superficial auditors had a +new sensation, those who came to stare remained to wonder; the more +reflective felt that they had learnt something of value. Carlyle had +no inconsiderable share of the oratorical power which he latterly so +derided; he was able to speak from a few notes; but there were comments +more or less severe on his manner and style. J. Grant, in his _Portraits +of Public Characters,_ says: "At times he distorts his features as if +suddenly seized by some paroxysm of pain ... he makes mouths; he has a +harsh accent and graceless gesticulation." Leigh Hunt, in the _Examiner,_ +remarks on the lecturer's power of extemporising; but adds that he often +touches only the mountain-tops of the subject, and that the impression +left was as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalised by +German philosophy. Bunsen, present at one of the lectures, speaks of +the striking and rugged thoughts thrown at people's heads; and Margaret +Fuller, afterwards Countess Ossoli, referred to his arrogance redeemed +by "the grandeur of a Siegfried melting down masses of iron into sunset +red." Carlyle's own comments are for the most part slighting. He refers +to his lectures as a mixture of prophecy and play-acting, and says that +when about to open his course on "Heroes" he felt like a man going to be +hanged. To Emerson, April 17th 1839, he writes :-- + + My lectures come on this day two weeks. O heaven! I cannot + "speak"; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a + spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by + want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then--! + Shall it be Switzerland? shall it be Scotland? nay, shall it + be America and Concord? + +Emerson had written about a Boston publication of the _Miscellanies_ +(first there collected), and was continually urging his friend to +emigrate and speak to more appreciative audiences in the States; but +the London lectures, which had, with the remittances from over sea, +practically saved Carlyle from ruin or from exile, had made him decide +"to turn his back to the treacherous Syren"--the temptation to sink into +oratory. Mr. Froude's explanation and defence of this decision may be +clenched by a reference to the warning his master had received. He had +announced himself as a preacher and a prophet, and been taken at his +word; but similarly had Edward Irving, who for a season of sun or glamour +gathered around him the same crowd and glitter: the end came; twilight +and clouds of night. Fashion had flocked to the sermons of the elder +Annandale youth--as to the recitatives of the younger--to see a wild man +of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on" +to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with +"unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed +his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause, +madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with +the fixed resolve, "De me fabula non narrabitur," he shut the book on +this phase of his life. + +The lectures on "Hero-Worship" (a phrase taken from Hume) were published +in 1841, and met with considerable success, the name of the writer having +then begun to run "like wildfire through London." At the close of the +previous year he had published his long pamphlet on _Chartism_, it having +proved unsuitable for its original destination as an article in the +_Quarterly_. Here first he clearly enunciates, "Might is right"--one +of the few strings on which, with all the variations of a political +Paganini, he played through life. This tract is on the border line +between the old modified Radicalism of _Sartor_ and the less modified +Conservatism of his later years. In 1840 Carlyle still speaks of himself +as a man foiled; but at the close of that year all fear of penury was +over, and in the following he was able to refuse a Chair of History at +Edinburgh, as later another at St. Andrews. Meanwhile his practical +power and genuine zeal for the diffusion of knowledge appeared in his +foundation of the London Library, which brought him into more or less +close contact with Tennyson, Milman, Forster, Helps, Spedding, Gladstone, +and other leaders of the thought and action of the time. + +There is little in Carlyle's life at any time that can be called +eventful. From first to last it was that of a retired scholar, a thinker +demanding sympathy while craving after solitude, and the frequent +inconsistency of the two requirements was the source of much of his +unhappiness. Our authorities for all that we do not see in his +published works are found in his voluminous correspondence, copious +autobiographical jottings, and the three volumes of his wife's letters +and journal dating from the commencement of the struggle for recognition +in London, and extending to the year of her death. Criticism of these +remarkable documents, the theme of so much controversy, belongs rather +to a life of Mrs. Carlyle; but a few salient facts may here be noted. It +appears on the surface that husband and wife had in common several +marked peculiarities; on the intellectual side they had not only an +extraordinary amount but the same kind of ability, superhumanly keen +insight, and wonderful power of expression, both with tongue and pen; the +same intensity of feeling, thoroughness, and courage to look the ugliest +truths full in the face; in both, these high qualities were marred by a +tendency to attribute the worst motives to almost every one. Their joint +contempt for all whom they called "fools," _i.e._ the immense majority of +mankind, was a serious drawback to the pleasure of their company. It is +indeed obvious that, whether or not it be correct to say that "his nature +was the soft one, her's the hard," Mrs. Carlyle was the severer cynic of +the two. Much of her writing confirms the impression of those who have +heard her talk that no one, not even her husband, was safe from the +shafts of her ridicule. Her pride in his genius knew no bounds, and it is +improbable that she would have tolerated from any outsider a breath of +adverse criticism; but she herself claimed many liberties she would not +grant. She was clannish as Carlyle himself, yet even her relations +are occasionally made to appear ridiculous. There was nothing in her +affections, save her memory of her own father, corresponding to his +devotion to his whole family. With equal penetration and greater scorn, +she had no share of his underlying reverence. Such limited union as was +granted to her married life had only soured the mocking-bird spirit +of the child that derided her grandfather's accent on occasion of his +bringing her back from a drive by another route to "varry the shane." + +Carlyle's constant wailings take from him any claim to such powers of +endurance as might justify his later attacks on Byron. But neither +had his wife any real reticence. Whenever there were domestic +troubles--flitting, repairing, building, etc., on every occasion of +clamour or worry, he, with scarce pardonable oblivion of physical +delicacy greater than his own, went off, generally to visit distinguished +friends, and left behind him the burden and the heat of the day. She +performed her unpleasant work and all associated duties with a practical +genius that he complimented as "triumphant." She performed them, +ungrudgingly perhaps, but never without complaint; her invariable +practice was to endure and tell. "Quelle vie," she writes in 1837 to John +Sterling, whom she seems to have really liked, "let no woman who values +peace of soul ever marry an author"; and again to the same in 1839, +"Carlyle had to sit on a jury two days, to the ruin of his whole being, +physical, moral, and intellectual," but "one gets to feel a sort of +indifference to his growling." Conspicuous exceptions, as in the case of +the Shelleys, the Dobells, and the Brownings, have been seen, within +or almost within our memories, but as a rule it is a risk for two +supersensitive and nervous people to live together: when they are +sensitive in opposite ways the alliance is fatal; fortunately the +Carlyles were, in this respect, in the main sympathetic. With most of the +household troubles which occupy so exaggerated a space in the letters and +journals of both--papering, plastering, painting, deceitful or disorderly +domestics--general readers have so little concern that they have reason +to resent the number of pages wasted in printing them; but there was one +common grievance of wider and more urgent interest, to which we must here +again finally refer, premising that it affected not one period but the +whole of their lives, _i.e._ their constant, only half-effectual struggle +with the modern Hydra-headed Monster, the reckless and needless Noises +produced or permitted, sometimes increased rather than suppressed, by +modern civilisation. Mrs. Carlyle suffered almost as much as her husband +from these murderers of sleep and assassins of repose; on her mainly fell +the task of contending with the cochin-chinas, whose senseless shrieks +went "through her like a sword," of abating a "Der Freischütz of cats," +or a pandemonium of barrel organs, of suppressing macaws for which +Carryle "could neither think nor live"; now mitigating the scales on a +piano, now conjuring away, by threat or bribe, from their neighbours +a shoal of "demon fowls"; lastly of superintending the troops of +bricklayers, joiners, iron-hammerers employed with partial success to +convert the top story of 5 Cheyne Row into a sound-proof room. Her +hard-won victories in this field must have agreeably added to the sense +of personality to which she resolutely clung. Her assertion, "Instead +of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle +round every individuality," is the essence of much of her mate's +philosophy; but, in the following to Sterling, she somewhat bitterly +protests against her own absorption: "In spite of the honestest efforts +to annihilate my I---ity or merge it in what the world doubtless +considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting, and, +alas, self-seeking me." + +The ever-restive consciousness of being submerged is one of the dominant +notes of her journal, the other is the sense of being even within the +circle unrecognised. "C. is a domestic wandering Jew.... When he is at +work I hardly ever see his face from breakfast to dinner."... "Poor +little wretch that I am, ... I feel as if I were already half-buried ... +in some intermediate state between the living and the dead.... Oh, so +lonely." These are among the _suspiria de profundis_ of a life which her +husband compared to "a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother, +whom he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming:--"Solitude, +indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad like Bedlam; absence +of delirium is possible only for me in solitude"; a sentiment almost +literally acted on. In his offering of penitential cypress, referring to +his wife's delight in the ultimate success of his work, he says, "She +flickered round me like a perpetual radiance." But during their joint +lives their numerous visits and journeys were made at separate times or +apart. They crossed continually on the roads up and down, but when +absent wrote to one another often the most affectionate letters. Their +attraction increased, contrary to Newton's law, in the _direct_ ratio of +the square of the distance, and when it was stretched beyond the stars +the long-latent love of the survivor became a worship. + +Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his +bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration +for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him +unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic +differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have +practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in +comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond +was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first +great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many +callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne +Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, +in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant +friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) +had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with +so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in +her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was +accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to +having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed +on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to +interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her +mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too +characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. +Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger +than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of +candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with +an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother +resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which +prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will +that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round +which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has +recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many +graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane +down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They +parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, +perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but +bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet +waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 +news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried +north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; +when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her +mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle +came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that +the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as +executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, +devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of +pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in +the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading +them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of +the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, +with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again +revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said +of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the +Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place +opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness +of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. +Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath +that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry +scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies +completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the +Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. + +The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife +more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once +Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been +glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the +restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was +constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land +to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed +better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdröckh wanderings +abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A +letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- + +Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his +bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration +for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him +unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic +differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have +practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in +comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond +was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first +great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many +callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne +Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, +in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant +friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) +had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with +so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in +her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was +accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to +having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed +on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to +interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her +mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too +characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. +Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger +than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of +candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with +an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother +resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which +prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will +that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round +which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has +recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many +graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane +down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They +parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, +perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but +bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet +waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 +news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried +north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; +when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her +mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle +came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that +the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as +executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, +devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of +pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in +the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading +them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of +the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, +with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again +revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said +of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the +Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place +opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness +of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. +Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath +that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry +scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies +completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the +Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. + +The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife +more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once +Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been +glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the +restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was +constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land +to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed +better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdröckh wanderings +abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A +letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- + + This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont: and as for + my particular case uses me not worse but better than of old. + Nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for + me.... The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge + roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of + nerves as mine. + + The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the + streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to + be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressingly + as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be _buried_ at + least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub ... + if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I + will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge. + +The competence had come, the death of Mrs. Welsh leaving to his wife and +himself practically from £200 to £300 a year: why not finally return to +the home of their early restful secluded life, "in reductâ, valle," with +no noise around it but the trickle of rills and the nibbling of sheep? +Craigenputtock was now their own, and within its "four walls" they would +begin a calmer life. Fortunately Mrs. Carlyle, whose shrewd practical +instinct was never at fault, saw through the fallacy, and set herself +resolutely against the scheme. Scotland had lost much of its charm for +her--a year later she refused an invitation from Mrs. Aitken, saying, "I +could do nothing at Scotsbrig or Dumfries but cry from morning to night." +She herself had enough of the Hill of the Hawks, and she know that within +a year Carlyle would again be calling it the Devil's Den and lamenting +Cheyne Row. He gave way with the protest, "I cannot deliberately mean +anything that is harmful to you," and certainly it was well for him. + +There is no record of an original writer or artist coming from the +north of our island to make his mark in the south, succeeding, and then +retracing his steps. Had Carlyle done so, he would probably have passed +from the growing recognition of a society he was beginning to find on the +whole congenial, to the solitude of intellectual ostracism. Scotland may +be breezy, but it is not conspicuously free. Erratic opinions when duly +veiled are generally allowed; but this concession is of little worth. On +the tolerance of those who have no strong belief in anything, Carlyle, +thinking possibly of rose-water Hunt and the litterateurs of his tribe, +expressed himself with incisive and memorable truth: "It is but doubt +and indifference. _Touch the thing they do believe and value, their own +self-conceit: they are rattlesnakes then_." + +[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] + +Tolerance for the frank expression of views which clash with the sincere +or professed faith of the majority is rare everywhere; in Scotland +rarest. English Churchmen, high and broad, were content to condone the +grim Calvinism still infiltrating Carlyle's thoughts, and to smile, at +worst, at his idolatry of the iconoclast who said, "the idolater shall +die the death." But the reproach of "Pantheism" was for long fatal to his +reception across the Tweed. + +Towards the close of this period he acknowledged that London was "among +improper places" the best for "writing books," after all the one use of +living "for him;" its inhabitants "greatly the best" he "had ever walked +with," and its aristocracy--the Marshalls, Stanleys, Hollands, Russells, +Ashburtons, Lansdownes, who held by him through life--its "choicest +specimens." Other friendships equally valued he made among the leading +authors of the age. Tennyson sought his company, and Connop Thirlwall. +Arnold of Rugby wrote in commendation of the _French Revolution_ and +hailed _Chartism._ Thackeray admired him and reviewed him well. In +Macaulay, condemned to limbo under the suspicion of having reviewed him +ill, he found, when the suspicion was proved unjust, a promise of +better things. As early as 1839 Sterling had written an article in the +_Westminster,_ which gave him intense pleasure; for while contemning +praise in almost the same words as Byron did, he loved it equally well. +In 1840 he had crossed the Rubicon that lies between aspiration and +attainment. The populace might be blind or dumb, the "rattlesnakes"--the +"irresponsible indolent reviewers," who from behind a hedge pelt every +wrestler till they found societies for the victor--might still obscurely +hiss; but Carlyle was at length safe by the verdict of the "Conscript +Fathers." + +[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] + + + + +CHAPTER V + +CHEYNE ROW + +[1842-1853] + +The bold venture of coming to London with a lean purse, few friends, +and little fame had succeeded: but it had been a terrible risk, and the +struggle had left scars behind it. To this period of his life we may +apply Carlyle's words,--made use of by himself at a later date,--"The +battle was over and we were sore wounded." It is as a maimed knight +of modern chivalry, who sounded the _réveil_ for an onslaught on the +citadels of sham, rather than as a prophet of the future that his name is +likely to endure in the history of English thought. He has also a place +with Scott amongst the recreators of bygone ages, but he regarded their +annals less as pictures than as lesson-books. His aim was that expressed +by Tennyson to "steal fire from fountains of the past," but his design +was to admonish rather than "to glorify the present." This is the avowed +object of the second of his distinctly political works, which following +on the track of the first, _Charlism_, and written in a similar spirit, +takes higher artistic rank. _Past and Present_, suggested by a visit to +the poorhouse of St. Ives and by reading the chronicle of _Jocelin de +Brakelond_, was undertaken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a +greater work,--the duty he felt laid upon him to say some thing that +should bear directly on the welfare of the people, especially of the poor +around him. It was an impulse similar to that which inspired _Oliver +Twist_, but Carlyle's remedies were widely different from those of +Dickens. Not merely more kindness and sympathy, but paternal government, +supplying work to the idle inmates of the workhouse, and insisting, by +force if need be, on it being done, was his panacea. It had been Abbot +Samson's way in his strong government of the Monastery of St. Edmunds, +and he resolved, half in parable, half in plain sermon, to recommend it +to the Ministers Peel and Russell. + +In this mood, the book was written off in the first seven weeks of +1843, a _tour de force_ comparable to Johnson's writing of _Rasselas_. +Published in April, it at once made a mark by the opposition as well as +by the approval it excited. Criticism of the work--of its excellences, +which are acknowledged, and its defects as manifold--belongs to a review +of the author's political philosophy: it is enough here to note that it +was remarkable in three ways. _First_, the object of its main attack, +_laissez faire_, being a definite one, it was capable of having and had +some practical effect. Mr. Froude exaggerates when he says that Carlyle +killed the pseudo-science of orthodox political economy; for the +fundamental truths in the works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, and Mill +cannot be killed: but he pointed out that, like Aristotle's leaden rule, +the laws of supply and demand must be made to bend; as Mathematics made +mechanical must allow for friction, so must Economics leave us a little +room for charity. There is ground to believe that the famous Factory Acts +owed some of their suggestions to _Past and Present_. Carlyle always +speaks respectfully of the future Lord Shaftesbury. "I heard Milnes +saying," notes the Lady Sneerwell of real life, "at the Shuttleworths +that Lord Ashley was the greatest man alive: he was the only man that +Carlyle praised in his book. I daresay he knew I was overhearing him." +But, while supplying arguments and a stimulus to philanthropists, his +protests against philanthropy as an adequate solution of the problem of +human misery became more pronounced. About the date of the conception of +this book we find in the Journal:-- + + Again and again of late I ask myself in whispers, is it the + duty of a citizen to paint mere heroisms? ... Live to make + others happy! Yes, surely, at all times, so far as you can. + But at bottom that is not the aim of my life ... it is mere + hypocrisy to call it such, as is continually done + nowadays.... Avoid cant. Do not think that your life means + a mere searching in gutters for fallen figures to wipe and + set up. + +_Past and Present_, in the _second_ place, is notable as the only +considerable consecutive book--unless we also except the _Life of +Sterling_,--which the author wrote without the accompaniment of +wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts. _Thirdly_, though marking a stage +in his mental progress, the fusion of the refrains of _Chartism_ and +_Hero-Worship_, and his first clear breach with Mazzini and with Mill, +the book was written as an interlude, when he was in severe travail with +his greatest contribution to English history. The last rebuff which +Carlyle encountered came, by curious accident, from the _Westminster_, to +which Mill had engaged him to contribute an article on "Oliver Cromwell." +While this was in preparation, Mill had to leave the country on account +of his health, and gave the review in charge to an Aberdonian called +Robertson, who wrote to stop the progress of the essay with the message +that _he_ had decided to undertake the subject himself. Carlyle was +angry; but, instead of sullenly throwing the MS. aside, he set about +constructing on its basis a History of the Civil War. + +Numerous visits and tours during the following three years, though +bringing him into contact with new and interesting personalities, were +mainly determined by the resolve to make himself acquainted with the +localities of the war; and his knowledge of them has contributed to give +colour and reality to the finest battle-pieces in modern English prose. +In 1842 with Dr. Arnold he drove from Rugby fifteen miles to Naseby, and +the same year, after a brief yachting trip to Belgium--in the notes on +which the old Flemish towns stand out as clearly as in Longfellow's +verse--he made his pilgrimage to St. Ives and Ely Cathedral, where Oliver +two centuries before had called out to the recalcitrant Anglican in the +pulpit, "Cease your fooling and come down." In July 1843 Carlyle made a +trip to South Wales; to visit first a worthy devotee called Redwood, and +then Bishop Thirlwall near Carmarthen. "A right solid simple-hearted +robust man, very strangely swathed," is the visitor's meagre estimate of +one of our most classic historians. + +On his way back he carefully reconnoitred the field of Worcester. Passing +his wife at Liverpool, where she was a guest of her uncle, and leaving +her to return to London and brush up Cheyne Row, he walked over Snowdon +from Llanheris to Beddgelert with his brother John. He next proceeded +to Scotsbrig, then north to Edinburgh, and then to Dunbar, which he +contrived to visit on the 3rd of September, an anniversary revived in his +pictured page with a glow and force to match which we have to revert +to Bacon's account of the sea-fight of the _Revenge_. From Dunbar he +returned to Edinburgh, spent some time with his always admired and +admiring friend Erskine of Linlathen, a Scotch broad churchman of the +type of F.D. Maurice and Macleod Campbell, and then went home to set in +earnest to the actual writing of his work. He had decided to abandon +the design of a History, and to make his book a Biography of Cromwell, +interlacing with it the main features and events of the Commonwealth. The +difficulties even of this reduced plan were still immense, and his groans +at every stage in its progress were "louder and more loud," _e.g._ "My +progress in _Cromwell_ is frightful." "A thousand times I regretted that +this task was ever taken up." "The most impossible book of all I ever +before tried," and at the close, "_Cromwell_ I must have written in 1844, +but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to +me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling, +and misery I used to count it had cost me." The book issued in 1845 soon +went through three editions, and brought the author to the front as the +most original historian of his time. Macaulay was his rival, but in +different paths of the same field. About this time Mr. Froude became his +pupil, and has left an interesting account (iii. 290-300) of his master's +influence over the Oxford of those days, which would be only spoilt +by selections. Oxford, like Athens, ever longing after something new, +patronised the Chelsea prophet, and then calmed down to her wonted +cynicism. But Froude and Ruskin were, as far as compatible with the +strong personality of each, always loyal; and the capacity inborn in +both, the power to breathe life into dry records and dead stones, had at +least an added impulse from their master. + +The year 1844 is marked by the publication in the _Foreign Quarterly_ of +the essay on _Dr. Francia,_ and by the death of John Sterling,--loved +with the love of David for Jonathan--outside his own family losses, the +greatest wrench in Carlyle's life. Sterling's published writings are as +inadequate to his reputation as the fragmentary remains of Arthur Hallam; +but in friendships, especially unequal friendships, personal fascination +counts for more than half, and all are agreed as to the charm in both +instances of the inspiring companionships. Archdeacon Hare having given a +somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergyman, Carlyle three +years later, in 1851, published his own impressions of his friend as +a thinker, sane philanthropist, and devotee of truth, in a work that, +written in a three months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though +faltering, as prose after verse, with _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, and +Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_. + +These years are marked by a series of acts of unobtrusive benevolence, +the memory of which has been in some cases accidentally rescued from the +oblivion to which the benefactor was willing to have them consigned. +Carlyle never boasted of doing a kindness. He was, like Wordsworth, +frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as generous in giving as he +was ungenerous in judging. His assistance to Thomas Cooper, author of the +_Purgatory of Suicides_, his time spent in answering letters of "anxious +enquirers,"--letters that nine out of ten busy men would have flung into +the waste-paper basket,--his interest in such works as Samuel Bamford's +_Life of a Radical_, and admirable advice to the writer; his instructions +to a young student on the choice of books, and well-timed warning to +another against the profession of literature, are sun-rifts in the storm, +that show "a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The same +epoch, however,--that of the start of the great writer's almost +uninterrupted triumph--brings us in face of an episode singularly delicate +and difficult to deal with, but impossible to evade. + +[Footnote: These letters to Bamford, showing a keen interest in the +working men of whom his correspondent had written, point to the ideal of a +sort of Tory Democracy. Carlyle writes: "We want more knowledge about the +Lancashire operatives; their miseries and gains, virtues and vices. Winnow +what you have to say, and give us wheat free from chaff. Then the rich +captains of workers will he willing to listen to you. Brevity and +sincerity will succeed. Be brief and select, omit much, give each subject +its proper proportionate space; and be exact without caring to round off +the edges of what you have to say." Later, he declines Bamford's offer of +verses, saying "verse is a bugbear to booksellers at present. These are +prosaic, earnest, practical, not singing times."] + +Carlyle, now generally recognised in London as having one of the most +powerful intellects and by far the greatest command of language among his +contemporaries, was beginning to suffer some of the penalties of renown +in being beset by bores and travestied by imitators; but he was also +enjoying its rewards. Eminent men of all shades of opinion made his +acquaintance; he was a frequent guest of the genial Maecenas, an admirer +of genius though no mere worshipper of success, R. Monckton Milnes; +meeting Hallam, Bunsen, Pusey, etc., at his house in London, and +afterwards visiting him at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. The future Lord +Houghton was, among distinguished men of letters and society, the one of +whom he spoke with the most unvarying regard. Carlyle corresponded with +Peel, whom he set almost on a par with Wellington as worthy of +perfect trust, and talked familiarly with Bishop Wilberforce, whom he +miraculously credits with holding at heart views much like his own. At +a somewhat later date, in the circle of his friends, bound to him by +various degrees of intimacy, History was represented by Thirlwall, Grote, +and Froude; Poetry by Browning, Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Clough; +Social Romance by Kingsley; Biography by James Spedding and John Forster; +and Criticism by John Ruskin. His link to the last named was, however, +their common distrust of political economy, as shown in _Unto This Last_, +rather than any deep artistic sympathy. In Macaulay, a conversationalist +more rapid than himself, Carlyle found a rival rather than a companion; +but his prejudiced view of physical science was forgotten in his personal +affection for Tyndall and in their congenial politics. His society was +from the publication of _Cromwell_ till near his death increasingly +sought after by the aristocracy, several members of which invited him to +their country seats, and bestowed on him all acceptable favours. In this +class he came to find other qualities than those referred to in the +_Sartor_ inscription, and other aims than that of "preserving their +game,"--the ambition to hold the helm of the State in stormy weather, and +to play their part among the captains of industry. In the _Reminiscences_ +the aristocracy are deliberately voted to be "for continual grace of +bearing and of acting, steadfast honour, light address, and cheery +stoicism, actually yet the best of English classes." There can be no +doubt that his intercourse with this class, as with men of affairs and +letters, some of whom were his proximate equals, was a fortunate sequel +to the duck-pond of Ecclefechan and the lonely rambles on the Border +moors. + + Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, + Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt. + +The life of a great capital may be the crown of education, but there is +a danger in homage that comes late and then without reserve. Give me +neither poverty nor riches, applies to praise as well as to wealth; and +the sudden transition from comparative neglect to + + honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, + +is a moral trial passing the strength of all but a few of the "irritable +race" of writers. The deference paid to Carlyle made him yet more +intolerant of contradiction, and fostered his selfishness, in one +instance with the disastrous result of clouding a whole decade of his +domestic life. In February 1839 he speaks of dining--"an eight-o'clock +dinner which ruined me for a week"--with "a certain Baring," at whose +table in Bath House he again met Bunsen, and was introduced to Lord +Mahon. This was the beginning of what, after the death of Sterling, +grew into the most intimate friendship of his life. Baring, son of Lord +Ashburton of the American treaty so named, and successor to the title on +his father's death in 1848, was a man of sterling worth and sound sense, +who entered into many of the views of his guest. His wife was by general +consent the most brilliant woman of rank in London, whose grace, wit, +refinement, and decision of character had made her the acknowledged +leader of society. Lady Harriet, by the exercise of some overpowering +though purely intellectual spell, made the proudest of men, the modern +Diogenes, our later Swift, so much her slave that for twelve years, +whenever he could steal a day from his work, he ran at her beck from town +to country, from castle to cot; from Addiscombe, her husband's villa in +Surrey, to the Grange, her father-in-law's seat in Hampshire; from Loch +Luichart and Glen Finnan, where they had Highland shootings, to the +Palais Eoyal. Mr. Froude's comment in his introduction to the Journal +is substantially as follows: Lady Harriet Baring or Ashburton was the +centre of a planetary system in which every distinguished public man of +genuine worth then revolved. Carlyle was naturally the chief among them, +and he was perhaps at one time ambitious of himself taking some part in +public affairs, and saw the advantage of this stepping-stone to enable +him to do something more for the world, as Byron said, than write books +for it. But the idea of entering Parliament, which seems to have once +suggested itself to him in 1849, was too vague and transient to have ever +influenced his conduct. It is more correct to say that he was flattered +by a sympathy not too thorough to be tame, pleased by adulation never +gross, charmed by the same graces that charmed the rest, and finally +fascinated by a sort of hypnotism. The irritation which this strange +alliance produced in the mind of the mistress of Cheyne Row is no matter +of surprise. Pride and affection together had made her bear with all her +husband's humours, and share with him all the toils of the struggle +from obscurity. He had emerged, and she was still half content to be +systematically set aside for his books, the inanimate rivals on which he +was building a fame she had some claim to share. But her fiery spirit was +not yet tamed into submitting to be sacrificed to an animate rival, or +passively permitting the usurpation of companionship grudged to herself +by another woman, whom she could not enjoy the luxury of despising. Lady +Harriet's superiority in _finesse_ and geniality, as well as advantages +of station, only aggravated the injury; and this with a singular want of +tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting +the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, +were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between +the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently +unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental +neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's +"Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen goddess," while Mrs. +Carlyle, with reference to her favourite dog "Nero," was in her turn +nicknamed "Agrippina." + +In midsummer of 1846, after an enforced sojourn at Addiscombe in worse +than her usual health, she returned to Chelsea with "her mind all churned +to froth," and opened it to her husband with such plainness that "there +was a violent scene": she left the house in a mood like that of the first +Mrs. Milton, and took refuge with her friends the Paulets at Seaforth +near Liverpool, uncertain whether or not she would return. There were +only two persons from whom it seemed natural for her at such a crisis +to ask advice; one was Geraldine Jewsbury, a young Manchester lady, +authoress of a well-known novel, _The Half-Sisters_, from the beginning +of their acquaintance in 1841 till the close in 1866 her most intimate +associate and chosen confidant, who, we are told, "knew all" her secrets. + +[Footnote: Carlyle often speaks, sometimes slightingly, of Miss Jewsbury, +as a sensational novelist and admirer of George Sand, but he appreciated +her genuine worth.] + +The other was the inspired Italian, pure patriot and Stoic moralist Joseph +Mazzini. To him she wrote twice--once apparently before leaving London, +and again from Seaforth. His letters in reply, tenderly sympathetic and +yet rigidly insistent on the duty of forbearance and endurance, availed to +avert the threatened catastrophe; but there are sentences which show how +bitter the complaints must have been. + + It is only you who can teach yourself that, whatever the + _present_ may be, you must front it with dignity.... I + could only point out to you the fulfilment of duties which + can make life--not happy--what can? but earnest, sacred, and + resigned.... I am carrying a burden even heavier than you, + and have undergone even bitterer deceptions. Your life + proves an empty thing, you say. Empty! Do not blaspheme. + Have you never done good? Have you never loved? ... Pain and + joy, deception and fulfilled hopes are just the rain and the + sunshine that must meet the traveller on his way. Bless the + Almighty if He has thought proper to send the latter to + you.... Wrap your cloak round you against the first, but do + not think a single moment that the one or the other have + anything to do with the _end_ of the journey. + +Carlyle's first letter after the rupture is a mixture of reproach +and affection. "We never parted before in such a manner; and all for +literally nothing.... Adieu, dearest, for that is, and, if madness +prevail not, may for ever be your authentic title." Another, enclosing +the birthday present which he had never omitted since her mother's death, +softened his wife's resentment, and the storm blew over for a time. +But while the cause remained there was in the house at best a surface +tranquillity, at worst an under tone of misery which (October 1855 to May +1856) finds voice in the famous Diary, not merely covered with "black +spider webs," but steeped in gall, the publication of which has made so +much debate. It is like a page from _Othello_ reversed. A few sentences +condense the refrain of the lament. "Charles Buller said of the Duchess +de Praslin, 'What could a poor fellow do with a wife that kept a journal +but murder her?'" "That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand +miles Mr. C. has walked between here and there?" "Being an only child, I +never wished to sew men's trousers--no, never!" + + I gin to think I've sold myself + For very little cas." + +"To-day I called on my lady: she was perfectly civil, for a wonder." + +"Edward Irving! The past is past and gone is gone-- + + O waly, waly, love is bonnie, + A little while when it is new;" + +quotations which, laid alongside the records of the writer's visit to the +people at Haddington, "who seem all to grow so good and kind as they grow +old," and to the graves in the churchyard there, are infinitely pathetic. +The letters that follow are in the same strain, _e.g._ to Carlyle when +visiting his sister at the Gill, "I never forget kindness, nor, alas, +unkindness either": to Luichart, "I don't believe thee, wishing yourself +at home.... You don't, as weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself +for the pleasure of others"; to Mrs. Russell at Thornhill, "My London +doctor's prescription is that I should be kept always happy and +tranquil(!!!)." + +In the summer of 1856 Lady Ashburton gave a real ground for offence in +allowing both the Carlyles, on their way north with her, to take a seat +in an ordinary railway carriage, beside her maid, while she herself +travelled in a special saloon. Partly, perhaps in consequence, Mrs. +Carlyle soon went to visit her cousins in Fifeshire, and afterwards +refused to accompany her ladyship on the way back. This resulted in +another quarrel with her husband, who had issued the command from +Luichart--but it was their last on the subject, for Gloriana died on the +4th of the following May, 1857, at Paris: "The most queen-like woman I +had ever known or seen, by nature and by culture _facile princeps_ she, I +think, of all great ladies I have ever seen." This brought to a close an +episode in which there were faults on both sides, gravely punished: the +incidents of its course and the manner in which they were received show, +among other things, that railing at the name of "Happiness" does little +or nothing to reconcile people to the want of the reality. In 1858 Lord +Ashburton married again--a Miss Stuart Mackenzie, who became the attached +friend of the Carlyles, and remained on terms of unruffled intimacy with +both till the end: she survived her husband, who died in 1864, leaving a +legacy of £2000 to the household at Cheyne Row. _Sic transiit._ + +From this date we must turn back over nearly twenty years to retrace the +main steps of the great author's career. Much of the interval was devoted +to innumerable visits, in acceptance of endless hospitalities, or in +paying his annual devotions to Annandale,--calls on his time which kept +him rushing from place to place like a comet. Two facts are notable about +those expeditions: they rarely seemed to give him much pleasure, even at +Scotsbrig he complained of sleepless nights and farm noises; and he was +hardly ever accompanied by his wife. She too was constantly running north +to her own kindred in Liverpool or Scotland, but their paths did not run +parallel, they almost always intersected, so that when the one was on the +way north the other was homeward bound, to look out alone on "a horizon +of zero." Only a few of these visits are worth recording as of general +interest. Most of them were paid, a few received. In the autumn of 1846, +Margaret Fuller, sent from Emerson, called at Cheyne Row, and recorded +her impression of the master as "in a very sweet humour, full of wit and +pathos, without being overbearing," adding that she was "carried away by +the rich flow of his discourse"; and that "the hearty noble earnestness +of his personal bearing brought back the charm of his writing before she +wearied of it." A later visitor, Miss Martineau, his old helper in days +of struggle, was now thus esteemed: "Broken into utter wearisomeness, +a mind reduced to these three elements--imbecility, dogmatism, and +unlimited hope. I never in my life was more heartily bored with any +creature!" In 1847 there followed the last English glimpse of Jeffrey and +the last of Dr. Chalmers, who was full of enthusiasm about _Cromwell_; +then a visit to the Brights, John and Jacob, at Rochdale: with the former +he had "a paltry speaking match" on topics described as "shallow, totally +worthless to me," the latter he liked, recognising in him a culture and +delicacy rare with so much strength of will and independence of thought. +Later came a second visit from Emerson, then on a lecturing tour to +England, gathering impressions revived in his _English Traits_. "His +doctrines are too airy and thin," wrote Carlyle, "for the solid practical +heads of the Lancashire region. We had immense talkings with him here, +but found that he did not give us much to chew the cud upon. He is a +pure-minded man, but I think his talent is not quite so high as I had +anticipated." They had an interesting walk to Stonehenge together, +and Carlyle attended one of his friend's lectures, but with modified +approval, finding this serene "spiritual son" of his own rather "gone +into philanthropy and moonshine." Emerson's notes of this date, on the +other hand, mark his emancipation from mere discipleship. "Carlyle had +all the kleinstãdtlicher traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and +reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a +vast continent.... In him, as in Byron, one is more struck with the +rhetoric than with the matter.... There is more character than intellect +in every sentence, therein strangely resembling Samuel Johnson." The same +year Carlyle perpetrated one of his worst criticisms, that on Keats:-- + + The kind of man he was gets ever more horrible to me. Force + of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other + force.... Such a structure of soul, it would once have been + very evident, was a chosen "Vessel of Hell"; + +and in the next an ungenerously contemptuous reference to Macaulay's +_History_:-- + + The most popular ever written. Fourth edition already, + within perhaps four months. Book to which four hundred + editions could not add any value, there being no depth of + sense in it at all, and a very great quantity of rhetorical + wind. + +Landor, on the other hand, whom he visited later at Bath, he appreciated, +being "much taken with the gigantesque, explosive but essentially +chivalrous and almost heroic old man." He was now at ease about the sale +of his books, having, _inter alia_, received £600 for a new edition of +the _French Revolution_ and the _Miscellanies_. His journal is full of +plans for a new work on Democracy, Organisation of Labour, and Education, +and his letters of the period to Thomas Erskine and others are largely +devoted to politics. + +[Footnote: This is one of the few instances in which further knowledge led +to a change for the better in Carlyle's judgment. In a letter to Emerson, +1840, he speaks disparagingly of Landor as "a wild man, whom no extent of +culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be +weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about +anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind +shows him this side or the other of the object: and _sides_ of an object +are all that he sees." _De te faliula._ Emerson answers defending Landor, +and indicating points of likeness between him and Carlyle.] + +In 1846 he spent the first week of September in Ireland, crossing from +Ardrossan to Belfast, and then driving to Drogheda, and by rail to +Dublin, where in Conciliation Hall he saw O'Connell for the first time +since a casual glimpse at a radical meeting arranged by Charles Buller--a +meeting to which he had gone out of curiosity in 1834. O'Connell was +always an object of Carlyle's detestation, and on this occasion he does +not mince his words. + + Chief quack of the then world ... first time I had ever + heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney + ... the big beggar-man who had £15,000 a year, and, _proh + pudor!_ the favour of English ministers instead of the + pillory. + +At Dundrum he met by invitation Carleton the novelist, with Mitchell and +Gavan Duffy, the Young Ireland leaders whom he seems personally to have +liked, but he told Mitchell that he would probably be hanged, and said +during a drive about some flourishing and fertile fields of the Pale, "Ah! +Duffy, there you see the hoof of the bloody Saxon." + +[Footnote: Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the "Conversations and Correspondence," +now being published in the _Contemporary Review_, naturally emphasises +Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several expressions of +sympathy with the "Tenant Agitations"; but his demur to the _Reminiscences +of My Irish Journey_ being accepted as an accurate account of the writer's +real sentiments is of little avail in face of the letters to Emerson, more +strongly accentuating the same views, _e.g._ "Bothered almost to madness +with Irish balderdash.... '_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars,' I +sometimes advised, 'and sell them in Brazil as niggers!'--perhaps +Parliament on sweet constraint will allow you to advance them to be +niggers!"] + +He returned from Kingston to Liverpool on the 10th, and so closed his +short and unsatisfactory trip. Three years later, July to August 6th, +1849, he paid a longer and final visit to the "ragged commonweal" or +"common woe," as Raleigh called it, landing at Dublin, and after some days +there passing on to Kildare, Kilkenny, Lismore, Waterford, beautiful +Killarney and its beggar hordes, and then to Limerick, Clare, Castlebar, +where he met W.E. Forster, whose acquaintance he had made two years +earlier at Matlock. At Gweedore in Donegal he stayed with Lord George +Hill, whom he respected, though persuaded that he was on the wrong road to +Reform by Philanthropy in a country where it had never worked; and then on +to half Scotch Derry. There, August 6th, he made an emphatic after- +breakfast speech to a half-sympathetic audience; the gist of it being that +the remedy for Ireland was not "emancipation" or "liberty," but to "cease +following the devil, as it had been doing for two centuries." The same +afternoon he escaped on board a Glasgow steamer, and landed safe at 2 A.M. +on the morning of the 7th. The notes of the tour, set down on his return +to Chelsea and republished in 1882, have only the literary merit of the +vigorous descriptive touches inseparable from the author's lightest +writing; otherwise they are mere rough-and-tumble jottings, with no +consecutive meaning, of a rapid hawk's-eye view of the four provinces. + +But Carlyle never ceased to maintain the thesis they set forth, that +Ireland is, for the most part, a country of semi-savages, whose +staple trade is begging, whose practice is to lie, unfit not only +for self-government but for what is commonly called constitutional +government, whose ragged people must be coerced, by the methods of +Raleigh, of Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and +respect for law. At Westport, where "human swinery has reached its acme," +he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred +hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, +while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be +a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of +the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his +neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers +generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country +when he formulated his idea of the Home Rule that seemed to him most for +their good. + + Kildare Railway: big blockhead sitting with his dirty feet + on seat opposite, not stirring them for one who wanted to + sit there. "One thing we're all agreed on," said he; "we're + very ill governed: Whig, Tory, Radical, Repealer, all all + admit we're very ill-governed!" I thought to myself, "Yes, + indeed; you govern yourself! He that would govern you well + would probably surprise you much, my friend--laying a hearty + horse-whip over that back of yours." + +And a little later at Castlebar he declares, "Society here would have to +eat itself and end by cannibalism in a week, if it were not held up by +the rest of our Empire standing afoot." These passages are written in +the spirit which inspired his paper on "The Nigger Question" and the +aggressive series of assaults to which it belongs, on what he regarded as +the most prominent quackeries, shams, and pretence philanthropies of the +day. His own account of the reception of this work is characteristic:-- + + In 1849, after an interval of deep gloom and bottomless + dubitation, came _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, which + unpleasantly astonished everybody, set the world upon the + strangest suppositions--"Carlyle got deep into whisky," said + some,--ruined my reputation according to the friendliest + voices, and in effect divided me altogether from the mob of + "Progress-of-the-species" and other vulgar; but were a great + relief to my own conscience as a faithful citizen, and have + been ever since. + +These pamphlets alienated Mazzini and Mill, and provoked the assault +of the newspapers; which, by the author's confession, did something to +arrest and restrict the sale. + +Nor was this indignation wholly unnatural. Once in his life, on occasion +of his being called to serve at a jury trial, Carlyle, with remarkable +adroitness, coaxed a recalcitrant juryman into acquiescence with the +majority; but coaxing as a rule was not his way. When he found himself in +front of what he deemed to be a falsehood his wont was to fly in its face +and tear it to pieces. His satire was not like that of Horace, who taught +his readers _ridendo dicere verum_, it was rather that of the elder +Lucilius or the later Juvenal; not that of Chaucer, who wrote-- + + That patience is a virtue high is plain, + Because it conquers, as the clerks explain, + Things that rude valour never could attain, + +but that of _The Lye_, attributed to Raleigh, or Swift's _Gulliver_ or +the letters of Junius. The method of direct denunciation has advantages: +it cannot be mistaken, nor, if strong enough, ignored; but it must lay +its account with consequences, and Carlyle in this instance found them +so serious that he was threatened at the height of his fame with +dethronement. Men said he had lost his head, gone back to the everlasting +"No," and mistaken swearing all round for political philosophy. The +ultimate value attached to the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ must depend to a +large extent on the view of the critic. It is now, however, generally +admitted on the one hand that they served in some degree to counteract +the rashness of Philanthropy; on the other, that their effect was marred +by more than the writer's usual faults of exaggeration. It is needless to +refer the temper they display to the troubles then gathering about his +domestic life. A better explanation is to be found in the public events +of the time. + +The two years previous to their appearance were the Revolution years, +during which the European world seemed to be turned upside down. The +French had thrown out their _bourgeois_ king, Louis Philippe--"the +old scoundrel," as Carlyle called him,--and established their second +Republic. Italy, Hungary, and half Germany were in revolt against the old +authorities; the Irish joined in the chorus, and the Chartist monster +petition was being carted to Parliament. Upheaval was the order of the +day, kings became exiles and exiles kings, dynasties and creeds were +being subverted, and empires seemed rocking as on the surface of an +earthquake. They were years of great aspirations, with beliefs in all +manner of swift regeneration-- + + Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, + +all varieties of doctrinaire idealisms. Mazzini failed at Rome, Kossuth +at Pesth; the riots of Berlin resulted in the restoration of the old +dull bureaucratic regime; Smith O'Brien's bluster exploded in a cabbage +garden; the Railway Bubble burst in the fall of the bloated king Hudson, +and the Chartism of the time evaporated in smoke. The old sham gods, with +Buonaparte of the stuffed eagle in front, came back; because, concluded +Carlyle, there was no man in the front of the new movement strong enough +to guide it; because its figure-heads were futile sentimentalists, +insurgents who could not win. The reaction produced by their failure had +somewhat the same effect on his mind that the older French Revolution had +on that of Burke: he was driven back to a greater degree than Mr. Froude +allows on practical conservatism and on the negations of which +the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ are the expression. To this series of +_pronunciamentos_ of political scepticism he meant to add another, of +which he often talks under the name of "Exodus from Houndsditch," boldly +stating and setting forth the grounds of his now complete divergence from +all forms of what either in England or Europe generally could be called +the Orthodox faith in Religion. He was, we are told, withheld from this +by the feeling that the teaching even of the priests he saw and derided +in Belgium or in Galway was better than the atheistic materialism which +he associated with the dominion of mere physical science. He may have +felt he had nothing definite enough to be understood by the people to +substitute for what he proposed to destroy; and he may have had a thought +of the reception of such a work at Scotsbrig. Much of the _Life of +Sterling_, however, is somewhat less directly occupied with the same +question, and though gentler in tone it excited almost as much clamour as +the _Pamphlets_, especially in the north. The book, says Carlyle himself, +was "utterly revolting to the religious people in particular (to my +surprise rather than otherwise). 'Doesn't believe in us either!' Not he +for certain; can't, if you will know." During the same year his almost +morbid dislike of materialism found vent in denunciations of the "Crystal +Palace" Exhibition of Industry; though for its main promoter, Prince +Albert, he subsequently entertained and expressed a sincere respect. + +In the summer of 1851 the Carlyles went together to Malvern, where they +met Tennyson (whose good nature had been proof against some slighting +remarks on his verses), Sydney Dobell, then in the fame of his +"Roman," and other celebrities. They tried the "Water Cure," under the +superintendence of Dr. Gully, who received and treated them as guests; +but they derived little good from the process. "I found," says Carlyle, +"water taken as medicine to be the most destructive drug I had ever +tried." Proceeding northward, he spent three weeks with his mother, then +in her eighty-fourth year and at last growing feeble; a quiet time only +disturbed by indignation at "one ass whom I heard the bray of in some +Glasgow newspaper," comparing "our grand hater of shams" to Father +Gavazzi. His stay was shortened by a summons to spend a few days with the +Ashburtons at Paris on their return from Switzerland. Though bound by +a promise to respond to the call, Carlyle did not much relish it. +Travelling abroad was always a burden to him, and it was aggravated in +this case by his very limited command of the language for conversational +purposes. Fortunately, on reaching London he found that the poet Browning, +whose acquaintance he had made ten years before, was, with his wife, about +to start for the same destination, and he prevailed upon them, though +somewhat reluctant, to take charge of him. + +[Footnote: Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life of Robert Browning_.] + +The companionship was therefore not accidental, and it was of great +service. "Carlyle," according to Mrs. Browning's biographer, "would have +been miserable without Browning," who made all the arrangements for the +party, passed luggage through the customs, saw to passports, fought the +battles of all the stations, and afterwards acted as guide through the +streets of the great city. By a curious irony, two verse-makers and +admirers of George Sand made it possible for the would-be man of action to +find his way. The poetess, recalling the trip afterwards, wrote that she +liked the prophet more than she expected, finding his "bitterness only +melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." Browning himself continued through +life to regard Carlyle with "affectionate reverence." "He never ceased," +says Mrs. Orr, "to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his +wife, or to believe that, in the matter of their domestic unhappiness, she +was the more responsible of the two.... He always thought her a hard +unlovable woman, and I believe little liking was lost between them ... Yet +Carlyle never rendered him that service--easy as it appears--which one man +of letters most justly values from another, that of proclaiming the +admiration which he privately professed for his work." The party started, +September 24th, and reached Dieppe by Newhaven, after a rough passage, the +effects of which on some fellow-travellers more unfortunate than himself +Carlyle describes in a series of recently-discovered jottings [Footnote: +Partially reproduced, _Pall Mall Gazette,_ April 9th 1890, with +illustrative connecting comments.] made on his return, October 2nd, to +Chelsea. On September 25th they reached Paris. Carlyle joined the +Ashburtons at Meurice's Hotel; there dined, went in the evening to the +Théâtre Français, cursed the play, and commented unpleasantly on General +Changarnier sitting in the stalls. + +During the next few days he met many of the celebrities of the time, and +caricatured, after his fashion, their personal appearance, talk, and +manner. These criticisms are for the most part of little value. The +writer had in some of his essays shown almost as much capacity of +understanding the great Frenchmen of the last century as was compatible +with his Puritan vein; but as regards French literature since the +Revolution he was either ignorant or alien. What light could be thrown on +that interesting era by a man who could only say of the authors of _La +Comédie Humaine_ and _Consuelo_ that they were ministers in a Phallus +worship? Carlyle seems to have seen most of Thiers, whom he treats with +good-natured condescension, but little insight: "round fat body, tapering +like a ninepin into small fat feet, placidly sharp fat face, puckered +eyeward ... a frank, sociable kind of creature, who has absolutely +no malignity towards any one, and is not the least troubled with +self-seekings." Thiers talked with contempt of Michelet; and Carlyle, +unconscious of the numerous affinities between that historian of genius +and himself, half assented. Prosper Mérimée, on the other hand, +incensed him by some freaks of criticism, whether in badinage or in +earnest--probably the former. "Jean Paul," he said, getting on the theme +of German literature, "was a hollow fool of the first magnitude," and +Goethe was "insignificant, unintelligible, a paltry kind of Scribe +manqué." "I could stand no more of it, but lighted a cigar, and adjourned +to the street. 'You impertinent blasphemous blockhead!' this was sticking +in my throat: better to retire without bringing it out." + +[Footnote: The two men were mutually antagonistic; Mérimée tried to read +the _French Revolution_, but flung the book aside in weariness or in +disdain.] + +Of Guizot he writes, "Tartuffe, gaunt, hollow, resting on the everlasting +'No' with a haggard consciousness that it ought to be the everlasting +'Yea.'" "To me an extremely detestable kind of man." Carlyle missed +General Cavaignac, "of all Frenchmen the one" he "cared to see." In the +streets of Paris he found no one who could properly be called a gentleman. +"The truly ingenious and strong men of France are here (_i.e_. among the +industrial classes) making money, while the politician, literary, etc. +etc. class is mere play-actorism." His summary before leaving at the close +of a week, rather misspent, is: "Articulate-speaking France was altogether +without beauty or meaning to me in my then diseased mood; but I saw traces +of the inarticulate ... much worthier." + +Back in London, he sent Mrs. Carlyle to the Grange (distinguishing +himself, in an interval of study at home, by washing the back area flags +with his own hands), and there joined her till the close of the year. +During the early part of the next he was absorbed in reading and planning +work. Then came an unusually tranquil visit to Thomas Erskine of +Linlathen, during which he had only to complain that the servants were +often obliged to run out of the room to hide their laughter at his +humorous bursts. At the close of August 1852 he embarked on board a Leith +steamer bound for Rotterdam, on his first trip to Germany. Home once +more, in October, he found chaos come, and seas of paint overwhelming +everything; "went to the Grange, and back in time to witness from Bath +House the funeral, November 18th, of the great Duke," remarking, "The +one true man of official men in England, or that I know of in Europe, +concludes his long course.... Tennyson's verses are naught. Silence alone +is respectable on such an occasion." In March, again at the Grange, he +met the Italian minister Azeglio, and when this statesman disparaged +Mazzini--a thing only permitted by Carlyle to himself--he retorted with +the remark, "Monsieur, vous ne le connaissez pas du tout, du tout." At +Chelsea, on his return, the fowl tragic-comedy reached a crisis, "the +unprotected male" declaring that he would shoot them or poison them. "A +man is not a Chatham nor a Wallenstein; but a man has work too, which the +Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two and sixpence +worth of bantams.... They must either withdraw or die." Ultimately his +mother-wife came to the rescue of her "babe of genius"; the cocks +were bought off, and in the long-talked-of sound-proof room the last +considerable work of his life, though painfully, proceeded. Meanwhile +"brother John" had married, and Mrs. Carlyle went to visit the couple at +Moffat. While there bad tidings came from Scotsbrig, and she dutifully +hurried off to nurse her mother-in-law through an attack from which the +strong old woman temporarily rallied. But the final stroke could not be +long delayed. When Carlyle was paying his winter visit to the Grange in +December news came that his mother was worse, and her recovery +despaired of; and, by consent of his hostess, he hurried off to +Scotsbrig,--"mournful leave given me by the Lady A., mournful +encouragement to be speedy, not dilatory,"--and arrived in time to hear +her last words. "Here is Tom come to bid you good-night, mother," said +John. "As I turned to go, she said, 'I'm muckle obleeged to you.'" She +spoke no more, but passed from sleep after sleep of coma to that of +death, on Sunday, Christmas Day, 1853. "We can only have one mother," +exclaimed Byron on a like event--the solemn close of many storms. But +between Margaret Carlyle and the son of whom she was so proud there had +never been a shadow. "If," writes Mr. Froude, "she gloried in his fame +and greatness, he gloried more in being her son, and while she lived she, +and she only, stood between him and the loneliness of which he so often +and so passionately complained." + +Of all Carlyle's letters none are more tenderly beautiful than those +which he sent to Scotsbrig. The last, written on his fifty-eighth +birthday, December 4th, which she probably never read, is one of the +finest. The close of their wayfaring together left him solitary; his +"soul all hung with black," and, for months to come, everything around +was overshadowed by the thought of his bereavement. In his journal of +February 28th 1854, he tells us that he had on the Sunday before seen a +vision of Mainhill in old days, with mother, father, and the rest getting +dressed for the meeting-house. "They are gone now, vanished all; their +poor bits of thrifty clothes, ... their pious struggling efforts; their +little life, it is all away. It has all melted into the still sea, it +was rounded with a sloop." The entry ends, as fitting, with a prayer: "O +pious mother! kind, good, brave, and truthful soul as I have ever found, +and more than I have elsewhere found in this world. Your poor Tom, long +out of his schooldays now, has fallen very lonely, very lame and broken +in this pilgrimage of his; and you cannot help him or cheer him ... any +more. From your grave in Ecclefechan kirkyard yonder you bid him trust in +God; and that also he will try if he can understand and do." + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE MINOTAUR + +[1853-1866] + +Carlyle was now engaged on a work which required, received, and well nigh +exhausted all his strength, resulting in the greatest though the least +generally read of all his books. _Cromwell_ achieved, he had thrown +himself for a season into contemporary politics, condescending even, +contrary to his rule, to make casual contributions to the Press; but his +temper was too hot for success in that arena, and his letters of the time +are full of the feeling that the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ had set the world +against him. Among his generous replies to young men asking advice, none +is more suggestive than that in which he writes from Chelsea (March 9th +1850):-- + + If my books teach you anything, don't mind in the least + whether other people believe it or not; but lay it to + heart ... as a real message left with you, which you must + set about fulfilling, whatever others do.... And be not + surprised that "people have no sympathy with you." That is + an accompaniment that will attend you all your days if you + mean to live an earnest life. + +But he himself, though "ever a fighter," felt that, even for him, it was +not good to be alone. He decided there "was no use railing in vain like +Timon"; he would go back again from the present to the past, from the +latter days of discord to seek countenance in some great figure of +history, under whose ægis he might shelter the advocacy of his views. +Looking about for a theme, several crossed his mind. He thought of +Ireland, but that was too burning a subject; of William the Conqueror, of +Simon de Montfort, the Norsemen, the Cid; but these may have seemed to +him too remote. Why, ask patriotic Scotsmen, did he not take up his and +their favourite Knox? But Knox's life had been fairly handled by M'Crie, +and Carlyle would have found it hard to adjust his treatment of that +essentially national "hero" to the "Exodus from Houndsditch." "Luther" +might have been an apter theme; but there too it would have been a strain +to steer clear of theological controversy, of which he had had enough. +Napoleon was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste. Looking over +Europe in more recent times, he concluded that the Prussian monarchy had +been the main centre of modern stability, and that it had been made so by +its virtual creator, Friedrich II., called the Great. Once entertained, +the subject seized him as with the eye of Coleridge's mariner, and, in +spite of manifold efforts to get free, compelled him, so that he could +"not choose but" write on it. Again and again, as the magnitude of the +task became manifest, we find him doubting, hesitating, recalcitrating, +and yet captive. He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own Memoirs +and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains through which he had to dig. +"Prussian Friedrich and the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust +lay crushing me with the continual question, Dare I try it? Dare I not?" +At length, gathering himself together for the effort, he resolved, as +before in the case of Cromwell, to visit the scenes of which he was to +write. Hence the excursion to Germany of 1852, during which, with the +kindly-offered guidance of Mr. Neuberg, an accomplished German admirer of +some fortune resident in London, he made his first direct acquaintance +with the country of whose literature he had long been himself the English +interpreter. The outlines of the trip may be shortly condensed from the +letters written during its progress to his wife and mother. He reached +Rotterdam on September 1st; then after a night made sleepless by "noisy +nocturnal travellers and the most industrious cocks and clamorous bells" +he had ever heard, he sailed up the river to Bonn, where he consulted +books, saw "Father Arndt," and encountered some types of the German +professoriate, "miserable creatures lost in statistics." There he met +Neuberg, and they went together to Rolandseck, to the village of Hunef +among the Sieben-Gebirge, and then on to Coblenz. After a detour to Ems, +which Carlyle, comminating the gaming-tables, compared to Matlock, and +making a pilgrimage to Nassau as the birthplace of William the Silent, +they rejoined the Rhine and sailed admiringly up the finest reach of the +river. From Mainz the philosopher and his guide went on to Frankfort, +paid their respects to Goethe's statue and the garret where _Werther_ was +written, the Judengasse, "grimmest section of the Middle Ages," and the +Römer--election hall of the old Kaisers; then to Homburg, where they saw +an old Russian countess playing "gowpanfuls of gold pieces every +stake," and left after no long stay, Carlyle, in a letter to Scotsbrig, +pronouncing the fashionable Badeort to be the "rallying-place of such a +set of empty blackguards as are not to be found elsewhere in the world." +We find him next at Marburg, where he visited the castle of Philip of +Hesse. Passing through Cassel, he went to Eisenach, and visited the +neighbouring Wartburg, where he kissed the old oaken table, on which the +Bible was made an open book for the German race, and noted the hole in +the plaster where the inkstand had been thrown at the devil and his +noises; an incident to which eloquent reference is made in the lectures +on "Heroes." Hence they drove to Gotha, and lodged in Napoleon's room +after Leipzig. Then by Erfurt, with more Luther memories, they took rail +to Weimar, explored the houses of Goethe and of Schiller, and dined by +invitation with the Augustenburgs; the Grand Duchess, with sons and +daughters, conversing in a Babylonish dialect, a melange of French, +English, and German. The next stage seems to have been Leipzig, then in +a bustle with the Fair. "However," says Carlyle, "we got a book or two, +drank a glass of wine in Auerbach's keller, and at last got off safe to +the comparative quiet of Dresden." He ignores the picture galleries; and +makes a bare reference to the palaces from which they steamed up the Elbe +to the heart of Saxon Switzerland. There he surveyed Lobositz, first +battle-field of the Seven Years' War, and rested at the romantic mountain +watering-place of Töplitz. "He seems," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, "to be getting +very successfully through his travels, thanks to the patience and +helpfulness of Neuberg. He makes in every letter frightful _misereres_ +over his sleeping accommodations; but he cannot conceal that he is really +pretty well." The writer's own _misereres_ are as doleful and nearly +as frequent; but she was really in much worse health. From Töplitz the +companions proceeded in weary stellwagens to Zittau in Lusatia, and so on +to + + Herrnhut, the primitive city of the Moravian brethren: a + place not bigger than Annan, but beautiful, pure, and quiet + beyond any town on the earth, I daresay; and, indeed, more + like a saintly dream of ideal Calvinism made real than a town + of stone and lime. + +Onward by "dreary moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred +"the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his +worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of +the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we have, October +1st:-- + + I am dead stupid; my heart nearly choked out of me, and my + head churned to pieces.... Berlin is loud almost as London, + but in no other way great ... about the size of Liverpool, + and more like Glasgow. + +They spent a week there (sight-seeing being made easier by an +introduction from Lady Ashburton to the Ambassador), discovering at +length an excellent portrait of Fritz, meeting Tieck, Cornelius, Rauch, +Preuss, etc., and then got quickly back to London by way of Hanover, +Cologne, and Ostend. Carlyle's travels are always interesting, and would +be more so without the tiresome, because ever the same, complaints. Six +years later (1858) he made his second expedition to Germany, in the +company of two friends, a Mr. Foxton--who is made a butt--and the +faithful Neuberg. Of this journey, undertaken with a more exclusively +business purpose, and accomplished with greater dispatch, there are fewer +notes, the substance of which may be here anticipated. He sailed (August +21st) from Leith to Hamburg, admiring the lower Elbe, and then went out +of his way to accept a pressing invitation from the Baron Usedom and his +wife to the Isle of Rügen, sometimes called the German Isle of Wight. He +went there by Stralsund, liked his hosts and their pleasant place, where +for cocks crowing he had doves cooing; but in Putbus, the Richmond of the +island, he had to encounter brood sows as well as cochin-chinas. From +Rügen he went quickly south by Stettin to Berlin, then to Cüstrin to +survey the field of Zorndorf, with what memorable result readers of +_Friedrich_ know. His next halt was at Liegnitz, headquarters for +exploring the grounds of "Leuthen, the grandest of all the battles," +and Molwitz--first of Fritz's fights--of which we hear so much in the +_Reminiscences_. His course lay on to Breslau, "a queer old city as ever +you heard of, high as Edinburgh or more so," and, by Landshut, through +the picturesque villages of the Riesen-Gebirge into Bohemia. There he +first put up at Pardubitz in a vile, big inn, for bed a "trough eighteen +inches too short, a mattress forced into it which cocked up at both +ends"--such as most travellers in remoter Germany at that period have +experienced. Carlyle was unfavourably impressed by the Bohemians; and +"not one in a hundred of them could understand a word of German. They +are liars, thieves, slatterns, a kind of miserable, subter-Irish +people,--Irish with the addition of ill-nature." He and his friends +visited the fields of Chotusitz and Kolin, where they found the "Golden +Sun," from which "the last of the Kings" had surveyed the ground, "sunk +to be the dirtiest house probably in Europe." Thence he made for Prague, +whose picturesque grandeur he could not help extolling. "Here," he +writes, enclosing the flower to his wife, "is an authentic wild pink +plucked from the battle-field. Give it to some young lady who practises +'the Battle of Prague' on her piano to your satisfaction." On September +15th he dates from Dresden, whence he spent a laborious day over Torgau. +Thereafter they sped on, with the usual tribulations, by Hochkirk, +Leipzig, Weissenfels, and Rossbach. Hurrying homeward, they were obliged +to decline another invitation from the Duchess at Weimar; and, making +for Guntershausen, performed the fatiguing journey from there to +Aix-la-Chapelle in one day, _i.e._ travelling often in slow trains from 4 +A.M. to 7 P.M., a foolish feat even for the eupeptic. Carlyle visited the +cathedral, but has left a very poor account of the impression produced +on him by the simple slab sufficiently inscribed, "Carolo Magno." "Next +morning stand upon the lid of Charlemagne, abominable monks roaring +out their idolatrous grand music within sight." By Ostend and Dover he +reached home on the 22nd. A Yankee scamper trip, one might say, but for +the result testifying to the enormous energy of the traveller. "He speaks +lightly," says Mr. Froude, "of having seen Kolin, Torgau, etc. etc. No +one would guess from reading these short notices that he had mastered the +details of every field he visited; not a turn of the ground, not a brook, +not a wood ... had escaped him.... There are no mistakes. Military +students in Germany are set to learn Frederick's battles in Carlyle's +account of them." + +During the interval between those tours there are few events of interest +in Carlyle's outer, or phases of his inner life which have not been +already noted. The year 1854 found the country ablaze with the excitement +of the Crimean War, with which he had as little sympathy as had Cobden +or Bright or the members of Sturge's deputation. He had no share in the +popular enthusiasm for what he regarded as a mere newspaper folly. All +his political leaning was on the side of Russia, which, from a safe +distance, having no direct acquaintance with the country, he always +admired as a seat of strong government, the representative of wise +control over barbarous races. Among the worst of these he reckoned the +Turk, "a lazy, ugly, sensual, dark fanatic, whom we have now had for 400 +years. I would not buy the continuance of him in Europe at the rate of +sixpence a century." Carlyle had no more faith in the "Balance of power" +than had Byron, who scoffed at it from another, the Republican, side as +"balancing straws on kings' noses instead of wringing them off," _e.g._-- + + As to Russian increase of strength, he writes, I would wait + till Russia meddled with me before I drew sword to stop his + increase of strength. It is the idle population of editors, + etc., that has done all this in England. One perceives + clearly that ministers go forward in it against their will. + +Even our heroisms at Alma--"a terrible, almost horrible, +operation"--Balaclava, and Inkermann, failed to raise a glow in his mind, +though he admitted the force of Tennyson's ringing lines. The alliance +with the "scandalous copper captain," elected by the French, as the Jews +chose Barabbas,--an alliance at which many patriots winced--was to him +only an added disgrace. Carlyle's comment on the subsequent visit to +Osborne of Victor Hugo's "brigand," and his reception within the pale of +legitimate sovereignty was, "Louis Bonaparte has not been shot hitherto. +That is the best that can be said." Sedan brought most men round to his +mind about Napoleon III.: but his approval of the policy of the Czars +remains open to the criticism of M. Lanin. In reference to the next great +struggle of the age, Carlyle was in full sympathy with the mass of his +countrymen. He was as much enraged by the Sepoy rebellion as were those +who blew the ringleaders from the muzzles of guns. "Tongue cannot speak," +he exclaims, in the spirit of Noel Paton's picture, before it was amended +or spoilt, "the horrors that were done on the English by these mutinous +hyaenas. Allow hyaenas to mutiny and strange things will follow." He +never seems to have revolved the question as to the share of his admired +Muscovy in instigating the revolt. For the barbarism of the north he had +ready apologies, for the savagery of the south mere execration; and he +writes of the Hindoos as he did, both before and afterwards, of the +negroes in Jamaica. + +Three sympathetic obituary notices of the period expressed his softer +side. In April 1854, John Wilson and Lord Cockburn died at Edinburgh. His +estimate of the former is notable as that generally entertained, now that +the race of those who came under the personal spell of Christopher North +has passed:-- + + We lived apart as in different centuries; though to say the + truth I always loved Wilson, he had much nobleness of heart, + and many traits of noble genius, but the central tie-beam + seemed always wanting; very long ago I perceived in him the + most irreconcilable contradictions--Toryism with + Sansculottism, Methodism of a sort with total incredulity, + etc.... Wilson seemed to me always by far the most gifted + of our literary men, either then or still: and yet + intrinsically he has written nothing that can endure. + +Cockburn is referred to in contrast as "perhaps the last genuinely +national type of rustic Scotch sense, sincerity, and humour--a wholesome +product of Scotch dialect, with plenty of good logic in it." Later, +Douglas Jerrold is described as "last of the London wits, I hope the +last." Carlyle's letters during this period are of minor interest: many +refer to visits paid to distinguished friends and humble relatives, with +the usual complaints about health, servants, and noises. At Farlingay, +where he spent some time with Edward FitzGerald, translator of _Omar +Khayyam_, the lowing of cows took the place of cocks crowing. Here and +there occurs a, criticism or a speculation. That on his dreams is, in the +days of "insomnia," perhaps worth noting (F. iv. 154, 155); _inter alia_ +he says:--"I have an impression that one always dreams, but that only in +cases where the nerves are disturbed by bad health, which produces light +imperfect sleep, do they start into such relief as to force themselves on +our waking consciousness." Among posthumously printed documents of Cheyne +Row, to this date belongs the humorous appeal of Mrs. Carlyle for a +larger allowance of house money, entitled "Budget of a Femme Incomprise." +The arguments and statement of accounts, worthy of a bank auditor, were +so irresistible that Carlyle had no resource but to grant the request, +_i.e._ practically to raise the amount to £230, instead of £200 per +annum. It has been calculated that his reliable income even at this time +did not exceed £400, but the rent of the house was kept very low, £30: +he and his wife lived frugally, so that despite the expenses of the +noise-proof room and his German tour he could afford in 1857 to put a +stop to her travelling in second-class railway carriages; in 1860, when +the success of the first instalment of his great work made an end of +financial fears, to keep two servants; and in 1863 to give Mrs. Carlyle +a brougham. Few men have left on the whole so unimpeachable a record in +money matters. + +In November 1854 there occurred an incident hitherto unrecorded in any +biography. The Lord Rectorship of the University of Glasgow having fallen +vacant, the "Conservative Club" of the year had put forward Mr. Disraeli +as successor to the honorary office. A small body of Mr. Carlyle's +admirers among the senior students on the other side nominated him, +partly as a tribute of respect and gratitude, partly in opposition to +a statesman whom they then distrusted. The nomination was, after much +debate, adopted by the so-called "Liberal Association" of that day; +and, with a curious irony, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ and +_Friedrich II._ was pitted, as a Radical, against the future promoter of +the Franchise of 1867 as a Tory. It soon appeared that his supporters +had underestimated the extent to which Mr. Carlyle had offended Scotch +theological prejudice and outraged the current Philanthropy. His name +received some sixty adherents, and had ultimately to be withdrawn. The +nomination was received by the Press, and other exponents of popular +opinion, with denunciations that came loudest and longest from the +leaders of orthodox Dissent, then arrogating to themselves the profession +of Liberalism and the initiation of Reform. Among the current expressions +in reference to his social and religious creeds were the following:-- + + Carlyle's philanthropy is not that of Howard, his cure for + national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving + wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be + described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong." + He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down + into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is + a sham.... Elect him and you bid God-speed to Pantheism and + spiritualism. + + [Footnote: Mr. Wylie states that "twice before his election by his + own University he (Carlyle) had been invited to allow himself to + be nominated for the office of Lord Rector, once by students in + the University of Glasgow and once by those of Aberdeen: but both + of these invitations he had declined." This as regards Glasgow is + incorrect.] + + Mr. Carlyle neither possesses the talent nor the distinction, nor + does he occupy the position which entitle a man to such an honour + as the Rectorial Chair. The _Scotch Guardian_ writes: But for the + folly exhibited in bringing forward Mr. Disraeli, scarcely any + party within the College or out of it would have ventured to + nominate a still more obnoxious personage. This is the first + instance we have been able to discover in which the suffrages of + the youth of the University have been sought for a candidate who + denied in his writings that the revealed Word of God is "the way, + the truth, the life." It is impossible to separate Mr. Carlyle + from that obtrusive feature of his works in which the solemn + verities of our holy religion are sneered at as wornout + "biblicalities," "unbelievabilities," and religious profession is + denounced as "dead putrescent cant." The reader of the _Life of + Sterling_ is not left to doubt for a moment the author's malignant + hostility to the religion of the Bible. In that work, saving faith + is described as "stealing into heaven by the modern method of + sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on earth," that is + to say, by believing in the doctrines of the Gospels. How, after + this, could the Principal and Professors of the University, the + guardians of the faiths and morals of its inexperienced youth, + accompany to the Common Hall, and allow to address the students a + man who has degraded his powers to the life-labour of sapping and + mining the foundations of the truth, and opened the fire of his + fiendish raillery against the citadel of our best aspirations and + dearest hopes? + +In the result, two men of genius--however diverse--were discarded, and +a Scotch nobleman of conspicuous talent, always an active, if not +intrusive, champion of orthodoxy, was returned by an "overwhelming +majority." In answer to intelligence transmitted to Mr. Carlyle of these +events, the president of the Association of his supporters--who had +nothing on which to congratulate themselves save that only the benches +of the rooms in which they held their meetings had been riotously +broken,--received the following previously unpublished letter:-- + + Chelsea, _16th December_ 1854. + + DEAR SIR--I have received your Pamphlet; and return many + thanks for all your kindness to me. I am sorry to learn, as + I do for the first time from this narrative, what angry + nonsense some of my countrymen see good to write of me. Not + being much a reader of Newspapers, I had hardly heard of the + Election till after it was finished; and I did not know that + anything of this melancholy element of Heterodoxy, + "Pantheism," etc. etc., had been introduced into the matter. + It is an evil, after its sort, this of being hated and + denounced by fools and ignorant persons; but it cannot be + mended for the present, and so must be left standing there. + + That another wiser class think differently, nay, that they + alone have any real knowledge of the question, or any real + right to vote upon it, is surely an abundant compensation. + If that be so, then all is still right; and probably there + is no harm done at all!--To you, and the other young + gentlemen who have gone with you on this occasion, I can + only say that I feel you have loyally meant to do me a great + honour and kindness; that I am deeply sensible of your + genial recognition, of your noble enthusiasm (which reminds + me of my own young years); and that in fine there is no loss + or gain of an Election which can in the least alter these + valuable facts, or which is not wholly insignificant to me, + in comparison with them. "Elections" are not a thing + transacted by the gods, in general; and I have known very + unbeautiful creatures "elected" to be kings, chief-priests, + railway kings, etc., by the "most sweet voices," and the + spiritual virtue that inspires these, in our time! + + Leaving all that, I will beg you all to retain your + honourable good feelings towards me; and to think that if + anything I have done or written can help any one of you in + the noble problem of living like a wise man in these evil + and foolish times, it will be more valuable to me than never + so many Elections or Non-elections. With many good wishes + and regards I heartily thank you all, and remain--Yours very + sincerely, + + T. CARLYLE. + +[Footnote: For the elucidation of some points of contact between Carlyle +and Lord Beaconsfield, _vide_ Mr. Froude's _Life_ of the latter.] + +Carlyle's letters to strangers are always valuable, for they are terse +and reticent. In writing to weavers, like Bamford; to men in trouble, as +Cooper; to students, statesmen, or earnest inquirers of whatever degree, +a genuine sympathy for them takes the place of the sympathy for himself, +often too prominent in the copious effusions to his intimates. The letter +above quoted is of special interest, as belonging to a time from which +comparatively few survive; when he was fairly under weigh with a task +which seemed to grow in magnitude under his gaze. The _Life of Friedrich_ +could not be a succession of dramatic scenes, like the _French +Revolution_, nor a biography like _Cromwell_, illustrated by the +surrounding events of thirty years. Carlyle found, to his dismay, that he +had involved himself in writing the History of Germany, and in a measure +of Europe, during the eighteenth century, a period perhaps the most +tangled and difficult to deal with of any in the world's annals. He was +like a man who, with intent to dig up a pine, found himself tugging at +the roots of an Igdrasil that twined themselves under a whole Hercynian +forest. His constant cries of positive pain in the progress of the work +are distressing, as his indomitable determination to wrestle with and +prevail over it is inspiring. There is no imaginable image that he does +not press into his service in rattling the chains of his voluntary +servitude. Above all, he groans over the unwieldy mass of his +authorities--"anti-solar systems of chaff." + + "I read old German books dull as stupidity itself--nay + superannuated stupidity--gain with labour the dreariest + glimpses of unimportant extinct human beings ... but when I + begin operating: _how_ to reduce that widespread black + desert of Brandenburg sand to a small human garden! ... I have + no capacity of grasping the big chaos that lies around me, + and reducing it to order. Order! Reducing! It is like + compelling the grave to give up its dead!" + +Elsewhere he compares his travail with the monster of his own creation +to "Balder's ride to the death kingdoms, through frozen rain, sound of +subterranean torrents, leaden-coloured air"; and in the retrospect of +the _Reminiscences_ touchingly refers to his thirteen years of rarely +relieved isolation. "A desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my whole +strength devoted to it ... withdrawn from all the world." He received few +visitors and had few correspondents, but kept his life vigorous by riding +on his horse Fritz (the gift of the Marshalls), "during that book, some +30,000 miles, much of it, all the winter part of it, under cloud of +night, sun just setting when I mounted. All the rest of the day I sat, +silent, aloft, insisting upon work, and such work, _invitissimâ Minervâ_, +for that matter." Mrs. Carlyle had her usual share of the sufferings +involved in "the awful _Friedrich_." "That tremendous book," she writes, +"made prolonged and entire devastation of any satisfactory semblance of +home life or home happiness." But when at last, by help of Neuberg and of +Mr. Larkin, who made the maps of the whole book, the first two volumes +were in type (they appeared in autumn 1858), his wife hailed them in a +letter sent from Edinburgh to Chelsea: "Oh, my dear, what a magnificent +book this is going to be, the best of all your books, forcible, clear, and +sparkling as the _French Revolution_; compact and finished as _Cromwell_. +Yes, you shall see that it will be the best of all your books, and small +thanks to it, it has taken a doing." On which the author naively purrs: +"It would be worth while to write books, if mankind would read them as +you." Later he speaks of his wife's recognition and that of Emerson--who +wrote enthusiastically of the art of the work, though much of it was +across his grain--as "the only bit of human criticism in which he could +discern lineaments of the thing." But the book was a swift success, two +editions of 2000 and another of 1000 copies being sold in a comparatively +brief space. Carlyle's references to this--after his return from another +visit to the north and the second trip to Germany--seen somewhat +ungracious:-- + + Book ... much babbled over in newspapers ... no better to me + than the barking of dogs ... officious people put reviews + into my hands, and in an idle hour I glanced partly into + these; but it would have been better not, so sordidly ignorant + and impertinent were they, though generally laudatory. + +[Footnote: Carlyle himself writes: "I felt well enough how it was crushing +down her existence, as it was crushing down my own; and the thought that +she had not been at the choosing of it, and yet must suffer so for it, was +occasionally bitter to me. But the practical conclusion always was, Get +done with it, get done with it! For the saving of us both that is the one +outlook. And sure enough, I did stand by that dismal task with all my time +and all my means; day and night wrestling with it, as with the ugliest +dragon, which blotted out the daylight and the rest of the world to me +till I should get it slain."] + +But these notices recall the fact familiar to every writer, that while +the assailants of a book sometimes read it, favourable reviewers hardly +ever do; these latter save their time by payment of generally superficial +praise, and a few random quotations. + +Carlyle scarcely enjoyed his brief respite on being discharged of the +first instalment of his book: the remainder lay upon him like a menacing +nightmare; he never ceased to feel that the work must be completed ere he +could be free, and that to accomplish this he must be alone. Never absent +from his wife without regrets, lamentations, contrite messages, and +childlike entreaties for her to "come and protect him," when she came +it was to find that they were better apart; for his temper was never +softened by success. "Living beside him," she writes in 1858, is "the +life of a weathercock in high wind." During a brief residence together +in a hired house near Aberdour in Fifeshire, she compares herself to a +keeper in a madhouse; and writes later from Sunny bank to her husband, +"If you could fancy me in some part of the house out of sight, my absence +would make little difference to you, considering how little I do see of +you, and how preoccupied you are when I do see you." Carlyle answers in +his touching strain, "We have had a sore life pilgrimage together, much +bad road. Oh, forgive me!" and sends her beautiful descriptions; but her +disposition, not wholly forgiving, received them somewhat sceptically. +"Byron," said Lady Byron, "can write anything, but he does not feel it"; +and Mrs. Carlyle on one occasion told her "harsh spouse" that his fine +passages were very well written for the sake of future biographers: +a charge he almost indignantly repudiates. He was then, August 1860, +staying at Thurso Castle, the guest of Sir George Sinclair; a visit that +terminated in an unfortunate careless mistake about a sudden change of +plans, resulting in his wife, then with the Stanleys at Alderley, +being driven back to Chelsea and deprived of her promised pleasure and +requisite rest with her friends in the north. + +The frequency of such incidents,--each apart capable of being palliated +by the same fallacy of division that has attempted in vain to justify the +domestic career of Henry VIII.,--points to the conclusion of Miss Gully +that Carlyle, though often nervous on the subject, acted to his wife as +if he were "totally inconsiderate of her health," so much so that she +received medical advice not to be much at home when he was in the stress +of writing. In January 1858 he writes to his brother John an anxious +letter in reference to a pain about a hand-breadth below the heart, of +which she had begun to complain, the premonitory symptom of the disease +which ultimately proved fatal; but he was not sufficiently impressed +to give due heed to the warning; nor was it possible, with his +long-engrained habits, to remove the Marah spring that lay under all the +wearisome bickerings, repentances, and renewals of offence. The "very +little herring" who declined to be made a part of Lady Ashburton's +luggage now suffered more than ever from her inanimate rival. The +highly-endowed wife of one of the most eminent philanthropists of +America, whose life was devoted to the awakening of defective intellects, +thirty-five years ago murmured, "If I were only an idiot!" Similarly Mrs. +Carlyle might have remonstrated, "Why was I not born a book!" Her letters +and journal teem to tiresomeness with the refrain, "I feel myself +extremely neglected for unborn generations." Her once considerable +ambitions had been submerged, and her own vivid personality overshadowed +by a man she was afraid to meet at breakfast, and glad to avoid at +dinner. A woman of immense talent and a spark of genius linked to a man +of vast genius and imperious will, she had no choice but to adopt his +judgments, intensify his dislikes, and give a sharper edge to his sneers. + +Mr. Froude, who for many years lived too near the sun to see the sun, +and inconsistently defends many of the inconsistencies he has himself +inherited from his master, yet admits that Carlyle treated the Broad +Church party in the English Church with some injustice. His recorded +estimates of the leading theologians of the age, and personal relation to +them, are hopelessly bewildering. His lifelong friendship for Erskine of +Linlathen is intelligible, though he did not extend the same charity to +what he regarded as the muddle-headedness of Maurice (Erskine's spiritual +son), and keenly ridiculed the reconciliation pamphlet entitled +"Subscription no Bondage." The Essayists and Reviewers, "Septem contra +Christum," "should," he said, "be shot for deserting their posts"; even +Dean Stanley, their _amicus curioe,_ whom he liked, came in for a share +of his sarcasm; "there he goes," he said to Froude, "boring holes in the +bottom of the Church of England." Of Colenso, who was doing as much as +any one for the "Exodus from Houndsditch," he spoke with open contempt, +saying, "he mistakes for fame an extended pillory that he is standing +on"; and was echoed by his wife, "Colenso isn't worth talking about for +five minutes, except for the absurdity of a man making arithmetical +onslaughts on the Pentateuch with a bishop's little black silk apron on." +This is not the place to discuss the controversy involved; but we +are bound to note the fact that Carlyle was, by an inverted Scotch +intolerance, led to revile men rowing in the same boat as himself, but +with a different stroke. To another broad Churchman, Charles Kingsley, +partly from sympathy with this writer's imaginative power, he was more +considerate; and one of the still deeply religious freethinkers of the +time was among his closest friends. The death of Arthur Clough in 1861 +left another blank in Carlyle's life: we have had in this century to +lament the comparatively early loss of few men of finer genius. Clough +had not, perhaps, the practical force of Sterling, but his work is of a +higher order than any of the fragments of the earlier favourite. Among +High Churchmen Carlyle commended Dr. Pusey as "solid and judicious," and +fraternised with the Bishop of Oxford; but he called Keble "an ape," +and said of Cardinal Newman that he had "no more brains than an +ordinary-sized rabbit." + +These years are otherwise marked by his most glaring political blunder. +The Civil War, then raging in America, brought, with its close, the +abolition of Slavery throughout the States, a consummation for which he +cared little, for he had never professed to regard the negroes as fit for +freedom; but this result, though inevitable, was incidental. As is known +to every one who has the remotest knowledge of Transatlantic history, +the war was in great measure a struggle for the preservation of National +Unity: but it was essentially more; it was the vindication of Law and +Order against the lawless and disorderly violence of those who, when +defeated at the polling-booth, flew to the bowie knife; an assertion of +Right as Might for which Carlyle cared everything: yet all he had to +say of it was his "Ilias Americana in nuce," published in _Macmillan's +Magazine_, August 1863. + + _Peter of the North_ (to Paul of the South): "Paul, you + unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for + life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going + straight to Hell, you----" + + _Paul_: "Good words, Peter. The risk is my own. I am + willing to take the risk. Hire you your servants by the + month or the day, and get straight to Heaven; leave me to my + own method." + + _Peter_: "No, I won't. I will beat your brains out + first!" [And is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet + manage it.] + +This, except the _Prinzenraub_, a dramatic presentation of a dramatic +incident in old German history, was his only side publication during the +writing of _Friedrich_. + +After the war ended and Emerson's letters of remonstrance had proved +prophetic, Carlyle is said to have confessed to Mr. Moncure Conway as +well as to Mr. Froude that he "had not seen to the bottom of the matter." +But his republication of this nadir of his nonsense was an offence, +emphasising the fact that, however inspiring, he is not always a safe +guide, even to those content to abide by his own criterion of success. + +There remains of this period the record of a triumph and of a tragedy. +After seven years more of rarely intermitted toil, broken only by a few +visits, trips to the sea-shore, etc., and the distress of the terrible +accident to his wife,--her fall on a curbstone and dislocation of a +limb,--which has been often sufficiently detailed, he had finished his +last great work. The third volume of _Friedrich_ was published in May +1862, the fourth appeared in February 1864, the fifth and sixth in March +1865. Carlyle had at last slain his Minotaur, and stood before the +world as a victorious Theseus, everywhere courted and acclaimed, his +hard-earned rest only disturbed by a shower of honours. His position +as the foremost prose writer of his day was as firmly established in +Germany, where his book was at once translated and read by all readers of +history, as in England. Scotland, now fully awake to her reflected fame, +made haste to make amends. Even the leaders of the sects, bond and +"free," who had denounced him, were now eager to proclaim that he had +been intrinsically all along, though sometimes in disguise, a champion of +their faith. No men knew better how to patronise, or even seem to lead, +what they had failed to quell. The Universities made haste with their +burnt-offerings. In 1856 a body of Edinburgh students had prematurely +repeated the attempt of their forerunners in Glasgow to confer on him +their Lord Rectorship, and failed. In 1865 he was elected, in opposition +again to Mr. Disraeli, to succeed Mr. Gladstone, the genius of elections +being in a jesting mood. He was prevailed on to accept the honour, and, +later, consented to deliver in the spring of 1866 the customary Inaugural +Address. Mrs. Carlyle's anxiety on this occasion as to his success and +his health is a tribute to her constant and intense fidelity. He went +north to his Installation, under the kind care of encouraging friends, +imprimis of Professor Tyndall, one of his truest; they stopped on the road +at Fryston, with Lord Houghton, and there met Professor Huxley, who +accompanied them to Edinburgh. Carlyle, having resolved to speak and not +merely to read what he had to say, was oppressed with nervousness; and of +the event itself he writes: "My speech was delivered in a mood of defiant +despair, and under the pressure of nightmare. Some feeling that I was not +speaking lies alone sustained me. The applause, etc., I took for empty +noise, which it really was not altogether." The address, nominally on the +"Reading of Books," really a rapid autobiography of his own intellectual +career, with references to history, literature, religion, and the conduct +of life, was, as Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs. Carlyle,--save for some +difficulty the speaker had in making himself audible--"a perfect triumph." +His reception by one of the most enthusiastic audiences ever similarly +assembled marked the climax of a steadily-increasing fame. It may be +compared to the late welcome given to Wordsworth in the Oxford Theatre. +After four days spent with Erskine and his own brother James in Edinburgh, +he went for a week's quiet to Scotsbrig, and was kept there, lingering +longer than he had intended, by a sprained ankle, "blessed in the country +stillness, the purity of sky and earth, and the absence of all babble." On +April 20th he wrote his last letter to his wife, a letter which she never +read. On the evening of Saturday the 21st, when staying on the way south +at his sister's house at Dumfries, he received a telegram informing him +that the close companionship of forty years--companionship of struggle and +victory, of sad and sweet so strangely blent--was for ever at an end. Mrs. +Carlyle had been found dead in her carriage when driving round Hyde Park +on the afternoon of that day, her death (from heart-disease) being +accelerated by an accident to a favourite little dog. Carlyle felt as "one +who hath been stunned," hardly able to realise his loss. "They took me out +next day ... to wander in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and +anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation, 'My poor little +woman,' but no full gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come." On +the following Monday he set off with his brother for London. "Never for a +thousand years shall I forget that arrival hero of ours, my first +unwelcomed by her. She lay in her coffin, lovely in death. Pale death Hid +things not mine or ours had possession of our poor darling." On Wednesday +they returned, and on Thursday the 26th she was buried in the nave of the +old Abbey Kirk at Haddington, in the grave of her father The now desolate +old man, who had walked with her over many a stony road, paid the first of +his many regretful tributes in the epitaph inscribed over her tomb: in +which follows, after the name and date of birth:-- + +IN HER BRIGHT EXISTENCE SHE HAD MORE SORROWS THAN ARE COMMON, BUT ALSO +A SOFT INVINCIBILITY, A CAPACITY OF DISCERNMENT, AND A NOBLE LOYALTY OF +HEART WHICH ARE RARE. FOR 40 YEARS SHE WAS THE TRUE AND LOVING HELP-MATE +OF HER HUSBAND, AND BY ACT AND WORD UNWEARIEDLY FORWARDED HIM AS NONE +ELSE COULD IN ALL OF WORTHY THAT HE DID OR ATTEMPTED. SHE DIED AT +LONDON, 21ST APRIL 1866, SUDDENLY SNATCHED FROM HIM, AND THE LIGHT OF HIS +LIFE AS IF GONE OUT. + +[Footnote: For the most interesting, loyally sympathetic, and +characteristic account of Carlyle's journey north on this occasion, and of +the incidents which followed, we may refer to _New fragments_, by John +Tyndall, just published.] + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +DECADENCE + +[1866-1881] + +After this shock of bereavement Carlyle's days went by "on broken wing," +never brightening, slowly saddening to the close; but lit up at intervals +by flashes of the indomitable energy that, starting from no vantage, +had conquered a world of thought, and established in it, if not a new +dynasty, at least an intellectual throne. Expressions of sympathy came +to him from all directions, from the Queen herself downwards, and he +received them with the grateful acknowledgment that he had, after all, +been loved by his contemporaries. When the question arose as to his +future life, it seemed a natural arrangement that he and his brother +John, then a childless widower who had retired from his profession with a +competence, should take up house together. The experiment was made, but, +to the discredit of neither, it proved a failure. They were in some +respects too much alike. John would not surrender himself wholly to the +will or whims even of one whom he revered, and the attempt was by mutual +consent abandoned; but their affectionate correspondence lasted through +the period of their joint lives. Carlyle, being left to himself in his +"gaunt and lonesome home," after a short visit to Miss Bromley, an +intimate friend of his wife, at her residence in Kent, accepted the +invitation of the second Lady Ashburton to spend the winter in her house +at Mentone. There he arrived on Christmas Eve 1866, under the kind convoy +of Professor Tyndall, and remained breathing the balmy air and gazing on +the violet sea till March of the following year. During the interval he +occupied himself in writing his _Reminiscences,_ drawing pen-and-ink +pictures of the country, steeped in beauty fit to soothe any sorrow save +such as his, and taking notes of some of the passers-by. Of the greatest +celebrity then encountered, Mr. Gladstone, he writes in his journal, in a +tone intensified as time went on: "Talk copious, ingenious,... a man +of ardent faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons +shape.... Man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed +by the Prince, or many Princes, of the Air." Back in Chelsea, he was +harassed by heaps of letters, most of which, we are told, he answered, +and spent a large portion of his time and means in charities. + +Amid Carlyle's irreconcilable inconsistencies of theory, and sometimes +of conduct, he was through life consistent in practical benevolence. The +interest in the welfare of the working classes that in part inspired his +_Sartor, Chartism,_ and _Past and Present_ never failed him. He was +among the foremost in all national movements to relieve and solace their +estate. He was, further, with an amiable disregard of his own maxims, +over lenient towards the waifs and strays of humanity, in some instances +careless to inquire too closely into the causes of their misfortune or +the degree of their demerits. In his latter days this disposition grew +upon him: the gray of his own evening skies made him fuller of compassion +to all who lived in the shade. Sad himself, he mourned with those who +mourned; afflicted, he held out hands to all in affliction. Consequently +"the poor were always with him," writing, entreating, and personally +soliciting all sorts of alms, from advice and help to ready money. His +biographer informs us that he rarely gave an absolute refusal to any +of these various classes of beggars. He answered a letter which is a +manifest parody of his own surface misanthropy; he gave a guinea to a +ticket-of-leave-convict, pretending to be a decayed tradesman; and a +shilling to a blind man, whose dog took him over the crossing to a gin +shop. Froude remonstrated; "Poor fellow," was the answer, "I daresay he +is cold and thirsty." The memory of Wordsworth is less warmly cherished +among the dales of Westmoreland than that of Carlyle in the lanes of +Chelsea, where "his one expensive luxury was charity." + +His attitude on political questions, in which for ten years he still took +a more or less prominent part, represents him on his sterner side. The +first of these was the controversy about Governor Eyre, who, having +suppressed the Jamaica rebellion by the violent and, as alleged, cruel +use of martial law, and hung a quadroon preacher called Gordon--the man +whether honest or not being an undoubted incendiary--without any law at +all, was by the force of popular indignation dismissed in disgrace, and +then arraigned for mis-government and illegality. In the movement, which +resulted in the governor's recall and impeachment, there was doubtless +the usual amount of exaggeration--represented by the violent language +of one of Carlyle's minor biographers: "There were more innocent people +slain than at Jeffreys' Bloody Assize"; "The massacre of Glencoe was +nothing to it"; "Members of Christian Churches were flogged," etc. +etc.--but among its leaders there were so many men of mark and celebrity, +men like John S. Mill, T. Hughes, John Bright, Fawcett, Cairnes, Goldwin +Smith, Herbert Spencer, and Frederick Harrison, that it could not be set +aside as a mere unreasoning clamour. It was a hard test of Carlyle's +theory of strong government; and he stood to his colours. Years before, +on John Sterling suggesting that the negroes themselves should be +consulted as to making a permanent engagement with their masters, he had +said, "I never thought the rights of the negroes worth much discussing +in any form. Quashee will get himself made a slave again, and with +beneficent whip will be compelled to work." On this occasion he regarded +the black rebellion in the same light as the Sepoy revolt. He organised +and took the chair of a "Defence Committee," joined or backed by Ruskin, +Henry Kingsley, Tyndall, Sir R. Murchison, Sir T. Gladstone, and others. +"I never," says Mr. Froude, "knew Carlyle more anxious about anything." +He drew up a petition to Government and exerted himself heart and soul +for the "brave, gentle, chivalrous, and clear man," who when the ship was +on fire "had been called to account for having flung a bucket or two of +water into the hold beyond what was necessary." He had damaged some of +the cargo perhaps, but he had saved the ship, and deserved to be made +"dictator of Jamaica for the next twenty-five years," to govern after +the model of Dr. Francia in Paraguay. The committee failed to get +Eyre reinstalled or his pension restored; but the impeachment was +unsuccessful. + +The next great event was the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, by the +Tories, educated by Mr. Disraeli to this method of "dishing the Whigs," +by outbidding them in the scramble for votes. This instigated the famous +tract called _Shooting Niagara_, written in the spirit of the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_--Carlyle's final and unqualified denunciation of this +concession to Democracy and all its works. But the upper classes in +England seemed indifferent to the warning. "Niagara, or what you like," +the author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, "we will +at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when Church and State have +gone." A _mot_ emphatically of the decadence. + +Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions being a means of +bringing the Irish question within the range of practical politics. + + I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of + those Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house + had decided to expel and extirpate the human inhabitants, + which latter seemed to have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor + arsenic, and are trying to prevail by the method of love. + +Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland for text and Cromwell's +storm of Drogheda for example, or Otto von Bismarck, would have been, in +his view, in place at Dublin Castle. + +In the next great event of the century, the close of the greatest +European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which pleased Cato pleased +also the gods. Carlyle, especially in his later days, had a deepening +confidence in the Teutonic, a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He +regarded the contest between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, and +wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with exultation. When +a feeling spread in this country, naming itself sympathy for the +fallen,--really half that, the other half, as in the American war, being +jealousy of the victor,--and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a +decisive letter to the _Times_, November 11th 1870, tracing the sources +of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV., and ridiculing the +prevailing sentiment about the recaptured provinces of Lothringen and +Elsass. With a possible reference to Victor Hugo and his clients, he +remarks-- + + They believe that they are the "Christ of Nations."... I + wish they would inquire whether there might not be a + Cartouche of nations. Cartouche had many gallant + qualities--had many fine ladies begging locks of his hair + while the indispensable gibbet was preparing. Better he + should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, who has + him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part + of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and + try to become again a Chevalier Bayard. All Europe does + _not_ come to the rescue in gratitude for the heavenly + illumination it is getting from France: nor could all Europe + if it did prevent that awful Chancellor from having his own + way. Metz and the boundary fence, I reckon, will be + dreadfully hard to get out of that Chancellor's hands + again.... Considerable misconception as to Herr von Bismarck + is still prevalent in England. He, as I read him, is not a + person of Napoleonic ideas, but of ideas quite superior to + Napoleonic.... That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid + Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become + Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, + gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive + France, seems to me the hopefulest fact that has occurred in + my time. + +Carlyle seldom wrote with more force, or with more justice. Only, to be +complete, his paper should have ended with a warning. He has done more +than any other writer to perpetuate in England the memories of the great +thinkers and actors--Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Körner, Stein, Goethe,--who +taught their countrymen how to endure defeat and retrieve adversity. Who +will celebrate their yet undefined successors, who will train Germany +gracefully to bear the burden of prosperity? Two years later Carlyle +wrote or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to shake, his +historical sketch of the _Early Kings of Norway_, showing no diminution +of power either of thought or expression, his estimates of the three +Hakons and of the three Olafs being especially notable; and a paper +on _The Portraits of John Knox_, the prevailing dull gray of which is +relieved by a radiant vision of Mary Stuart. + +He was incited to another public protest, when, in May 1877, towards the +close of the Russo-Turkish war, he had got, or imagined himself to have +got, reliable information that Lord Beaconsfield, then Prime Minister, +having sent our fleet to the Dardanelles, was planning to seize Gallipoli +and throw England into the struggle. Carlyle never seems to have +contemplated the possibility of a Sclavo-Gallic alliance against the +forces of civilised order in Europe, and he chose to think of the Czars +as the representatives of an enlightened autocracy. We are here mainly +interested in the letter he wrote to the _Times_, as "his last public act +in this world,"--the phrase of Mr. Froude, who does not give the letter, +and unaccountably says it "was brief, not more than three or four lines." +It is as follows:-- + + Sir--A rumour everywhere prevails that our miraculous + Premier, in spite of the Queen's Proclamation of Neutrality, + intends, under cover of care for "British interests," to + send the English fleet to the Baltic, or do some other feat + which shall compel Russia to declare war against England. + Latterly the rumour has shifted from the Baltic and become + still more sinister, on the eastern side of the scene, where + a feat is contemplated that will force, not Russia only, + but all Europe, to declare war against us. This latter I + have come to know as an indisputable fact; in our present + affairs and outlooks surely a grave one. + + As to "British interests" there is none visible or + conceivable to me, except taking strict charge of our route + to India by Suez and Egypt, and for the rest, resolutely + steering altogether clear of any copartnery with the Turk in + regard to this or any other "British interest" whatever. It + should be felt by England as a real ignominy to be connected + with such a Turk at all. Nay, if we still had, as we ought + to have, a wish to save him from perdition and annihilation + in God's world, the one future for him that has any hope in + it is even now that of being conquered by the Russians, and + gradually schooled and drilled into peaceable attempt at + learning to be himself governed. The newspaper outcry + against Russia is no more respectable to me than the howling + of Bedlam, proceeding as it does from the deepest ignorance, + egoism, and paltry national jealousy. + + These things I write, not on hearsay, but on accurate + knowledge, and to all friends of their country will + recommend immediate attention to them while there is yet + time, lest in a few weeks the maddest and most criminal + thing that a British government could do, should be done + and all Europe kindle into flames of war.--I am, etc. + + T. CARLYLE. + 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, + _May 4th._ + +Meanwhile honours without stint were being rendered to the great author +and venerable sage. In 1868 he had by request a personal interview with +the Queen, and has left, in a letter, a graphic account of the interview +at the Deanery of Westminster. Great artists as Millais, Watts, and +Boehm vied with one another, in painting or sculpture, to preserve his +lineaments; prominent reviews to record their impression of his work, +and disciples to show their gratitude. One of these, Professor Masson +of Edinburgh, in memory of Carlyle's own tribute to Goethe, started a +subscription for a medal, presented on his eightieth birthday; but he +valued more a communication of the same date from Prince Bismarck. Count +Bernstoff from Berlin wrote him (1871) a semi-official letter of thanks +for the services he had conferred on Germany, and in 1874 he was +prevailed on to accept the Prussian "Ordre pour le mérite." In the same +year Mr. Disraeli proposed, in courteous oblivion of bygone hostilities, +to confer on him a pension and the "Order of the Grand Cross of Bath," an +emolument and distinction which Carlyle, with equal courtesy, declined. +To the Countess of Derby, whom he believed to be the originator of the +scheme, he (December 30th) expressed his sense of the generosity of the +Premier's letter: "It reveals to me, after all the hard things I have +said of him, a now and unexpected stratum of genial dignity and manliness +of character." To his brother John he wrote: "I do, however, truly admire +the magnanimity of Dizzy in regard to me. He is the only man I almost +never spoke of without contempt ... and yet see here he comes with a +pan of hot coals for my guilty head." That he was by no means gagged by +personal feeling or seduced in matters of policy is evident from the +above-quoted letter to the _Times_; but he liked Disraeli better than +he did his great rival; the one may have bewildered his followers, the +other, according to his critic's view, deceived himself--the lie, in +Platonic phrase, had got into the soul, till, to borrow an epigram, "he +made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice." "Carlyle," says +Mr. Froude, "did not regard Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who, +knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into +specious sentiments, but as the representative of the numerous cants of +the age ... differing from others in that the cant seemed true to him. +He in fact believed him to be one of those fatal figures created by +England's evil genius to work irreparable mischief." It must be admitted +that Carlyle's censures are so broadcast as to lose half their sting. +In uncontroversial writing, it is enough to note that his methods of +reforming the world and Mr. Gladstone's were as far as the poles asunder; +and the admirers of the latter may console themselves with the reflection +that the censor was, at the same time, talking with equal disdain of the +scientific discoverers of the age--conspicuously of Mr. Darwin, whom he +describes as "evolving man's soul from frog spawn," adding, "I have +no patience with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other +criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose _Adam Bede_ he pronounced +"simply dull," display a curious limitation or obtuseness of mind. + +One of the pleasantest features of his declining years is the ardour of +his attachment to the few staunch friends who helped to cheer and console +them. He had a sincere regard for Fitzjames Stephen, "an honest man with +heavy strokes"; for Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he said in effect, "Your +duty one day will be to take away that bauble and close the doors of +the House of Discord"; for Tyndall always; for Lecky, despite their +differences; for Moncure Conway, athwart the question of "nigger" +philanthropies; for Kingsley and Tennyson and Browning, the last of whom +was a frequent visitor till near the end. Froude he had bound to his soul +by hoops of steel; and a more faithful disciple and apostle, in intention +always, in practice in the main (despite the most perplexing errors of +judgment), no professed prophet ever had. But Carlyle's highest praise +is reserved for Ruskin, whom he regarded as no mere art critic, but as a +moral power worthy to receive and carry onward his own "cross of fire." +The relationship between the two great writers is unchequered by any +shade of patronage on the one hand, of jealousy or adulation on the +other. The elder recognised in the younger an intellect as keen, a spirit +as fearless as his own, who in the Eyre controversy had "plunged his +rapier to the hilt in the entrails of the Blatant Beast," _i.e._ Popular +Opinion. He admired all Ruskin's books; the _Stones of Venice,_ the most +solid structure of the group, he named "Sermons in Stones"; he resented +an attack on _Sesame and Lilies_ as if the book had been his own; and +passages of the _Queen of the Air_ went into his heart "like arrows." The +_Order of the Rose_ has attempted a practical embodiment of the review +contemplated by Carlyle, as a counteractive to the money making practice +and expediency-worships of the day. + +Meanwhile he had been putting his financial affairs in order. In 1867, +on return from Mentone, he had recorded his bequest of the revenues of +Graigenputtock for the endowment of three John Welsh bursaries in the +University of Edinburgh. In 1873 he made his will, leaving John Forster +and Froude his literary executors: a legacy of trust which, on the death +of the former, fell to the latter, to whose discretion, by various later +bequests, less and less limited, there was confided the choice--at +last almost made a duty--of editing and publishing the manuscripts and +journals of himself and his wife. + +Early in his seventy-third year (December 1867) Carlyle quotes, "Youth is +a garland of roses," adding, "I did not find it such. 'Age is a crown of +thorns.' Neither is this altogether true for me. If sadness and sorrow +tend to loosen us from life, they make the place of rest more desirable." +The talk of Socrates in the _Republic_, and the fine phrases in Cicero's +_De Senectute_, hardly touch on the great grief, apart from physical +infirmities, of old age--its increasing solitariness. After sixty, a man +may make disciples and converts, but few new friends, while the old ones +die daily; the "familiar faces" vanish in the night to which there is no +morning, and leave nothing in their stead. + +During these years Carlyle's former intimates were falling round him like +the leaves from an autumn tree, and the kind care of the few survivors, +the solicitous attention of his niece, nurse, and amanuensis, Mary +Aitken, yet left him desolate. Clough had died, and Thomas Erskine, and +John Forster, and Wilberforce, with whom he thought he agreed, and Mill, +his old champion and ally, with whom he so disagreed that he +almost maligned his memory--calling one of the most interesting of +autobiographies "the life of a logic-chopping machine." In March 1876 he +attended the funeral of Lady Augusta Stanley; in the following month his +brother Aleck died in Canada; and in 1878 his brother John at Dumfries. +He seemed destined to be left alone; his physical powers were waning. As +early as 1868 he and his last horse had their last ride together; later, +his right hand failed, and he had to write by dictation. In the gathering +gloom he began to look on death as a release from the shreds of life, and +to envy the old Roman mode of shuffling off the coil. His thoughts turned +more and more to Hamlet's question of the possible dreams hereafter, and +his longing for his lost Jeannie made him beat at the iron gates of the +"Undiscovered Country" with a yearning cry; but he could get no answer +from reason, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, least +of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven "by way of mesmeric and +spiritualistic trances." His question and answer are always-- + + Strength quite a stranger to me.... Life is verily a + weariness on those terms. Oftenest I feel willing to go, were + my time come. Sweet to rejoin, were it only in eternal sleep, + those that are away. That ... is now and then the whisper + of my worn-out heart, and a kind of solace to me. "But why + annihilation or eternal sleep?" I ask too. They and I are + alike in the will of the Highest. + +"When," says Mr. Froude, "he spoke of the future and its uncertainties, +he fell back invariably on the last words of his favourite hymn-- + + Wir heissen euch hoffen." + +His favourite quotations in those days were Macbeth's "To-morrow and +to-morrow and to-morrow"; Burns's line, "Had we never lo'ed sae +kindly,"--thinking of the tomb which he was wont to kiss in the gloamin' +in Haddington Church,--the lines from "The Tempest" ending, "our little +life is rounded with a sleep," and the dirge in "Cymbeline." He lived on +during the last years, save for his quiet walks with his biographer about +the banks of the Thames, like a ghost among ghosts, his physical life +slowly ebbing till, on February 4th 1881, it ebbed away. His remains +were, by his own desire, conveyed to Ecclefechan and laid under the +snow-clad soil of the rural churchyard, beside the dust of his kin. He +had objected to be buried, should the request be made (as it was by Dean +Stanley), in Westminster Abbey:[greek: andron gar epiphanon pasa gae +taphos.] + +Of no man whose life has been so laid bare to us is it more difficult to +estimate the character than that of Thomas Carlyle; regarding no one of +equal eminence, with the possible exception of Byron, has opinion been +so divided. After his death there was a carnival of applause from his +countrymen in all parts of the globe, from Canton to San Francisco. Their +hot zeal, only equalled by that of their revelries over the memory of +Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer +than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one +perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist": +"Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, +will be heard no more": the _Scotsman_ newspaper writes of him as +"probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the volcanic +glare of his _French Revolution_ all Epics, ancient and modern, grow pale +and shadowy,... his like is not now left in the world." More recently a +stalwart Aberdonian, on helping to put a bust into a monument, exclaims +in a strain of genuine ardour, "I knew Carlyle, and I aver to you that +his heart was as large and generous as his brain was powerful; that +he was essentially a most lovable man, and that there were depths of +tenderness, kindliness, benevolence, and most delicate courtesy in him, +with all his seeming ruggedness and sternness, such as I have found +throughout my life rarely in any human being." + +On the other side, a little later, after the publication of the +_Reminiscences_, _Blackwood_ denounced the "old man eloquent" as "a +blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were the only person who knew good +from bad. ... Every one and every thing dealt with in his _History_ is +treated in the tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The _World_ +remarks that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthumous +depreciation for a factitious fame; "but the game of venomous +recrimination was begun by himself.... There is little that is +extraordinary, still less that is heroic in his character. He had no +magnanimity about him ... he was full of littleness and weakness, of +shallow dogmatism and of blustering conceit." The _Quarterly_, +after alluding to Carlyle's style "as the eccentric expression of +eccentricity," denounces his choice of "heroes" as reckless of morality. +According to the same authority, he "was not a deep thinker, but he was a +great word-painter ... he has the inspiration as well as the contortions +of the Sibyl, the strength as well as the nodosities of the oak. ... In +the _French Revolution_ he rarely condescends to plain narrative ... it +resembles a drama at the Porte St. Martin, in so many acts and tableaux. +... The raisers of busts and statues in his honour are winging and +pointing new arrows aimed at the reputation of their most distinguished +contemporaries, and doing their best to perpetuate a baneful influence." +_Fraser_, no longer edited by Mr. Froude, swells the chorus of dissent: +"Money, for which he cared little, only came in quantity after the death +of his wife, when everything became indifferent to an old and life-weary +man. Who would be great at such a price? Who would buy so much misery +with so much labour? Most men like their work. In his Carlyle seems to +have found the curse imposed upon Adam.... He cultivated contempt of the +kindly race of men." + +Ample texts for these and similar censures are to be found in the pages +of Mr. Froude, and he has been accused by Carlyle's devotees of having +supplied this material of malice prepense. No accusation was over more +ridiculously unjust. To the mind of every impartial reader, Froude +appears as one of the loyallest if one of the most infatuated of friends. +Living towards the close in almost daily communion with his master, and +in inevitable contact with his numerous frailties, he seems to have +revered him with a love that passeth understanding, and attributed to him +in good faith, as Dryden did in jest to the objects of his mock heroics, +every mental as well as every moral power, _e.g.,_ "Had Carlyle turned +his mind to it he would have been a great philologer." "A great +diplomatist was lost in Carlyle." "He would have done better as a man of +action than a man of words." By kicking the other diplomatists into the +sea, as he threatened to do with the urchins of Kirkcaldy! Froude's +panegyrics are in style and tone worthy of that put into the mouth of +Pericles by Thucydides, with which the modern biographer closes his +only too faithful record. But his claims for his hero--amounting to the +assertions that he was never seriously wrong; that he was as good as he +was great; that "in the weightier matters of the law his life had been +without speck or flaw"; that "such faults as he had were but as the +vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the +man"; that he never, in their intercourse, uttered a "trivial word, nor +one which he had better have left unuttered"--these claims will never be +honoured, for they are refuted in every third page after that on which +they appear:--_e.g._ in the Biography, vol. iv. p. 258, we are told that +Carlyle's "knowledge was not in points or lines but complete and solid": +facing the remark we read, "He liked _ill_ men like Humboldt, Laplace, +or the author of the _Vestiges_. He refused Darwin's transmutation of +species as unproved: he fought against it, though I could see he dreaded +that it might turn out true." The statement that "he always spoke +respectfully of Macaulay" is soon followed by criticisms that make us +exclaim, "Save us from such respect." The extraordinary assertion that +Carlyle was "always just in speaking of living men" is safeguarded by the +quotation of large utterances of injustice and contempt for Coleridge, +Byron, Shelley, Keats, Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and +disparaging patronage of Scott, of Jeffrey, of Mazzini, and of Mill. The +dog-like fidelity of Boswell and Eckermann was fitting to their attitude +and capacity; but the spectacle of one great writer surrendering himself +to another is a new testimony to the glamour of conversational genius. + +[Footnote: This patronage of men, some quite, others nearly on his own +level, whom he delights in calling "small," "thin," and "poor," as if he +were the only big, fat, and rich, is more offensive than spurts of merely +dyspeptic abuse. As regards the libels on Lamb, Dr. Ireland has +endeavoured to establish that they were written in ignorance of the noble +tragedy of "Elia's" life; but this contention cannot be made good as +regards the later attacks.] + +Carlyle was a great man, but a great man spoiled, that is, largely +soured. He was never a Timon; but, while at best a Stoic, he was at worst +a Cynic, emulous though disdainful, trying all men by his own standard, +and intolerant of a rival on the throne. To this result there contributed +the bleak though bracing environment of his early years, amid kindred +more noted for strength than for amenity, whom he loved, trusted, and +revered, but from whose grim creed, formally at least, he had to +tear himself with violent wrenches apart; his purgatory among the +border-ruffians of Annan school; his teaching drudgeries; his hermit +college days; ten years' struggle for a meagre competence; a lifelong +groaning under the Nessus shirt of the irritable yet stubborn +constitution to which genius is often heir; and above all his unusually +late recognition. There is a good deal of natural bitterness in reference +to the long refusal by the publishers of his first original work--an +idyll like Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_, and our finest prose poem in +philosophy. "Popularity," says Emerson, "is for dolls"; but it remains +to find the preacher, prophet, or poet wholly impervious to unjust +criticism. Neglect which crushes dwarfs only exasperates giants, but to +the latter also there is great harm done. Opposition affected Carlyle as +it affected Milton, it made him defiant, at times even fierce, to those +beyond his own inner circle. When he triumphed, he accepted his success +without a boast, but not without reproaches for the past. He was crowned; +but his coronation came too late, and the death of his wife paralysed his +later years. + +Let those who from the Clyde to the Isis, from the Dee to the Straits, +make it their pastime to sneer at living worth, compare Ben Jonson's +lines, + + Your praise and dispraise are to me alike, + One does not stroke me, nor the other strike, + +with Samuel Johnson's, "It has been delayed till most of those whom I +wished to please are sunk into the grave, and success and failure are +empty sounds," and then take to heart the following:-- + + The "recent return of popularity greater than ever," which + I hear of, seems due alone to that late Edinburgh affair; + especially to the Edinburgh "Address," and affords new proof + of the singularly dark and feeble condition of "public + judgment" at this time. No idea, or shadow of an idea, is in + that Address but what had been set forth by me tens of times + before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism + receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to + buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done + with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me + £10,000 a year and bray unanimously their hosannahs + heaven-high for the rest of my life, who now would there be + to get the smallest joy or profit from it? To me I feel as + if it would be a silent sorrow rather, and would bring me + painful retrospections, nothing else. + +We require no open-sesame, no clumsy confidence from attaches flaunting +their intimacy, to assure us that there were "depths of tenderness" in +Carlyle. His susceptibility to the softer influences of nature, of family +life, of his few chosen friends, is apparent in almost every page of his +biography, above all in the _Reminiscences_, those supreme records of +regret, remorse, and the inspiration of bereavement. There is no surge of +sorrow in our literature like that which is perpetually tossed up in +the second chapter of the second volume, with the never-to-be-forgotten +refrain-- + + Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait + not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, + think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death + sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of + the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and + beautiful, when it is too late! + +Were we asked to bring together the three most pathetic sentences in our +tongue since Lear asked the question, "And have his daughters brought him +to this pass?" we should select Swift's comment on the lock of Stella, +"Only a woman's hair"; the cry of Tennyson's Rizpah, "The bones had moved +in my side"; and Carlyle's wail, "Oh that I had you yet but for five +minutes beside me, to tell you all!" But in answer we hear only the +flapping of the folds of Isis, "strepitumque Acherontis avari." + + All of sunshine that remained in my life went out in that + sudden moment. All of strength too often seems to have + gone.... Were it permitted, I would pray, but to whom? I can + well understand the invocation of saints. One's prayer now + has to be voiceless, done with the heart still, but also + with the hands still more.... Her birthday. She not here--I + cannot keep it for her now, and send a gift to poor old + Betty, who next to myself remembers her in life-long love + and sacred sorrow. This is all I can do.... Time was to + bring relief, said everybody; but Time has not to any + extent, nor, in truth, did I much wish him + + Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua, + Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae. + +Carlyle's pathos, far from being confined to his own calamity, was ready +to awake at every touch. "I was walking with him," writes Froude, "one +Sunday afternoon in Battersea Park. In the open circle among the trees +was a blind man and his daughter, she singing hymns, he accompanying her +on some instrument. We stood listening. She sang Faber's 'Pilgrims of the +Night.' The words were trivial, but the air, though simple, had something +weird and unearthly about it. 'Take me away,' he said, after a few +minutes, 'I shall cry if I stay longer.'" + +The melancholy, "often as of deep misery frozen torpid," that runs +through his writing, that makes him forecast death in life and paint the +springs of nature in winter hue, the "hoarse sea," the "bleared skies," +the sunsets "beautiful and brief and wae," compels our compassion in a +manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne, and De Quincey, +and other colour dramatists, because we feel it is as genuine as the +melancholy of Burns. Both had the relief of humour, but Burns only of the +two was capable of gaiety. "Look up there," said Leigh Hunt, pointing to +the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony that sings with infinite +voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man." "Eh, it's a sair +sicht," was the reply. + +We have referred to a few out of a hundred instances of Carlyle's +practical benevolence. To all deserving persons in misfortune he was a +good Samaritan, and like all benefactors the dupe of some undeserving. +Charity may be, like maternal affection, a form of self-indulgence, but +it is so only to kind-hearted men. In all that relates to money Carlyle's +career is exemplary. He had too much common sense to affect to despise +it, and was restive when he was underpaid; he knew that the labourer was +worthy of his hire. But, after hacking for Brewster he cannot be said to +have ever worked for wages, his concern was rather with the quality of +his work, and, regardless of results, he always did his best. A more +unworldly man never lived; from his first savings he paid ample tributes +to filial piety and fraternal kindness, and to the end of his life +retained the simple habits in which he had been trained. He hated waste +of all kinds, save in words, and carried his home frugalities even to +excess. In writing to James Aitken, engaged to his sister, "the Craw," he +says, "remember in marriage you have undertaken to do to others as you +would wish they should do to you." But this rede he did not reck. + +"Carlyle," writes Longfellow, "was one of those men who sacrificed their +happiness to their work"; the misfortune is that the sacrifice did not +stop with himself. He seemed made to live with no one but himself. +Alternately courteous and cross-grained, all his dramatic power went into +his creations; he could not put himself into the place of those near him. +Essentially perhaps the bravest man of his age, he would not move an inch +for threat or flattery; centered in rectitude, conscience never made +him a coward. He bore great calamities with the serenity of a Marcus +Aurelius: his reception of the loss of his first volume of the _French +Revolution_ was worthy of Sidney or of Newton: his letters, when the +successive deaths of almost all that were dearest left him desolate, are +among the noblest, the most resigned, the most pathetic in biography. +Yet, says Mr. Froude, in a judgment which every careful reader must +endorse: "Of all men I have ever seen Carlyle was the least patient of +the common woes of humanity." "A positive Christian," says Mrs. Carlyle, +"in bearing others' pain, he was a roaring Thor when himself pricked by +a pin," and his biographer corroborates this: "If matters went well with +himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any +one else; and, on the other hand, if he were uncomfortable he required +all the world to be uncomfortable along with him." He did his work with +more than the tenacity of a Prescott or a Fawcett, but no man ever made +more noise over it than this apostle of silence. "Sins of passion he +could forgive, but those of insincerity never." Carlyle has no tinge of +insincerity; his writing, his conversation, his life, are absolutely, +dangerously, transparent. His utter genuineness was in the long run one +of the sources of his success. He always, if we allow for a habit of +rhetorical exaggeration, felt what he made others feel. + +Sullen moods, and "words at random sent," those judging him from a +distance can easily condone; the errors of a hot head are pardonable to +one who, in his calmer hours, was ready to confess them. "Your temptation +and mine," he writes to his brother Alexander, "is a tendency to +imperiousness and indignant self-help; and, if no wise theoretical, +yet, practical forgetfulness and tyrannical contempt of other men." His +nicknaming mania was the inheritance of a family failing, always fostered +by the mocking-bird at his side. Humour, doubtless, ought to discount +many of his criticisms. Dean Stanley, in his funeral sermon, charitably +says, that in pronouncing the population of England to be "thirty +millions, mostly fools," Carlyle merely meant that "few are chosen and +strait is the gate," generously adding--"There was that in him, in spite +of his contemptuous descriptions of the people, which endeared him to +those who knew him best. The idols of their market-place he trampled +under foot, but their joys and sorrows, their cares and hopes, were to +him revered things." Another critic pleads for his discontent that it had +in it a noble side, like that of Faust, and that his harsh judgments of +eminent men were based on the belief that they had allowed meaner to +triumph over higher impulses, or influences of society to injure their +moral fibre. This plea, however, fails to cover the whole case. Carlyle's +ignorance in treating men who moved in spheres apart from his own, as the +leaders of science, definite theological enlightenment, or even poetry +and arts, was an intellectual rather than a moral flaw; but in the +implied assertion, "what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to +regret the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous powers, +which, beginning with his student days, possessed him to the last. The +fame of Newton, Leibnitz, Gibbon, whose works he came to regard as the +spoon-meat of his "rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his +or of any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot career, as a +"rose-water imbecility," or maligned Mill's intrepid thought as that of a +mere machine, he was astray on more delicate ground, and alienated some +of his truest friends. Among the many curses of our nineteenth-century +literature denounced by its leading Censor, the worst, the want of +loyalty among literary men, he fails to denounce because he largely +shares in it. "No sadder proof," he declares, "can be given by a man of +his own littleness than disbelief in great men," and no one has done more +to retrieve from misconception the memories of heroes of the past; +but rarely does either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a good word for any +considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, +more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from _Sartor,_ of which +he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his +self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his +enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger +Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson +would he grant the privilege to hold his own. _Per contra,_ he +overestimated those who were content to be his echoes. + +Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he used +and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who had preceded him in +his lines of historical investigation, as if they had been poachers on +his premises, _e.g._ Heath, the royalist writer of the Commonwealth +time, is "carrion Heath": Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is "my +reverend imbecile friend": his predecessors in _Friedrich,_ as Schlosser, +Preuss, Ranke, Förster, Vehse, are "dark chaotic dullards whose books +are mere blotches of printed stupor, tumbled mountains of marine stores +"--criticism valueless even when it raises the laughter due to a +pantomime. Carlyle assailed three sets of people:-- + +1. Real humbugs, or those who had behaved, or whom he believed to have +behaved, badly to him. + +2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could not understand--as +Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and the leaders of Physics and +Metaphysics. + +3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him an unrestricted +homage or an implicit following, as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc. + +The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his strictures been +always just,--so winged with humorous epigram,--they would have blasted a +score of reputations: as it is they have only served to mar his own. He +was a typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the *_oistros_ +of their ambitious competition and restless push, wanting in repose, +never like + + a gentleman at wise + With moral breadth of tomperament, + +too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call this man as +good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast +between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is +possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others +of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when +he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a +rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if +not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard at +Ecclefechan. + +Truth, in the sense of saying what he thought, was one of his ruling +passions. To one of his brothers on the birth of a daughter, he writes, +"Train her to this, as the cornerstone of all morality, to stand by the +truth, to abhor a lie as she does hell-fire." The "gates of hell" is the +phrase of Achilles; but Carlyle has no real point of contact with the +Greek love of abstract truth. He objects that "Socrates is terribly at +ease in Zion": he liked no one to be at ease anywhere. He is angry with +Walter Scott because he hunted with his friends over the breezy heath +instead of mooning alone over twilight moors. Read Scott's _Memoirs_ in +the morning, the _Reminiscences_ at night, and dispute if you like about +the greater genius, but never about the healthier, better, and larger +man. + +Hebraism, says Matthew Arnold, is the spirit which obeys the mandate, +"walk by your light"; Hellenism the spirit which remembers the other, +"have a care your light be not darkness." The former prefers doing to +thinking, the latter is bent on finding the truth it loves. Carlyle is +a Hebraist unrelieved and unretrieved by the Hellene. A man of +inconsistencies, egotisms, Alpine grandeurs and crevasses, let us take +from him what the gods or protoplasms have allowed. His way of life, +duly admired for its stern temperance, its rigidity of noble aim--eighty +years spent in contempt of favour, plaudit, or reward,--left him austere +to frailty other than his own, and wrapt him in the repellent isolation +which is the wrong side of uncompromising dignity. He was too great to +be, in the common sense, conceited. All his consciousness of power left +him with the feeling of Newton, "I am a child gathering shells on the +shore": but what sense he had of fallibility arose from his glimpse of +the infinite sea, never from any suspicion that, in any circumstances, he +might be wrong and another mortal right: Shelley's lines on Byron-- + + The sense that he was greater than his kind + Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind + By gazing on its own exceeding light. + +fit him, like Ruskin's verdict, "What can you say of Carlyle but that he +was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning?" which withers while +it immortalises. + +[Footnote: In the _Times_ of February 7th 1881, there appeared an +interesting account of Carlyle's daily routine. "No book hack could have +surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and late +in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties. +At ten o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he +took up his pen and laboured hard until three o'clock. Nothing, not even +the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then +came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends.... In the evening he +read and prepared for the work of the morrow."] + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN + +Carlyle was so essentially a Preacher that the choice of a profession +made for him by his parents was in some measure justified; but he was +also a keen Critic, unamenable to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of +the revolutionary spirit of the age, even while protesting against its +extremes: above all, he was a literary Artist. Various opinions will +continue to be held as to the value of his sermons; the excellence of his +best workmanship is universally acknowledged. He was endowed with few of +the qualities which secure a quick success--fluency, finish of style, +the art of giving graceful utterance to current thought; he had in +full measure the stronger if slower powers--sound knowledge, infinite +industry, and the sympathetic insight of penetrative imagination--that +ultimately hold the fastnesses of fame. His habit of startling his +hearers, which for a time restricted, at a later date widened their +circle. There is much, sometimes even tiresome, repetition in Carlyle's +work; the range of his ideas is limited, he plays on a few strings, with +wonderfully versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually +confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But, +after the perfunctory work for Brewster he wrote nothing wholly +commonplace; occasionally paradoxical to the verge of absurdity, he is +never dull. + +Setting aside his TRANSLATIONS, always in prose,--often in +verse,--masterpieces of their kind, he made his first mark in CRITICISM, +which may be regarded as a higher kind of translation: the great value of +his work in this direction is due to his so regarding it. Most criticism +has for its aim to show off the critic; good criticism interprets the +author. Fifty years ago, in allusion to methods of reviewing, not even +now wholly obsolete, Carlyle wrote:-- + + The first and most convenient is for the reviewer to perch + himself resolutely, as it were, on the shoulder of his + author, and therefrom to show as if he commanded him and + looked down upon him by natural superiority of stature. + Whatsoever the great man says or does the little man shall + treat with an air of knowingness and light condescending + mockery, professing with much covert sarcasm that this or + that is beyond _his_ comprehension, and cunningly + asking his readers if _they_ comprehend it. + +There is here perhaps some "covert sarcasm" directed against +contemporaries who forgot that their mission was to pronounce on the +merits of the books reviewed, and not to patronise their authors; it may +be set beside the objection to Jeffrey's fashion of saying, "I like this; +I do not like that," without giving the reason why. But in this instance +the writer did reck his own rede. The temptation of a smart critic is to +seek or select legitimate or illegitimate objects of attack; and that +Carlyle was well armed with the shafts of ridicule is apparent in his +essays as in his histories; superabundantly so in his letters and +conversation. His examination of the _German Playwrights_, of _Taylor's +German Literature_, and his inimitable sketch of Herr Döring, the hapless +biographer of Richter, are as amusing as is Macaulay's _coup de grâce_ to +Robert Montgomery. But the graver critic would have us take to heart +these sentences of his essay on Voltaire:-- + + Far be it from us to say that solemnity is an essential of + greatness; that no great man can have other than a rigid + vinegar aspect of countenance, never to be thawed or warmed + by billows of mirth. There are things in this world to be + laughed at as well as things to be admired. Nevertheless, + contempt is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one if + we habitually live in it. The faculty of love, of admiration, + is to be regarded as a sign and the measure of high souls; + unwisely directed, it leads to many evils; but without it, + there cannot be any good. Ridicule, on the other hand, is + the smallest of all faculties that other men are at pains to + repay with any esteem.... Its nourishment and essence is + denial, which hovers only on the surface, while knowledge + dwells far below,... it cherishes nothing but our vanity, + which may in general be left safely enough to shift for + itself. + +[Footnote: As an estimate of Voltaire this brilliant essay is inadequate. +Carlyle's maxim, we want to be told "not what is _not_ true but what _is_ +true," prevented him from appreciating the great work of Encyclopaedists.] + +We may compare with this one of the writer's numerous warnings to young +men taking to literature, as to drinking, in despair of anything better +to do, ending with the exhortation, "Witty above all things, oh, be not +witty"; or turn to the passage in the review of Sir Walter Scott:-- + + Is it with ease or not with ease that a man shall do his + best in any shape; above all, in this shape justly named of + soul's travail, working in the deep places of thought?... Not + so, now nor at any time.... Virgil and Tacitus, were they + ready writers? The whole _Prophecies of Isaiah_ are not + equal in extent to this cobweb of a Review article. + Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity; but not till + he had thought with intensity,... no easy writer he. Neither + was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with case. + Goethe tells us he "had nothing sent to him in his sleep," no + page of his but he knew well how it came there. + Schiller--"konnte nie fertig werden"--never could get done. + Dante sees himself "growing lean" over his _Divine Comedy_; + in stern solitary death wrestle with it, to prevail over it + and do it, if his uttermost faculty may; hence too it is done + and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures for + evermore among men. No; creation, one would think, cannot be + easy; your Jove has severe pains and fire flames in the head, + out of which an armed Pallas is struggling! As for + manufacture, that is a different matter.... Write by steam + if thou canst contrive it and sell it, but hide it like + virtue. + +In these and frequent similar passages lies the secret of Carlyle's slow +recognition, long struggle, and ultimate success; also of his occasional +critical intolerance. Commander-in-chief of the "red artillery," he sets +too little store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of the +light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but contempt for the +banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and +salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with +the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he +deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt to +leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can +only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of +ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every +ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher. +Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been +inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no +amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in +"the chamber of little ease," Carlyle travestied Goethe's "worship of +sorrow" till it became a pride in pain. He forgot that rude energy +requires restraint. Hercules Furens and Orlando Furioso did more than cut +down trees; they tore them up; but to no useful end. His power is often +almost Miltonic; it is never Shakespearian; and his insistent earnestness +would run the risk of fatiguing us were it not redeemed by his +humour. But he errs on the better side; and his example is a salutary +counteractive in an age when the dust of so many skirmishers obscures the +air, and laughter is too readily accepted as the test of truth, his stern +conception of literature accounts for his exaltations of the ideal, and +denunciations of the actual, profession of letters in passages which, +from his habit of emphasising opposite sides of truth, instead of +striking a balance, appear almost side by side in contradiction. The +following condenses the ideal:-- + + If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the + high and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have + guidance, freedom, immortality? These two in all degrees + I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind + blow whither it listeth. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, + indignation, despair itself--all these like hell-hounds lie + beleaguering the souls of the poor day worker as of every + man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, + and all these are stifled--all these shrink murmuring far + off in their caves. + +Against this we have to set innumerable tirades on the crime of worthless +writing, _e.g._-- + + No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag + his pen, without saying something; he knows not what + mischief he does, past computation, scattering words without + meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease. + For thistle-down flies abroad on all winds and airs of + wind.... Ship-loads of fashionable novels, sentimental + rhymes, tragedies, farces ... tales by flood and field are + swallowed monthly into the bottomless pool; still does the + press toil,... and still in torrents rushes on the great + army of publications to their final home; and still oblivion, + like the grave, cries give! give! How is it that of all + these countless multitudes no one can ... produce ought that + shall endure longer than "snowflake on the river? Because + they are foam, because there is no reality in them. . . ." + Not by printing ink alone does man live. Literature, as + followed at present, is but a species of brewing or cooking, + where the cooks use poison and vend it by telling + innumerable lies. + +These passages owe their interest to the attestation of their sincerity +by the writer's own practice. "Do not," he counsels one of his unknown +correspondents, "take up a subject because it is singular and will get +you credit, but because you _love_ it;" and he himself acted on the +rule. Nothing more impresses the student of Carlyle's works than his +_thoroughness._ He never took a task in hand without the determination to +perform it to the utmost of his ability; consequently when he satisfied +himself that he was master of his subject he satisfied his readers; but +this mastery was only attained, as it is only attainable, by the most +rigorous research. He seems to have written down his results with +considerable fluency: the molten ore flowed freely forth, but the process +of smelting was arduous. The most painful part of literary work is not +the actual composition, but the accumulation of details, the wearisome +compilation of facts, weighing of previous criticisms, the sifting of the +grains of wheat from the bushels of chaff. This part of his task Carlyle +performed with an admirable conscientiousness. His numerous letters +applying for out-of-the-way books to buy or borrow, for every pamphlet +throwing light on his subject, bear testimony to the careful exactitude +which rarely permitted him to leave any record unread or any worthy +opinion untested about any event of which or any person of whom he +undertook to write. From Templand (1833) he applies for seven volumes of +Beaumarchais, three of Bassompierre, the Memoirs of Abbé Georgel, and +every attainable account of Cagliostro and the Countess de la Motte, to +fuse into _The Diamond Necklace._ To write the essay on _Werner_ and +the _German Playwrights_ he swam through seas of trash. He digested the +whole of _Diderot_ for one review article. He seems to have read through +_Jean Paul Richter,_ a feat to accomplish which Germans require a +special dictionary. When engaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole +shoal of obscure seventeenth-century papers from Yarmouth, the remnant of +a yet larger heap, "read hundredweights of dreary books," and endured +"a hundred Museum headaches." In grappling with _Friedrich_ he waded +through so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping +condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes and places of +which he meant to speak, from St. Ives to Prague, and explored the +battlefields. Work done after this fashion seldom brings a swift return; +but if it is utilised and made vivid by literary genius it has a claim to +permanence. Bating a few instances where his sense of proportion is +defective, or his eccentricity is in excess, Carlyle puts his ample +material to artistic use; seldom making ostentation of detail, but +skilfully concentrating, so that we read easily and readily recall what he +has written. Almost everything he has done has made a mark: his best work +in criticism is final, it does not require to be done again. He interests +us in the fortunes of his leading characters: _first_, because he feels +with them; _secondly_, because he knows how to distinguish the essence +from the accidents of their lives, what to forget and what to remember, +where to begin and where to stop. Hence, not only his set biographies, as +of Schiller and of Sterling, but the shorter notices in his Essays, are +intrinsically more complete and throw more real light on character than +whole volumes of ordinary memoirs. + +With the limitations above referred to, and in view of his antecedents, +the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation is wonderfully wide. Often +perversely unfair to the majority of his English contemporaries, the +scales seem to fall from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of +other nations. The charity expressed in the saying that we should judge +men, not by the number of their faults, but by the amount of their +deflection from the circle, great or small, that bounds their being, +enables him often to do justice to those most widely differing in creed, +sentiment, and lines of activity from one another and from himself. +When treating congenial themes he errs by overestimate rather than by +depreciation: among the qualities of his early work, which afterwards +suffered some eclipse in the growth of other powers, is its flexibility. +It was natural for Carlyle, his successor in genius in the Scotch +lowlands, to give an account of Robert Burns which throws all previous +criticism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong affinities +to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his so-called heroes: but he +is fair to the characters, if not always to the work, of Voltaire and +Diderot, slurs over or makes humorous the escapades of Mirabeau, is +undeterred by the mysticism of Novalis, and in the fervour of his worship +fails to see the gulf between himself and Goethe. + +Carlyle's ESSAYS mark an epoch, _i.e._ the beginning of a new era, in +the history of British criticism. The able and vigorous writers who +contributed to the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly +Reviews_ successfully applied their taste and judgment to such works as +fell within their sphere, and could be fairly tested by their canons; but +they passed an alien act on everything that lay beyond the range of their +insular view. In dealing with the efforts of a nation whose literature, +the most recent in Europe save that of Russia, had only begun to command +recognition, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous. If +the old formulas have been theoretically dismissed, and a conscientious +critic now endeavours to place himself in the position of his author, +the change is largely due to the influence of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._ +Previous to their appearance, the literature of Germany, to which half +of these papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir Walter +Scott's translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen,_ De Quincey's travesties, +and Taylor's renderings from Lessing) a sealed book to English readers, +save those who were willing to breathe in an atmosphere of Coleridgean +mist. Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because he was +the first fully to apprehend its meaning. The _Life of Schiller,_ which +the author himself depreciated, remains one of the best of comparatively +short biographies, it abounds in admirable passages (conspicuously the +contrast between the elder and the younger of the Dioscuri at Weimar) and +has the advantage to some readers of being written in classical English +prose. + +To the essays relating to Germany, which we may accept as the _disjecta +membra_ of the author's unpublished History, there is little to add. +In these volumes we have the best English account of the Nibelungen +Lied--the most graphic, and in the main most just analyses of the genius +of Heyne, Rchter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, who is +recorded to have said, "Carlyle is almost more at home in our literature +than ourselves." With the Germans he is on his chosen ground; but the +range of his sympathies is most apparent in the portrait gallery of +eighteenth-century Frenchmen that forms, as it were, a proscenium to his +first great History. Among other papers in the same collection the most +prominent are the _Signs of the Times_ and _Characteristics,_ in which +he first distinctly broaches some of his peculiar views on political +philosophy and life. + +The scope and some of the limitations of Carlyle's critical power are +exhibited in his second Series of Lectures, delivered in 1838, when (_æt_. +43) he had reached the maturity of his powers. The first three of these +lectures, treating of Ancient History and Literature, bring into strong +relief the speaker's inadequate view of Greek thought and civilisation:-- + + Greek transactions had never anything alive, no result for + us, they were dead entirely ... all left is a few ruined + towers, masses of stone and broken statuary.... The writings + of Socrates are made up of a few wire-drawn notions about + virtue; there is no conclusion, no word of life in him. + +[Footnote: Though a mere reproduction of the notes of Mr. Chisholm Anstey, +this posthumous publication is justified by its interest and obvious +authenticity. The appearance in a prominent periodical (while these sheets +are passing through the press) of _Wotton Reinfred_ is more open to +question. This fragment of a romance, partly based on the plan of _Wilhelm +Meister_, with shadowy love episodes recalling the manner of the "Minerva +Press," can add nothing to Carlyle's reputation.] + + +These and similar dogmatic utterances are comments of the Hebrew on the +Hellene. To the Romans, "the men of antiquity," he is more just, dwelling +on their agriculture and road-making as their "greatest work written +on the planet;" but the only Latin author he thoroughly appreciates is +Tacitus, "a Colossus on edge of dark night." Then follows an exaltation +of the Middle Ages, in which "we see belief getting the victory over +unbelief," in the strain of Newman's _Grammar of Assent_. On the +surrender of Henry to Hildebrand at Canossa his approving comment is, +"the clay that is about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its +rights; the danger is always the other way, that the spiritual part of +man will become overlaid with the bodily part." In the later struggle +between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens his sympathy is with Gregory and +Innocent. In the same vein is his praise of Peter the Hermit, whose motto +was not the "action, action" of Demosthenes, but, "belief, belief." In +the brief space of those suggestive though unequal discourses the speaker +allows awkward proximity to some of the self-contradictions which, even +when scattered farther apart, perplex his readers and render it impossible +to credit his philosophy with more than a few strains of consistent +thought. + + In one page "the judgments of the heart are of more value than those of + the head." In the next "morals in a man are the counterpart of the + intellect that is in him." The Middle Ages were "a healthy age," and + therefore there was next to no Literature. "The strong warrior disdained + to write." "Actions will be preserved when all writers are forgotten." + Two days later, apropos of Dante, he says, "The great thing which any + nation can do is to produce great men.... When the Vatican shall have + crumbled to dust, and St. Peter's and Strassburg Minster be no more; for + thousands of years to come Catholicism will survive in this sublime + relic of antiquity--the _Divina Commedia."_ + + [Footnote: It has been suggested that Carlyle may have been in this + instance a student of Vauvenargues, who in the early years of the much- + maligned eighteenth century wrote "Les graudes pensées viennent du + coeur."] + +Passing to Spain, Carlyle salutes Cervantes and the Cid,--calling Don +Quixote the "poetry of comedy," "the age of gold in self-mockery,"--pays +a more reserved tribute to Calderon, ventures on the assertion that +Cortes was "as great as Alexander," and gives a sketch, so graphic that +it might serve as a text for Motley's great work, of the way in which +the decayed Iberian chivalry, rotten through with the Inquisition, broke +itself on the Dutch dykes. After a brief outline of the rise of the +German power, which had three avatars--the overwhelming of Rome, the +Swiss resistance to Austria, and the Reformation--we have a rough +estimate of some of the Reformers. Luther is exalted even over Knox; +Erasmus is depreciated, while Calvin and Melanchthon are passed by. + +The chapter on the Saxons, in which the writer's love of the sea appears +in picturesque reference to the old rover kings, is followed by unusually +commonplace remarks on earlier English literature, interspersed with some +of Carlyle's refrains. + + The mind is one, and consists not of bundles of faculties at + all ... the same features appear in painting, singing, + fighting ... when I hear of the distinction between the poet + and the thinker, I really see no difference at all.... Bacon + sees, Shakespeare sees through,... Milton is altogether + sectarian--a Presbyterian one might say--he got his + knowledge out of Knox.... Eve is a cold statue. + +Coming to the well-belaboured eighteenth century--when much was done of +which the nineteenth talks, and massive books were written that we are +content to criticise--we have the inevitable denunciations of scepticism, +materialism, argumentation, logic; the quotation, (referred to a motto +"in the Swiss gardens"), "Speech is silvern, silence is golden," and a +loud assertion that all great things are silent. The age is commended +for Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's spinning jenny, and Whitfield's +preaching, but its policy and theories are alike belittled. The summaries +of the leading writers are interesting, some curious, and a few absurd. +On the threshold of the age Dryden is noted "as a great poet born in the +worst of times": Addison as "an instance of one formal man doing great +things": Swift is pronounced "by far the greatest man of that time, not +unfeeling," who "carried sarcasm to an epic pitch": Pope, we are told, +had "one of the finest heads ever known." Sterne is handled with a +tenderness that contrasts with the death sentence pronounced on him by +Thackeray, "much is forgiven him because he loved much,... a good simple +being after all." Johnson, the "much enduring," is treated as in the +_Heroes_ and the Essay. Hume, with "a far duller kind of sense," is +commended for "noble perseverance and Stoic endurance of failure; but his +eye was not open to faith," etc. On which follows a stupendous criticism +of Gibbon, whom Carlyle, returning to his earlier and juster view, ended +by admiring. + + With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more + futile account of human things than he has done of the + _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. + +The sketch of the Pre-Revolution period is slight, and marked by a +somewhat shallow reference to Rousseau. The last lecture on the recent +German writers is a mere _réchauffé_ of the Essays. Carlyle closes +with the famous passage from Richter, one of those which indicate the +influence in style as in thought of the German over the Scotch humorist. +"It is now the twelfth hour of the night, birds of darkness are on the +wing, the spectres uprear, the dead walk, the living dream. Thou, Eternal +Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn." The whole volume is a testimony +to the speaker's power of speech, to his often unsurpassed penetration, +and to the hopeless variance of the often rapidly shifting streams of his +thought. + +Detailed criticism of Carlyle's HISTORIES belongs to the sphere of +separate disquisitions. Here it is only possible to take note of their +general characteristics. His conception of what history should be is +shared with Macaulay. Both writers protest against its being made a mere +record of "court and camp," of royal intrigue and state rivalry, of +pageants of procession, or chivalric encounters. Both find the sources of +these outwardly obtrusive events in the underground current of national +sentiment, the conditions of the civilisation from which they were +evolved, the prosperity or misery of the masses of the people. + + The essence of history does not lie in laws, senate-houses, + or battle-fields, but in the tide of thought and action--the + world of existence that in gloom and brightness blossoms and + fades apart from these. + +But Carlyle differs from Macaulay in his passion for the concrete. The +latter presents us with pictures to illustrate his political theory; the +former leaves his pictures to speak for themselves. "Give him a fact," +says Emerson, "he loaded you with thanks; a theory, with ridicule or +even abuse." It has been said that with Carlyle History was philosophy +teaching by examples. He himself defines it as "the essence of +innumerable biographies." He individualises everything he meets; his +dislike of abstractions is everywhere extreme. Thus while other writers +have expanded biography into history, Carlyle condenses history into +biography. Even most biographies are too vague for him. He delights in +Boswell: he glides over their generalisations to pick out some previously +obscure record from Clarendon or Hume. Even in _The French Revolution,_ +where the author has mainly to deal with masses in tumult, he gives most +prominence to their leaders. They march past us, labelled with strange +names, in the foreground of the scene, on which is being enacted the +death wrestle of old Feudalism and young Democracy. This book is unique +among modern histories for a combination of force and insight only +rivalled by the most incisive passages of the seventh book of Thucydides, +of Tacitus, of Gibbon, and of Michelet. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ a comparison of Carlyle and Michelet in Dr. Oswald's +interesting and suggestive little volume of criticism and selection, +_Thomas Carlyle, ein Lebensbild und Goldkörner aus seinen Werken._] + +_The French Revolution_ is open to the charge of being a comment and a +prophecy rather than a narrative: the reader's knowledge of the main +events of the period is too much assumed for the purpose of a school +book. Even Dryasdust will turn when trod on, and this book has been a +happy hunting field to aggressive antiquarians, to whom the mistake of a +day in date, the omission or insertion of a letter in a name, is of more +moment than the difference between vitalising or petrifying an era. The +lumber merchants of history are the born foes of historians who, like +Carlyle and Mr. Froude, have manifested their dramatic power of making +the past present and the distant near. That the excess of this power is +not always compatible with perfect impartiality may be admitted; for a +poetic capacity is generally attended by heats of enthusiasm, and is +liable to errors of detail; but without some share of it-- + + Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit + Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln. + +Mere research, the unearthing and arrangement of what Sir Philip Sidney +calls "old moth-eaten records," supplies material for the work of the +historian proper; and, occasionally to good purpose, corrects it, but, as +a rule, with too much flourish. Applying this minute criticism to _The +French Revolution,_ one reviewer has found that the author has given the +wrong number to a regiment: another esteemed scholar has discovered that +there are seven errors in the famous account of the flight to Varennes, +to wit:--the delay in the departure was due to Bouille, not to the Queen; +she did not lose her way and so delay the start; Ste. Menehould is too +big to be called a village; on the arrest, it was the Queen who asked for +hot water and eggs; the King only left the coach once; it went rather +faster than is stated; and, above all, _infandum!_ it was not painted +yellow, but green and black. This criticism does not in any degree +detract from the value of one of the most vivid and substantially +accurate narratives in the range of European literature. Carlyle's object +was to convey the soul of the Revolution, not to register its upholstery. +The annalist, be he dryasdust or gossip, is, in legal phrase, "the devil" +of the prose artist, whose work makes almost as great a demand on the +imaginative faculty as that of the poet. Historiography is related to +History as the Chronicles of Holinshed and the Voyages of Hakluyt to the +Plays of Shakespeare, plays which Marlborough confessed to have been +the main source of his knowledge of English history. Some men are born +philologists or antiquarians; but, as the former often fail to see the +books because of the words, so the latter cannot read the story for the +dates. The mass of readers require precisely what has been contemptuously +referred to as the "Romance of History," provided it leaves with them +an accurate impression, as well as an inspiring interest. Save in his +over-hasty acceptance of the French _blague_ version of "The Sinking of +the Vengeur," Carlyle has never laid himself open to the reproach of +essential inaccuracy. As far as possible for a man of genius, he was +a devotee of facts. He is never a careless, though occasionally +an impetuous writer; his graver errors are those of emotional +misinterpretation. It has been observed that, while contemning +Robespierre, he has extenuated the guilt of Danton as one of the main +authors of the September massacres, and, more generally, that "his +quickness and brilliancy made him impatient of systematic thought." But +his histories remain the best illuminations of fact in our language. _The +French Revolution_ is a series of flame-pictures; every page is on fire; +we read the whole as if listening to successive volleys of artillery: +nowhere has such a motley mass been endowed with equal life. This book +alone vindicates Lowell's panegyric: "the figures of most historians seem +like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs through any hole +that criticism may tear in them; but Carlyle's are so real that if you +prick them they bleed." + +When Carlyle generalises, as in the introductions to his Essays, he is +apt to thrust his own views on his subject and on his readers; but, +unlike De Quincey, who had a like love of excursus, he comes to the point +before the close. + +The one claimed the privilege, assumed by Coleridge, of starting from no +premises and arriving at no conclusion; the other, in his capacity as +a critic, arrives at a conclusion, though sometimes from questionable +premises. It is characteristic of his habit of concentrating, rather than +condensing, that Carlyle abandoned his design of a history of the Civil +Wars for _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches._ The events of the +period, whose issues the writer has firmly grasped, are brought into +prominence mainly as they elucidate the career of his hero; but the +"elucidations" have been accepted, with a few reservations, as final. No +other work has gone so far to reverse a traditional estimate. The old +current conceptions of the Protector are refuted out of his own mouth; +but it was left for his editor to restore life to the half-forgotten +records, and sweep away the clouds that obscured their revelations of a +great though rugged character. _Cromwell_ has been generally accepted +in Scotland as Carlyle's masterpiece--a judgment due to the fact of its +being, among the author's mature works, the least apparently opposed +to the theological views prevalent in the north of our island. In +reality--though containing some of his finest descriptions and +battle-pieces, conspicuously that of "Dunbar"--it is the least artistic +of his achievements, being overladen with detail and superabounding in +extract. A good critic has said that it was a labour of love, like +Spedding's _Bacon;_ but that the correspondence, lavishly reproduced in +both works, has "some of the defects of lovers' letters for those to whom +they are not addressed." + +[Footnote: In _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11th, 1881.] + +Carlyle has established that Oliver was not a hypocrite, "not a man of +falsehood, but a man of truth": he has thrown doubts on his being a +fanatic; but he has left it open to M. Guizot to establish that his later +rule was a practical despotism. + +In _Friedrich II._ he undertook a yet greater task; and his work +stretching over a wider arena, is, of necessity, more of a history, less +of a biography, than any of his others. In constructing and composing it +he was oppressed not only by the magnitude and complexity of his theme, +but, for the first time, by hesitancies as to his choice of a hero. +He himself confessed, "I never was admitted much to _Friedrich's_ +confidence, and I never cared very much about him." Yet he determined, +almost of malice prepense, to exalt the narrow though vivid Prussian +as "the last of the kings, the one genuine figure in the eighteenth +century," and though failing to prove his case, he has, like a loyal +lawyer, made the best of his brief. The book embodies and conveys the +most brilliant and the most readable account of a great part of the +century, and nothing he has written bears more ample testimony to the +writer's pictorial genius. It is sometimes garrulous with the fluency of +an old man eloquent; parts of the third volume, with its diffuse extracts +from the king's survey of his realm, are hard if not weary reading; but +the rest is a masterpiece of historic restoration. The introductory +portion, leading us through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy +and political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the procession +of the half-forgotten host of German worthies,--St. Adalbert and his +mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth; +Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret with the mouth; Sigismund +_supra grammaticam_; Augustus the physically strong; Albert Achilles and +Albert Alcibiades; Anne of Cleves; Mr. John Kepler,--who move on the +pages, more brightly "pictured" than those of Livy, like marionettes +inspired with life. In the main body of the book the men and women of the +Prussian court are brought before us in fuller light and shade. Friedrich +himself, at Sans Souci, with his cocked-hat, walking-stick and wonderful +gray eyes; Sophia Charlotte's grace, wit, and music; Wilhelmina and her +book; the old Hyperborean; the black artists Seckendorf and Grumkow; +George I. and his blue-beard chamber; the little drummer; the Old +Dessaner; the cabinet Venus; Grävenitz Hecate; Algarotti; Goetz in his +tower; the tragedy of Katte; the immeasurable comedy of Maupertuis, the +flattener of the earth, and Voltaire; all these and a hundred more are +summoned by a wizard's wand from the land of shadows, to march by +the central figures of these volumes; to dance, flutter, love, hate, +intrigue, and die before our eyes. It is the largest and most varied +showbox in all history; a prelude to a series of battle-pieces--Rossbach, +Leuthen, Molwitz, Zorndorf--nowhere else, save in the author's own pages, +approached in prose, and rarely rivalled out of Homer's verse. + +Carlyle's style, in the chiar-oscuro of which his Histories and +three-fourths of his Essays are set, has naturally provoked much +criticism and some objurgation. M. Taine says it is "exaggerated and +demoniacal." Hallam could not read _The French Revolution_ because of its +"abominable" style, and Wordsworth, whose own prose was perfectly limpid, +is reported to have said, "No Scotchman can write English. C---- is a pest +to the language." + +[Footnote: Carlyle with equal unfairness disparaged Hallam's _Middle +Ages:--"Eh, the poor miserable skeleton of a book," and regarded the +_Literature of Europe_ as a valley of dry bones.] + +Carlyle's style is not that of Addison, of Berkeley, or of Helps; its +peculiarities are due to the eccentricity of an always eccentric being; +but it is neither affected nor deliberately imitated. It has been +plausibly asserted that his earlier manner of writing, as in _Schiller,_ +under the influence of Jeffrey, was not in his natural voice. "They +forget," he said, referring to his critics, "that the style is the skin +of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old woman." Erratic, +metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and therefore a dangerous model, +"the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and +angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the _Birthmark_ +in Hawthorne's romance. To recast a chapter of the _Revolution_ in the +form of a chapter of Macaulay would be like rewriting Tacitus in the +form of Cicero, or Browning in the form of Pope. Carlyle is seldom +obscure, the energy of his manner is part of his matter; its abruptness +corresponds to the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often as +it were by a series of electric shocks, that threaten to break through +the formal restraints of an ordinary sentence. He writes like one who +must, under the spell of his own winged words; at all hazards, +determined to convey his meaning; willing, like Montaigne, to "despise +no phrase of those that run in the streets," to speak in strange tongues, +and even to coin new words for the expression of a new emotion. It is +his fashion to care as little for rounded phrase as for logical argument: +and he rather convinces and persuades by calling up a succession of +feelings than by a train of reasoning. He repeats himself like a +preacher, instead of condensing like an essayist. The American Thoreau +writes in the course of an incisive survey:-- + + Carlyle's ... mastery over the language is unrivalled; it + is with him a keen, resistless weapon; his power of words + is endless. All nature, human and external, is ransacked to + serve and run his errands. The bright cutlery, after all the + dross of Birmingham has been thrown aside, is his style.... + He has "broken the ice, and the torrent streams forth." He + drives six-in-hand over ruts and streams and never upsets.... + With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all + his moods and experiences, and crashes his way through + shoals of dilettante opinions. It is not in man to determine + what his style shall be, if it is to be his own. + +But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a careless or ready +writer. He weighed every sentence: if in all his works, from _Sartor_ to +the _Reminiscences_, you pencil-mark the most suggestive passages you +disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and +fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though +a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a +great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping +his pencil "in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse," now etching his +scenes with the tender touch of a Millet. + +Emerson, in one of his early letters to Carlyle, wrote, "Nothing seems +hid from those wonderful eyes of yours; those devouring eyes; those +thirsty eyes; those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine." +Men of genius, whether expressing themselves in prose or verse, on canvas +or in harmony, are, save when smitten, like Beethoven, by some malignity +of Nature, endowed with keener physical senses than other men. They +actually, not metaphorically, see more and hear more than their fellows. +Carlyle's super-sensitive ear was to him, through life, mainly a torment; +but the intensity of his vision was that of a born artist, and to' it we +owe the finest descriptive passages, if we except those of Mr. Ruskin, in +English prose. None of our poets, from Chaucer and Dunbar to Burns and +Tennyson, has been more alive to the influences of external nature. His +early letters abound in passages like the following, on the view from +Arthur's Seat:-- + + The blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills + swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags + and rude precipices at our feet (where not a hillock rears + its head unsung) with Edinburgh at their base clustering + proudly over her rugged foundations and covering with a + vapoury mantle the jagged black masses of stonework that + stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Faeryland.... + I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and + the moon's fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as + it is, was riding quietly above me. + +Compare with this the picture, in a letter to Sterling, of Middlebie +burn, "leaping into its cauldron, singing a song better than Pasta's"; or +that of the Scaur Water, that may be compared with Tennyson's verses in +the valley of Cauteretz; or the sketches of the Flemish cities in the +tour of 1842, with the photograph of the lace-girl, recalling Sterne at +his purest; or the account of the "atmosphere like silk" over the moor, +with the phrase, "it was as if Pan slept"; or the few lines written at +Thurso, where "the sea is always one's friend"; or the later memories of +Mentone, old and new, in the _Reminiscences_ (vol. ii. pp. 335-340). + +The most striking of those descriptions are, however, those in which the +interests of some thrilling event or crisis of human life or history +steal upon the scene, and give it a further meaning, as in the dim streak +of dawn rising over St. Abb's Head on the morning of Dunbar, or in the +following famous apostrophe:-- + + O evening sun of July, how at this hour thy beams fall slant + on reapers amid peaceful, woody fields; on old women + spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; + on balls at the Orangerie at Versailles, where high-rouged + dames of the palace are even now dancing with + double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring + Hell-porch of an Hôtel-de-Ville. + +Carlyle is, here and there, led astray by the love of contrast; but not +even Heinrich Heine has employed antithesis with more effect than in the +familiar passage on the sleeping city in _Sartor_, beginning, "Ach mein +Lieber ... it is a true sublimity to dwell here," and ending, "But I, +mein Werther, sit above it all. I am alone with the stars." His thought, +seldom quite original, is often a resuscitation or survival, and owes +much of its celebrity to its splendid brocade. _Sartor Resartus_ itself +escaped the failure that was at first threatened by its eccentricity +partly from its noble passion, partly because of the truth of the +"clothes philosophy," applied to literature as to life. + +His descriptions, too often caricatures, of men are equally vivid. They +set the whole great mass of _Friedrich_ in a glow; they lighten the +tedium of _Cromwell's_ lumbering despatches; they give a heart of fire +to _The French Revolution_. Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_ attempts +and fulfils on a smaller what Carlyle achieved on a greater scale. The +historian makes us sympathise with the real actors, even more than the +novelist does with the imaginary characters on the same stage. From the +account of the dying Louis XV. to the "whiff of grapeshot" which closed +the last scene of the great drama, there is not a dull page. Théroigne +de Méricourt, Marat, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Robespierre, +Talleyrand, Mdme. Roland, above all Marie Antoinette--for whom Carlyle +has a strong affection--and Buonaparte, so kindle and colour the scene +that we cannot pause to feel weary of the phrases with which they are +labelled. The author's letters show the same power of baptizing, which he +used often to unfair excess. We can no more forget Count d'Orsay as the +"Phoebus Apollo of Dandyism," Daniel Webster's "brows like cliffs and +huge black eyes," or Wordsworth "munching raisins" and recognising no +poet but himself, or Maurice "attacked by a paroxysm of mental cramp," +than we can dismiss from our memories "The Glass Coachman" or "The +Tobacco Parliament." + +Carlyle quotes a saying of Richter, that Luther's words were half +battles; he himself compares those of Burns to cannon-balls; much of his +own writing is a fusilade. All three were vehement in abuse of things +and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not +sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are, +by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his +humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining +over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as +finely quaint as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's. There is in +it, as in all the highest humour, a sense of apparent contrast, even of +contradiction, in life, of matter for laughter in sorrow and tears in +joy. He seems to check himself, and as if afraid of wearing his heart +in his sleeve, throws in absurd illustrations of serious propositions, +partly to show their universal range, partly in obedience to an instinct +of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermonising and to cut the story +short. Carlyle's grotesque is a mode of his golden silence, a sort of +Socratic irony, in the indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and +at himself. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, ridicule of +his own and other ages, now in droll reference or mock heroic detail, +in an odd conception, a character sketch, an event in parody, in an +antithesis or simile,--sometimes it lurks in a word, and again in a +sentence. In direct pathos--the other side of humour--he is equally +effective. His denunciations of sentiment remind us of Plato attacking +the poets, for he is at heart the most emotional of writers, the greatest +of the prose poets of England; and his dramatic sympathy extends alike to +the actors in real events and to his ideal creations. Few more pathetic +passages occur in literature than his "stories of the deaths of kings." +The following among the less known of his eloquent passages is an +apotheosis of their burials:-- + + In this manner did the men of the Eastern Counties take up + the slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in + the village of Hoxne; seek out the severed head and + reverently reunite the same. They embalmed him with myrrh + and sweet spices, with love, pity, and all high and awful + thoughts; consecrating him with a very storm of melodious, + adoring admiration, and sun-dried showers of tears; joyfully, + yet with awe (as all deep joy has something of the awful in + it), commemorating his noble deeds and godlike walk and + conversation while on Earth. Till, at length, the very Pope + and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear of it; and they, + summing up as correctly as they well could, with _Advocatus + Diaboli_ pleadings and other forms of process, the + general verdict of mankind, declared that he had in very + fact led a hero's life in this world: and, being now gone, + was gone, as they conceived, to God above and reaping his + reward there. Such, they said, was the best judgment they + could form of the case, and truly not a bad judgment. + +Carlyle's reverence for the past makes him even more apt to be touched by +its sorrows than amused by its follies. With a sense of brotherhood he +holds out hands to all that were weary; he feels even for the pedlars +climbing the Hohenzollern valley, and pities the solitude of soul on the +frozen Schreckhorn of power, whether in a dictator of Paraguay or in +a Prussian prince. He leads us to the death chamber of Louis XV., of +Mirabeau, of Cromwell, of Sterling, his own lost friend; and we feel with +him in the presence of a solemnising mystery. Constantly, amid the din of +arms or words, and the sarcasms by which he satirises and contemns old +follies and idle strifes, a gentler feeling wells up in his pages like +the sound of the Angelus. Such pauses of pathos are the records of real +or fanciful situations, as of Teufelsdröckh "left alone with the night" +when Blumine and Herr Towgood ride down the valley; of Oliver recalling +the old days at St. Ives; of the Electress Louisa bidding adieu to her +Elector. + +At the moment of her death, it is said, when speech had fled, he felt +from her hand, which lay in his, three slight slight pressures--farewell +thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easily to forget in this world. + +There is nothing more pathetic in the range of his works, if in that of +our literature, than the account of the relations of father and son in +the domestic history of the Prussian Court, from the first estrangement +between them--the young Friedrich in his prison at Cüstrin, the old +Friedrich gliding about seeking shelter from ghosts, mourning for +Absalom--to the reconciliation, the end, and the afterthoughts:-- + + The last breath of Friedrich Wilhelm having fled, Friedrich + hurried to a private room; sat there all in tears; looking + back through the gulfs of the Past, upon such a Father now + rapt away for ever. Sad all and soft in the moonlight of + memory--the lost Loved One all in the right as we now see, + we all in the wrong!--This, it appears, was the Son's fixed + opinion. Sever, years hence here is how Friedrich concludes + the _History_ of his Father, written with a loyal + admiration throughout: "We have left under silence the + domestic chagrins of this great Prince; readers must have + some indulgence for the faults of the children, in + consideration of the virtues of such a Father." All in + tears he sits at present, meditating these sad things. In a + little while the Old Dessauer, about to leave for Dessau, + ventures in to the Crown Prince, Crown Prince no longer; + "embraces his knees," offers weeping his condolence, his + congratulation; hopes withal that his sons and he will be + continued in their old posts, and that he the Old Dessauer + "will have the same authority as in the late reign." + Friedrich's eyes, at this last clause, flash out tearless, + strangely Olympian. "In your posts I have no thought of + making change; in your posts yes; and as to authority I + know of none there can be but what resides in the king that + is sovereign," which, as it were, struck the breath out of + the Old Dessauer; and sent him home with a painful + miscellany of feelings, astonishment not wanting among them. + At an after hour the same night Friedrich went to Berlin, + met by acclamation enough. He slept there not without + tumult of dreams, one may fancy; and on awakening next + morning the first sound he heard was that of the regiment + Glasenap under his windows, swearing fealty to the new King. + He sprang out of bed in a tempest of emotion; bustled + distractedly to and fro, wildly weeping. Pöllnitz, who came + into the anteroom, found him in this state, "half-dressed, + with dishevelled hair, in tears, and as if beside himself." + "These huzzahings only tell me what I have lost," said the + new King. "He was in great suffering," suggested Pöllnitz; + "he is now at rest." True, he suffered; but he was here with + us; and now----! + +Carlyle has said of Dante's _Francesco_ "that it is a thing woven as of +rainbows on a ground of eternal black." The phrase, well applied to the +_Inferno_, is a perhaps half-conscious verdict on his own tenderness as +exhibited in his life and in his works. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY + +One of the subtlest of Robert Browning's critics, in the opening sentence +of his work, quotes a saying of Hegel's, "A great man condemns the world +to the task of explaining him"; adding, "The condemnation is a double one, +and it generally falls heaviest on the great man himself who has to submit +to explanation." Cousin, the graceful Eclectic, is reported to have said +to the great Philosopher, "will you oblige me by stating the results of +your teaching in a few sentences?" and to have received the reply, "It is +not easy, especially in French." + +[Footnote: _Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher,_ by +Professor Henry Jones, of St. Andrews.] + +The retort applies, with severity, to those who attempt to systematise +Carlyle; for he himself was, as we have seen, intolerant of system. His +mathematical attainment and his antipathy to logical methods beyond +the lines of square and circle, his love of concise fact and his often +sweeping assertions are characteristic of the same contradictions in +his nature as his almost tyrannical premises and his practically +tender-hearted conclusions. A hard thinker, he was never a close +reasoner; in all that relates to human affairs he relies on nobility of +feeling rather than on continuity of thought. Claiming the full latitude +of the prophet to warn, exhort, even to command, he declines either to +preach or to accept the rubric of the partisan or of the priest. + +In praise of German literature, he remarks, "One of its chief qualities +is that it has no particular theory at all on the front of it;" and of +its leaders, "I can only speak of the revelations these men have made to +me. As to their doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be +said"; yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him "out +of the blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that +his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their +discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings, +inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of +credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or mountain air, +and found in them the key of the perennial riddle and the solution of the +insoluble mystery. But in later years the curtain to many of them became +the picture. + +When Carlyle was first recognised in London as a rising author, curiosity +was rife as to his "opinions"; was he a Chartist at heart or an +Absolutist, a Calvinist like Knox, a Deist like Hume, a Feudalist with +Scott, or a Democrat with Burns--inquisitions mostly vain. He had come +from the Scotch moors and his German studies, a strange element, into the +midst of an almost foreign society, not so much to promulgate a new set +of opinions as to infuse a new life into those already existing. He +claimed to have a "mission," but it was less to controvert any form of +creed than to denounce the insufficiency of shallow modes of belief. He +raised the tone of literature by referring to higher standards than those +currently accepted; he tried to elevate men's minds to the contemplation +of something better than themselves, and impress upon them the vacuity +of lip-services; he insisted that the matter of most consequence was the +grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to +sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty +to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only +barren but obstructive; that it is only + + When half-gods go, the gods arrive. + +But his manner of reading these important lessons admitted the retort +that he himself was content rather to dwell on what is _not_ than to +discover what _is_ true. Belief, he reiterates, is the cure for all the +worst of human ills; but belief in what or in whom? In "the eternities +and immensities," as an answer, requires definition. It means that we are +not entitled to regard ourselves as the centres of the universe; that +we are but atoms of space and time, with relations infinite beyond our +personalities; that the first step to a real recognition of our duties is +the sense of our inferiority to those above us, our realisation of the +continuity of history and life, our faith and acquiescence in some +universal law. This truth, often set forth + + By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet, + +no one has enforced with more eloquence than Carlyle; but though he +founded a dynasty of ideas, they are comparatively few; like a group of +strolling players, each with a well-filled wardrobe, and ready for many +parts. + +The difficulty of defining Carlyle results not merely from his frequent +golden nebulosity, but from his love of contradicting even himself. Dr. +Johnson confessed to Boswell that when arguing in his dreams he was often +worsted and took credit for the resignation with which he bore these +defeats, forgetting that the victor and the vanquished were one and the +same. Similarly his successor took liberties with himself which he would +allow to no one else, and in doing so he has taken liberties with his +reader. His praise and blame of the profession of letters, as the highest +priesthood and the meanest trade; his early exaltation of "the writers of +newspapers, pamphlets, books," as "the real effective working church of a +modern country"; and his later expressed contempt for journalism as +"mean and demoralising"--"we must destroy the faith in newspapers"; +his alternate faith and unfaith in Individualism; the teaching of the +_Characteristics_ and the _Signs of the Times_ that all healthy genius is +unconscious, and the censure of Sir Walter Scott for troubling himself +too little with mysteries; his commendation of "the strong warrior" for +writing no books, and his taking sides with the mediæval monks against +the kings--there is no reconciliation of such contradictories. They are +the expression of diverse moods and emphatically of different stages of +mental progress, the later, as a rule, more negative than the earlier. + +This change is most marked in the sphere of politics. At the close of his +student days Carlyle was to all intents a Radical, and believed in +Democracy; he saw hungry masses around him, and, justly attributing some +of their suffering to misgovernment, vented his sympathetic zeal for the +oppressed in denunciation of the oppressors. + +[Footnote: Passage quoted (Chap. II.) about the Glasgow Radical rising in +1819.] + +He began not only by sympathising with the people, but by believing in +their capacity to manage best their own affairs: a belief that steadily +waned as he grew older until he denied to them even the right to choose +their rulers. As late, however, as 1830, he argued against Irving's +conservatism in terms recalled in the _Reminiscences_. "He objected +clearly to my Reform Bill notions, found Democracy a thing forbidden, +leading even to outer darkness: I a thing inevitable and obliged to lead +whithersoever it could." During the same period he clenched his theory by +taking a definite side in the controversy of the age. "This," he writes to +Macvey Napier, "this is the day when the lords are to reject the Reform +Bill. The poor lords can only accelerate (by perhaps a century) their own +otherwise inevitable enough abolition." + +The political part of _Sartor Resartus_, shadowing forth some scheme of +well-organised socialism, yet anticipates, especially in the chapter on +_Organic Filaments_, the writer's later strain of belief in dukes, earls, +and marshals of men: but this work, religious, ethical, and idyllic, +contains mere vague suggestions in the sphere of practical life. About +this time Carlyle writes of liberty: "What art thou to the valiant and +the brave when thou art thus to the weak and timid, dearer than life, +stronger than death, higher than purest love?" and agrees with the +verdict, "The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive +struggles of anarchy." But he soon passed from the mood represented +by Emily Brontë to that of the famous apostrophe of Madame Roland. He +proclaimed that liberty to do as we like is a fatal license, that the +only true liberty is that of doing what is right, which he interprets +living under the laws enacted by the wise. Mrs. Austin in 1832 wrote to +Mrs. Carlyle, "I am that monster made up of all the Whigs hate--a Radical +and an Absolutist." The expression, at the time, accurately defined +Carlyle's own political position: but he shifted from it, till the +Absolutist, in a spirit made of various elements, devoured the Radical. +The leading counsel against the aristocracy changed his brief and became +chief advocate on their side, declaring "we must recognise the hereditary +principle if there is to be any fixity in things." In 1835, he says to +Emerson:-- + + I believe literature to be as good as dead ... and nothing + but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps + three generations.... I suffer also terribly from the + solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a + kind of passion with me to feel myself among my brothers. + And then How? Alas I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay, I + feel it to be a wretched necessity unfit for me; + Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet + these two are the grand categories under which all English + spiritual activity, that so much as thinks remuneration + possible, must range itself. + +And somewhat later-- + + People accuse me, not of being an incendiary Sansculotte, + but of being a Tory, thank Heaven! + +Some one has written with a big brush, "He who is not a radical in his +youth is a knave, he who is not a conservative in his age is a fool." The +rough, if not rude, generalisation has been plausibly supported by +the changes in the mental careers of Burke, Coleridge, Southey, and +Wordsworth. But Carlyle was "a spirit of another sort," of more mixed +yarn; and, as there is a vein of Conservatism in his early Radicalism, +so there is, as also in the cases of Landor and even of Goethe, still +a revolutionary streak in his later Conservatism. Consequently, in his +instance, there is a plea in favour of the prepossession (especially +strong in Scotland) which leads the political or religious party that a +distinguished man has left still to persist in claiming him; while +that which he has joined accepts him, if at all, with distrust. Scotch +Liberals will not give up Carlyle, one of his biographers keenly +asseverating that he was to the last "a democrat at heart"; while +the representative organ of northern Conservatism on the same ground +continues to assail him--"mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst +vergebens." On all questions directly bearing on the physical welfare of +the masses of the people, his speech and action remained consistent with +his declaration that he had "never heard an argument for the corn laws +which might not make angels weep." From first to last he was an advocate +of Free Trade--though under the constant protest that the greatness of +a nation depended in a very minor degree on the abundance of its +possessions--and of free, unsectarian, and compulsory Education. while, +in theology, though remote from either, he was more tolerant of the +dogmatic narrowness of the Low Church of the lower, than of the Ritualism +of the upper, classes. His unwavering interest in the poor and his belief +that legislation should keep them in constant view, was in accord with +the spirit of Bentham's standard: but Carlyle, rightly or wrongly, +came to regard the bulk of men as children requiring not only help and +guidance but control. + +On the question of "the Suffrage" he completely revolved. It appears, +from the testimony of Mr. Froude, that the result of the Reform Bill of +1832 disappointed him in merely shifting power from the owners of land to +the owners of shops, and leaving the handicraftsmen and his own peasant +class no better off. Before a further extension became a point +of practical politics he had arrived at the conviction that the +ascertainment of truth and the election of the fittest did not lie with +majorities. These sentences of 1835 represent a transition stage:-- + + Conservatism I cannot attempt to conserve, believing it to + be a portentous embodied sham.... Whether the Tories stay + out or in, it will be all for the advance of Radicalism, + which means revolt, dissolution, and confusion and a + darkness which no man can see through. + +No one had less faith in the paean chanted by Macaulay and others on the +progress of the nation or of the race, a progress which, without faith +in great men, was to him inevitably downward; no one protested with more +emphasis against the levelling doctrines of the French Revolution. It has +been observed that Carlyle's _Chartism_ was "his first practical step in +politics"; it is more true to say that it first embodied, with more than +his usual precision, the convictions he had for some time held of the +dangers of our social system; with an indication of some of the means to +ward them off, based on the realisation of the interdependence of all +classes in the State. This book is remarkable as containing his last, +very partial, concessions to the democratic creed, the last in which he +is willing to regard a wide suffrage as a possible, though by no means +the best, expedient. Subsequently, in _Past and Present_ and the +_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, he came to hold "that with every extension of the +Franchise those whom the voters would elect would be steadily inferior +and more unfit." Every stage in his political progress is marked by a +growing distrust in the judgment of the multitude, a distrust set forth, +with every variety of metaphor, in such sentences as the following:-- + + There is a divine message or eternal regulation of the + Universe. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count + heads, ask Universal Suffrage by the ballot-box and that + will tell!" From Adam's time till now the Universe was wont + to be of a somewhat abstruse nature, partially disclosing + itself to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was + not the majority. Of what use towards the general result of + finding out what it is wise to do, can the fools be? ... If + of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common + calculation, how in the name of wonder will you ever get a + ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these + ten men? ... Only by reducing to zero nine of these votes can + wisdom ever issue from your ten. The mass of men consulted at + the hustings upon any high matter whatsoever, is as ugly an + exhibition of human stupidity as this world sees.... If the + question be asked and the answer given, I will generally + consider in any case of importance, that the said answer is + likely to be wrong, and that I have to go and do the reverse + of the same ... for how should I follow a multitude to do + evil? Cease to brag to me of America and its model + institutions.... On this side of the Atlantic or on that, + Democracy is for ever impossible! The Universe is a monarchy + and a hierarchy, the noble in the high places, the ignoble in + the low; this is in all times and in all places the Almighty + Maker's law. Democracy, take it where you will, is found a + regulated method of rebellion, it abrogates the old + arrangement of things, and leaves zero and vacuity. It is the + consummation of no-government and _laissez faire_. + +Alongside of this train of thought there runs a constant protest against +the spirit of revolt. In _Sartor_ we find: "Whoso cannot obey cannot be +free, still less bear rule; he that is the inferior of nothing can be the +superior of nothing"; and in _Chartism_-- + + Men who rebel and urge the lower classes to rebel ought to + have other than formulas to go upon, ... those to whom + millions of suffering fellow-creatures are "masses," mere + explosive masses for blowing down Bastiles with, for voting + at hustings for us--such men are of the questionable + species.... Obedience ... is the primary duty of man.... + Of all "rights of men" this right of the ignorant to be + guided by the wiser, gently or forcibly--is the + indisputablest.... Cannot one discern, across all democratic + turbulence, clattering of ballot-boxes, and infinite + sorrowful jangle, that this is at bottom the wish and prayer + of all human hearts everywhere, "Give me a leader"? + +The last sentence indicates the transition from the merely negative +aspect of Carlyle's political philosophy to the positive, which is +his HERO-WORSHIP, based on the excessive admiration for individual +greatness,--an admiration common to almost all imaginative writers, +whether in prose or verse; on his notions of order and fealty, and on a +reverence for the past, which is also a common property of poets. The +Old and Middle Ages, according to his view, had their chiefs, captains, +kings, and waxed or waned with the increase or decrease of their +Loyality. Democracy, the new force of our times, must in its turn be +dominated by leaders. Raised to independence over the arbitrary will of a +multitude, these are to be trusted and followed, if need be, to death. + + Your noblest men at the summit of affairs is the ideal world + of poets.... Other aim in this earth we have none. That + we all reverence "great men" is to me the living rock amid + all rushings down whatsoever. All that democracy ever meant + lies there, the attainment of a truer Aristocracy or + Government of the Best. Make search for the Able man. How to + get him is the question of questions. + +It is precisely the question to which Carlyle never gives, and hardly +attempts, a reply; and his failure to answer it invalidates the +larger half of his Politics. Plato has at least detailed a scheme for +eliminating his philosopher guardians, though it somewhat pedantically +suggests a series of Chinese examinations: his political, though probably +unconscious disciple has only a few negative tests. The warrior or sage +who is to rule is _not_ to be chosen by the majority, especially in our +era, when they would choose the Orators who seduce and "traduce the +State"; nor are we ever told that the election is to rest with either +Under or Upper House: the practical conclusion is that when we find a man +of great force of character, whether representing our own opinions or the +reverse, we should take him on trust. This brings us to the central maxim +of Carlyle's political philosophy, to which we must, even in our space, +give some consideration, as its true meaning has been the theme of so +much dispute. + +It is a misfortune of original thought that it is hardly ever put +in practice by the original thinker. When his rank as a teacher is +recognised, his words have already lost half their value by repetition. +His manner is aped by those who find an easy path to notoriety in +imitation; the belief he held near his heart is worn as a creed like a +badge; the truth he promulgated is distorted in a room of mirrors, half +of it is a truism, the other half a falsism. That which began as a +denunciation of tea-table morality, is itself the tea-table morality of +the next generation: an outcry against cant may become the quintessence +of cant; a revolt from tyranny the basis of a new tyranny; the +condemnation of sects the foundation of a new sect; the proclamation of +peace a bone of contention. There is an ambiguity in most general maxims, +and a seed of error which assumes preponderance over the truth when the +interpreters of the maxim are men easily led by formulæ. Nowhere is this +degeneracy more strikingly manifested than in the history of some of +the maxims which Carlyle either first promulgated or enforced by his +adoption. When he said, or quoted, "Silence is better than speech," he +meant to inculcate patience and reserve. Always think before you speak: +rather lose fluency than waste words: never speak for the sake of +speaking. It is the best advice, but they who need it most are the last +to take it; those who speak and write not because they have something to +say, but because they wish to say or must say something, will continue to +write and speak as long as they can spell or articulate. Thoughtful men +are apt to misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit +still and leave the "war of words to those who like it." When Carlyle +condemned self-consciousness, a constant introspection and comparison of +self with others, he theoretically struck at the root of the morbid moods +of himself and other mental analysts; he had no intention to over-exalt +mere muscularity or to deify athletic sports. It were easy to multiply +instances of truths clearly conceived at first and parodied in their +promulgation; but when we have the distinct authority of the discoverer +himself for their correct interpretation, we can at once appeal to it. +A yet graver, not uncommon, source of error arises when a great writer +misapplies the maxims of his own philosophy, or states them in such a +manner that they are sure to be misapplied. + +Carlyle has laid down the doctrine that MIGHT IS RIGHT at various times +and in such various forms, with and without modification or caveat, that +the real meaning can only be ascertained from his own application of it. +He has made clear, what goes without saying, that by "might" he does not +intend mere physical strength. + + Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute + force; conquest of that kind does not endure. The strong man, + what is he? The wise man. His muscles and bones are not + stronger than ours; but his soul is stronger, clearer, + nobler.... Late in man's history, yet clearly at length, it + becomes manifest to the dullest that mind is stronger than + matter, that not brute Force, but only Persuasion and Faith, + is the king of this world.... Intellect has to govern this + world and will do it. + +There are sentences which indicate that he means something more than even +mental force; as in his Diary (Froude, iv. 422), "I shall have to tell +Lecky, Right is the eternal symbol of Might"; and again in _Chartism_, +"Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them +centuries to try it, and they are found to be identical. The strong thing +is the just thing. In kings we have either a divine right or a diabolic +wrong." On the other hand, we read in _Past and Present_:-- + + Savage fighting Heptarchies: their lighting is an + ascertainment who has the right to rule over them. + +And again-- + + Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: _either_ of + these, once ascertained, puts an end to battle. + +And elsewhere-- + + Rights men have none save to be governed justly.... + + Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere correctly + articulated mights.... All goes by wager of battle in this + world, and it is, well understood, the measure of all + worth.... By right divine the strong and capable govern the + weak and foolish.... Strength we may say is Justice itself. + +It is not left for us to balance those somewhat indefinite definitions. +Carlyle has himself in his Histories illustrated and enforced his own +interpretations of the summary views of his political treatises. There +he has demonstrated that his doctrine, "Might is Right," is no mere +unguarded expression of the truism that moral might is right. In his +hands it implies that virtue is in all cases a property of strength, that +strength is everywhere a property of virtue; that power of whatever sort +having any considerable endurance, carries with it the seal and signal of +its claim to respect, that whatever has established itself has, in the +very act, established its right to be established. He is never careful +enough to keep before his readers what he must himself have dimly +perceived, that victory _by right_ belongs not to the force of will +alone, apart from clear and just conceptions of worthy ends. Even in its +crude form, the maxim errs not so much in what it openly asserts as +in what it implicitly denies. Aristotle (the first among ancients to +_question_ the institution of slavery, as Carlyle has been one of the +last of moderns to defend it) more guardedly admits that strength is +in itself _a_ good,--[Greek: kai estin aei to kratoun en uperochae +agathoutinos],--but leaves it to be maintained that there are forms of +good which do not show themselves in excess of strength. Several of +Carlyle's conclusions and verdicts seem to show that he only acknowledges +those types of excellence that have already manifested themselves as +powers; and this doctrine (which, if adopted in earlier ages, would +practically have left possession with physical strength) colours all his +History and much of his Biography. Energy of any sort compels his homage. +Himself a Titan, he shakes hands with all Titans, Gothic gods, Knox, +Columbus, the fuliginous Mirabeau, burly Danton dying with "no weakness" +on his lips. The fulness of his charity is for the errors of Mohammed, +Cromwell, Burns, Napoleon I.,--whose mere belief in his own star he +calls sincerity,--the atrocious Francia, the Norman kings, the Jacobins, +Brandenburg despots; the fulness of his contempt for the conscientious +indecision of Necker, the Girondists, the Moderates of our own +Commonwealth. He condones all that ordinary judgments regard as the +tyranny of conquest, and has for the conquered only a _væ victis._ In +this spirit, he writes :-- + + M. Thierry celebrates with considerable pathos the fate of + the Saxons; the fate of the Welsh, too, moves him; of the + Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into + the mountains, whither they were not worth following. What + can we say, but that the cause which pleased the gods had in + the end to please Cato also? + +When all is said, Carlyle's inconsistent optimism throws no more light +than others have done on the apparent relapses of history, as the +overthrow of Greek civilisation, the long night of the Dark Ages, the +spread of the Russian power during the last century, or of continental +Militarism in the present. In applying the tests of success or failure we +must bear in mind that success is from its very nature conspicuous. We +only know that brave men have failed when they have had a "sacred bard." +The good that is lost is, _ipso facto_, forgotten. We can rarely tell of +greatness unrecognised, for the very fact of our being able to tell of it +would imply a former recognition. The might of evil walks in darkness: +we remember the martyrs who, by their deaths, ultimately drove the +Inquisition from England; not those whose courage quailed. "It was their +fate," as a recent writer remarks, "that was the tragedy." Reading +Carlyle's maxim between the lines of his chapter on the Reformation, +and noting that the Inquisition triumphed in Spain, while in Austria, +Bavaria, and Bohemia Protestantism was stifled by stratagem or by force; +that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was successful; and that the +revocation of the Edict of Nantes killed the France of Henry IV., we see +its limitations even in the long perspective of the past. Let us, +however, grant that in the ultimate issue the Platonic creed, +"Justice is stronger than injustice," holds good. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Mill's _Liberty_, chap. ii. pp. 52-54] + +It is when Carlyle turns to politics and regards them as history +accomplished instead of history in progress that his principle leads to +the most serious error. No one has a more withering contempt for evil as +meanness and imbecility; but he cannot see it in the strong hand. Of two +views, equally correct, "evil is weakness," such evil as sloth, and +"corruptio optimi pessima," such evil as tyranny--he only recognises the +first. Despising the palpable anarchies of passion, he has no word of +censure for the more settled form of anarchy which announced, "Order +reigns at Warsaw." He refuses his sympathy to all unsuccessful efforts, +and holds that if races are trodden under foot, they are [Greek: phusei +doulo dunamenoi allou einai] they who have allowed themselves to be +subjugated deserve their fate. The cry of "oppressed nationalities" was to +him mere cant. His Providence is on the side of the big battalions, and +forgives very violent means to an orderly end. To his credit he declined +to acknowledge the right of Louis Napoleon to rule France; but he accepted +the Czars, and ridiculed Mazzini till forced to admit, almost with +chagrin, that he had, "after all," substantially succeeded. + + Treason never prospers, what's the reason? + That when it prospers, none dare call it treason. + +Apprehending, on the whole more keenly than any of his contemporaries, +the foundations of past greatness, his invectives and teaching lay +athwart much that is best as well as much that is most hazardous in the +new ideas of the age. Because mental strength, endurance, and industry +do not appear prominently in the Negro race, he looks forward with +satisfaction to the day when a band of white buccaneers shall undo +Toussaint l'Ouverture's work of liberation in Hayti, advises the English +to revoke the Emancipation Act in Jamaica, and counsels the Americans +to lash their slaves--better, he admits, made serfs and not saleable by +auction--not more than is necessary to get from them an amount of work +satisfactory to the Anglo-Saxon mind. Similarly he derides all movements +based on a recognition of the claims of weakness to consideration and +aid. + + Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, + Doing or suffering. + +The application of the maxim, "Might is Right," to a theory of government +is obvious; the strongest government must be the best, _i.e._ that in +which Power, in the last resort supreme, is concentrated in the hands of +a single ruler; the weakest, that in which it is most widely diffused, +is the worst. Carlyle in his Address to the Edinburgh students commends +Machiavelli for insight in attributing the preservation of Rome to +the institution of the Dictatorship. In his _Friedrich_ this view is +developed in the lessons he directs the reader to draw from Prussian +history. The following conveys his final comparative estimate of an +absolute and a limited monarchy:-- + + This is the first triumph of the constitutional Principle + which has since gone to such sublime heights among + us--heights which we begin at last to suspect may be depths + leading down, all men now ask whitherwards. A much-admired + invention in its time, that of letting go the rudder or + setting a wooden figure expensively to take care of it, and + discovering that the ship would sail of itself so much the + more easily. Of all things a nation needs first to be + drilled, and a nation that has not been governed by + so-called tyrants never came to much in the world. + +Among the currents of thought contending in our age, two are +conspicuously opposed. The one says: Liberty is an end not a mere means +in itself; apart from practical results the crown of life. Freedom of +thought and its expression, and freedom of action, bounded only by +the equal claim of our fellows, are desirable for their own sakes as +constituting national vitality: and even when, as is sometimes the case, +Liberty sets itself against improvements for a time, it ultimately +accomplishes more than any reforms could accomplish without it. The fewer +restraints that are imposed from without on human beings the better: the +province of law is only to restrain men from violently or fraudulently +invading the province of other men. This view is maintained and in great +measure sustained by J.S. Mill in his _Liberty_, the _Areopagitica_ of +the nineteenth century, and more elaborately if not more philosophically +set forth in the comprehensive treatise of Wilhelm von Humboldt on _The +Sphere and Duties of Government_. These writers are followed with various +reserves by Grote, Buckle, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and by Mr. Lecky. Mill +writes:-- + + The idea of rational Democracy is not that the people + themselves govern; but that they have security for good + government. This security they can only have by retaining in + their own hands the ultimate control. The people ought to be + masters employing servants more skilful than themselves. + + [Footnote: It should be noted that Mill lays as great + stress on Individualism as Carlyle does, and a more + practical stress. He has the same belief in the essential + mediocrity of the masses of men whose "think ing is done for + them ... through the newspapers," and the same scorn for + "the present low state of society." He writes, "The + initiation of all wise and noble things comes and must come + from individuals: generally at first from some one + individual"; but adds, "I am not countenancing the sort of + 'hero-worship' which applauds the strong man of genius for + forcibly seizing on the government of the world.... All he + can claim is freedom to point out the way."] + +To this Carlyle, with at least the general assent of Mr. Froude, Mr. +Ruskin, and Sir James Stephen, substantially replies:-- + + In freedom for itself there is nothing to raise a man above + a fly; the value of a human life is that of its work done; + the prime province of law is to get from its subjects the + most of the best work. The first duty of a people is to + find--which means to accept--their chief; their second and + last to obey him. We see to what men have been brought by + "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," by the dreams of + idealogues, and the purchase of votes. + +This, the main drift of Carlyle's political teaching, rests on his +absolute belief in strength (which always grows by concentration), on his +unqualified admiration of order, and on his utter disbelief in what his +adverse friend Mazzini was wont, with over-confidence, to appeal to as +"collective wisdom." Theoretically there is much to be said for this +view: but, in practice, it involves another idealism as aerial as that of +any "idealogue" on the side of Liberty. It points to the establishment of +an Absolutism which must continue to exist, whether wisdom survives in +the absolute rulers or ceases to survive. [Greek: Kratein d' esti kai mae +dikios.] The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have been beneficent in +times of revolution; but their right to rule is apt to pass before their +power, and when the latter descends by inheritance, as from M. Aurelius +to Commodus, it commonly degenerates. It is well to learn, from a safe +distance, the amount of good that may be associated with despotism: its +worst evil is lawlessness, it not only suffocates freedom and induces +inertia, but it renders wholly uncertain the life of those under its +control. Most men would rather endure the "slings and arrows" of an +irresponsible press, the bustle and jargon of many elections, the delay +of many reforms, the narrowness of many streets, than have lived from +1814 to 1840, with the noose around all necks, in Paraguay, or even +precariously prospered under the paternal shield of the great Fritz's +extraordinary father, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. + +Carlyle's doctrine of the ultimate identity of "might and right" never +leads, with him, to its worst consequence, a fatalistic or indolent +repose; the withdrawal from the world's affairs of the soul "holding no +form of creed but contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent +optimist nor a consistent pessimist is apparent from his faith in man's +partial ability to mould his fate. Not "belief, belief," but "action, +action," is his working motto. On the title-page of the _Latter-Day +Pamphlets_ he quotes from Rushworth on a colloquy of Sir David Ramsay and +Lord Reay in 1638: "Then said his Lordship, 'Well, God mend all!'--'Nay, +by God, Donald; we must help Him to mend it,' said the other." + +"I am not a Tory," he exclaimed, after the clamour on the publication of +_Chartism_, "no, but one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest of +Radicals." With the Toryism which merely says "stand to your guns" and, +for the rest, "let well alone," he had no sympathy. There was nothing +selfish in his theories. He felt for and was willing to fight for +mankind, though he could not trust them; even his "king" he defines to +be a minister or servant of the State. "The love of power," he says, "if +thou understand what to the manful heart power signifies, is a very noble +and indispensable love"; that is, the power to raise men above the "Pig +Philosophy," the worship of clothes, the acquiescence in wrong. "The +world is not here for me, but I for it." "Thou shalt is written upon life +in characters as terrible as thou shalt not"; are protests against the +mere negative virtues which religionists are wont unduly to exalt. + +Carlyle's so-called Mysticism is a part of his German poetry; in the +sphere of common life and politics he made use of plain prose, and often +proved himself as shrewd as any of his northern race. An excessively +"good hater," his pet antipathies are generally bad things. In the +abstract they are always so; but about the abstract there is no +dispute. Every one dislikes or professes to dislike shams, hypocrisies, +phantoms,--by whatever tiresomely reiterated epithet he may be pleased to +address things that are not what they pretend to be. Diogenes's toil with +the lantern alone distinguished the cynic Greek, in admiration of an +honest man. Similarly the genuine zeal of his successor appears in +painstaking search; his discrimination in the detection, his eloquence in +his handling of humbugs. Occasional blunders in the choice of objects +of contempt and of worship--between which extremes he seldom +halts,--demonstrate his fallibility, but outside the sphere of literary +and purely personal criticism he seldom attacks any one, or anything, +without a show of reason. To all gospels there are two sides; and a great +teacher who, by reason of the very fire that makes him great, disdains to +halt and hesitate and consider the _juste milieu,_ seldom guards himself +against misinterpretation or excess. Mazzini writes, "He weaves and +unweaves his web like Penelope, preaches by turns life and nothingness, +and wearies out the patience of his readers by continually carrying them +from heaven to hell." Carlyle, like Ruskin, keeps himself right not by +caveats but by contradictions of himself, and sometimes in a way least to +be expected. Much of his writing is a blast of war, or a protest against +the philanthropy that sets charity before justice. Yet in a letter to the +London Peace Congress of 1851, dated 18th July, we find:-- + + I altogether approve of your object. Clearly the less war + and cutting of throats we have among us, it will be the + better for us all. As men no longer wear swords in the + streets, so neither by and by will nations.... How many + meetings would one expedition to Russia cover the cost of? + +He denounced the Americans, in apparent ignorance of their +"Constitution," for having no Government; and yet admitted that what he +called their anarchy had done perhaps more than anything else could have +done to subdue the wilderness. He spoke with scorn of the "rights of +women," their demand for the suffrage, and the _cohue_ of female authors, +expressing himself in terms of ridiculous disparagement of writers so +eminent as George Sand and George Eliot; but he strenuously advocated +the claim of women to a recognised medical education. He reviled "Model +Prisons" as pampering institutes of "a universal sluggard and scoundrel +amalgamation society," and yet seldom passed on the streets one of the +"Devil's elect" without giving him a penny. He set himself against every +law or custom that tended to make harder the hard life of the poor: there +was no more consistent advocate of the abolition of the "Game Laws." +Emerson says of the mediaeval architects, "they builded better than they +knew." Carlyle felt more softly than he said, and could not have been +trusted to execute one of his own Rhadamanthine decrees. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ a remarkable instance of this in the best short _Life of +Carlyle_, that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147.] + +Scratch the skin of the Tartar and you find beneath the despised +humanitarian. Everything that he has written on "The Condition of England +Question" has a practical bearing, and many of his suggestions have found +a place on our code, vindicating the assertion of the _Times_ of the day +after his death, that "the novelties and paradoxes of 1846 are to a large +extent nothing but the good sense of 1881." Such are:--his insistence on +affording every facility for merit to rise from the ranks, embodied in +measures against promotion by Purchase; his advocacy of State-aided +Emigration, of administrative and civil service Reform,--the abolition of +"the circumlocution office" in Downing Street,--of the institution of a +Minister of Education; his dwelling on the duties as well as the rights +of landowners,--the theme of so many Land Acts; his enlarging on the +superintendence of labour,--made practical in Factory and Limited Hours +Bills--on care of the really destitute, on the better housing of the +poor, on the regulation of weights and measures; his general contention +for fixing more exactly the province of the legislative and the executive +bodies. Carlyle's view that we should find a way to public life for +men of eminence who will not cringe to mobs, has made a step towards +realisation in further enfranchisement of Universities. Other of his +proposals, as the employment of our army and navy in time of peace, and +the forcing of able-bodied paupers into "industrial regiments," have +become matter of debate which may pave the way to legislation. One of +his desiderata, a practical veto on "puffing," it has not yet been found +feasible, by the passing of an almost prohibitive duty on advertisements, +to realise. + +Besides these specific recommendations, three ideas are dominant in +Carlyle's political treatises. _First_--a vehement protest against +the doctrine of _Laissez faire_; which, he says, "on the part of the +governing classes will, we repeat again and again, have to cease; pacific +mutual divisions of the spoil and a would-let-well-alone will no longer +suffice":--a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the Trades Union +wars, of which he failed to see the issue. He is so strongly in favour of +_Free-trade_ between nations that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared +to make it _compulsory_. "All men," he writes in _Past and Present_, +"trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do +it. Our friends of China, who refused to trade, had we not to argue with, +them, in cannon-shot at last?" But in Free-trade between class and class, +man and man, within the bounds of the same kingdom, he has no trust: he +will not leave "supply and demand" to adjust their relations. The +result of doing so is, he holds, the scramble between Capital for larger +interest and Labour for higher wage, in which the rich if unchecked will +grind the poor to starvation, or drive them to revolt. + +_Second_.--As a corollary to the abolition of _Laissez faire_, he +advocates the _Organisation of Labour_, "the problem of the whole future +to all who will pretend to govern men." The phrase from its vagueness +has naturally provoked much discussion. Carlyle's bigoted dislike of +Political Economists withheld him from studying their works; and he seems +ignorant of the advances that have been made by the "dismal science," +or of what it has proved and disproved. Consequently, while brought in +evidence by most of our modern Social idealists, Comtists and Communists +alike, all they can say is that he has given to their protest against the +existing state of the commercial world a more eloquent expression than +their own. He has no compact scheme,--as that of St. Simon or Fourier, or +Owen--few such definite proposals as those of Karl Marx, Bellamy, Hertzka +or Gronlund, or even William Morris. He seems to share with Mill the view +that "the restraints of communism are weak in comparison with those of +capitalists," and with Morris to look far forward to some golden age; he +has given emphatic support to a copartnership of employers and employed, +in which the profits of labour shall be apportioned by some rule of +equity, and insisted on the duty of the State to employ those who are out +of work in public undertakings. + + Enlist, stand drill, and become from banditti soldiers of + industry. I will lead you to the Irish bogs ... English + foxcovers ... New Forest, Salisbury Plains, and Scotch + hill-sides which as yet feed only sheep ... thousands of + square miles ... destined yet to grow green crops and fresh + butter and milk and beef without limit:-- + +an estimate with the usual exaggeration. But Carlyle's later work +generally advances on his earlier, in its higher appreciation of +Industrialism. He looks forward to the boon of "one big railway right +across America," a prophecy since three times fulfilled; and admits that +"the new omnipotence of the steam engine is hewing aside quite other +mountains than the physical," _i.e._ bridging the gulf between races +and binding men to men. He had found, since writing _Sartor_, that dear +cotton and slow trains do not help one nearer to God, freedom, and +immortality. + +Carlyle's _third_ practical point is his advocacy of _Emigration,_ or +rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy for Over-population. +He writes of "Malthusianism" with his constant contempt of convictions +other than his own:-- + + A full formed man is worth more than a horse.... One + man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him + earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded + indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and + delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your + population in the Pampas and Savannahs--in the Curragh of + Kildare? Let there be an _Emigration Service,_ ... so + that every honest willing workman who found England too + strait, and the organisation of labour incomplete, might + find a bridge to carry him to western lands.... Our little + isle has grown too narrow for us, but the world + is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.... If + this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not + everywhere else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to + us "Come and till me, come and reap me"? + +On this follows an eloquent passage about our friendly Colonies, +"overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas." Carlyle +would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans, +and Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; but the +problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines +to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to +overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps. + +In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is +ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of +Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite +tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's +leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public +life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive +to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day +demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of +_laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to +become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one, +of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule +for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample +without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common +good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's +blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many +respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits +of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity with an +eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with equal force put to scorn the +superstition of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts, +some of which may find a mark the archer little meant. + +[Footnote: _Vide passim_ the chapter in _Liberty_ entitled "Limits to the +Authority of Society over the Individual," where Mill denounces the idea +of "the majority of operatives in many branches of industry ... that bad +workmen ought to receive the same wages as good."] + + + + +CHAPTER X + +CARLYLE'S RELIGION AND ETHICS--RELATION TO PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE + +The same advance or retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is +traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages +of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the +widest sense--faith in some supreme Power above us yet acting for us--was +the great factor of his inner life. But when we further question his +Creed, he is either bewilderingly inconsistent or designedly vague. The +answer he gives is that of Schiller: "Welche der Religionen? Keine +von allen. Warum? Aus Religion." In 1870 he writes: "I begin to think +religion again possible for whoever will piously struggle upwards and +sacredly refuse to tell lies: which indeed will mostly mean refusal to +speak at all on that topic." This and other implied protests against +intrusive inquisition are valid in the case of those who keep their own +secrets: it is impertinence to peer and "interview" among the sanctuaries +of a poet or politician or historian who does not himself open their +doors. But Carlyle has done this in all his books. A reticent writer may +veil his convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. An +avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interrogation as to his text. + +With all the evidence before us--his collected works, his friendly +confidences, his journals, his fragmentary papers, as the interesting +series of jottings entitled "Spiritual Optics," and the partial accounts +to Emerson and others of the design of the "Exodus from Hounds-ditch"--it +remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We know that he +abandoned the ministry, for which he was destined, because, at an early +date, he found himself at irreconcilable variance, not on matters of +detail but on essentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism. +We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; that he went, as +continuously as possible for a mind so liable to fits and starts, further +and further from the faith of his fathers; but that he remained to the +last so much affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early +associations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist without +dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a Puritan who had lost +his creed." We know that he revered the character of Christ, and +theoretically accepted the ideal of self-sacrifice: the injunction +to return good for evil he never professed to accept; and vicarious +sacrifice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught that every +man must "dree his weird." We know that he not only believed in God as +revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but +that he threatened, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point +to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in +free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the +greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we +desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of +exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did _not_ believe. +This process is simplified by the fact that he assailed all convictions +other than his own. + +Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all +forms of _Materialism_ and _Hedonism,_ which he brands as "worships of +Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may +lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain. +Similarly he denounces _Atheism,_ never more vehemently than in his +Journals of 1868-1869:-- + + Had no God made this world it were an insupportable place. Laws without + a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. All that is good, + generous, wise, right ... who or what could by any possibility have + given it to me, but One who first had it to give! This is not logic, it + is axiom.... Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic specialities."... + Canst _thou_ by searching find out God? I am not surprised thou canst + not, vain fool. If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered + hearts, there will be seen such a world as few are dreaming of. + +Carlyle calls evidence from all quarters, appealing to Napoleon's +question, "Who made all that?" and to Friedrich's belief that intellect +"could not have been put into him by an entity that had none of its own," +in support of what he calls the Eternal Fact of Facts, to which he clings +as to the Rock of Ages, the sole foundation of hope and of morality to +one having at root little confidence in his fellow-men. + +If people are only driven upon virtuous conduct ... by association of +ideas, and there is no "Infinite Nature of Duty," the world, I should +say, had better count its spoons to begin with, and look out for +hurricanes and earthquakes to end with. + +Carlyle hazardously confessed that as regards the foundations of his +faith and morals, with Napoleon and Friedrich II. on his side, he had +against him the advancing tide of modern _Science._ He did not attempt +to disprove its facts, or, as Emerson, to sublimate them into a new +idealism; he scoffed at and made light of them, _e.g._-- + + Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very + sublime achievement either. I often think ... it is pretty + much all that science in this age has done. ... Protoplasm + (unpleasant doctrine that we are all, soul and body, made of + a kind of blubber, found in nettles among other organisms) + appears to be delightful to many.... Yesterday there came a + pamphlet published at Lewes, a hallelujah on the advent of + Atheism.... The real joy of Julian (the author) was what + surprised me, like the shout of a hyaena on finding that the + whole universe was actually carrion. In about seven minutes + my great Julian was torn in two and lying in the place fit + for him.... Descended from Gorillas! Then where is the place + for a Creator? Man is only a little higher than the tadpoles, + says our new Evangelist.... Nobody need argue with these + people. Logic never will decide the matter, or will seem to + decide it their way. He who traces nothing of God in his own + soul, will never find God in the world of matter--mere + circlings of force there, of iron regulation, of universal + death and merciless indifference.... Matter itself is either + Nothing or else a product due to man's _mind_. ... The + fast-increasing flood of Atheism on me takes no hold--does + not even wet the soles of my feet. + + [Footnote: Cf. Othello, "Not a jot, not a jot." Carlyle writes + on this question with the agitation of one himself not quite at + ease, with none of the calmness of a faith perfectly secure.] + +"Carlyle," says one of his intimates, "speaks as if Darwin wished to rob +or to insult him." _Scepticism_ proper fares as hardly in his hands as +definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in +the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as +intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole +soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal +to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace +of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of life as "a +most melancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean Paul, +"heaven becomes a gas, God a force, and the second world a grave." He +fails to see that all such appeals are beside the question; and deserts +the ground of his answer to John Sterling's expostulation, "that is +downright Pantheism": "What if it were Pot-theism if it is _true_?" It is +the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sympathy for suffering +to override his Stoic theories; but it vitiated his reasoning, and made +it impossible for him to appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional, +religiosity of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called +_Orthodoxy_--whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High or Low; he +abhorred Puseyism, Jesuitry, spoke of the "Free Kirk and other rubbish," +and recorded his definite disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation +and in Miracles. "It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing has +ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation of God's will and +justice, and the stars in their courses are a perpetual miracle, is +his refrain. _This is not what Orthodoxy means_, and no one was more +intolerant than Carlyle of all shifts and devices to slur the difference +between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his own "Exodus from +Houndsditch" might only open the way to the wilderness, he would allow +no one else to take in hand his uncompleted task; and disliked Strauss +and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. "He spoke to me once," says +Mr. Froude, "with loathing of the _Vie de Jésus_." I asked if a true life +could be written. He said, "Yes, certainly, if it were right to do so; +but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to Emerson:-- + + You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom + I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen + were all a kind of half-way-house characters, who I thought + should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in + unbelief, in faint possible _Theism_; which I like + considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, + deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed + among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat. + +What then is left for Carlyle's Creed? Logically little, emotionally +much. If it must be defined, it was that of a Theist with a difference. A +spirit of flame from the empyrean, he found no food in the cold _Deism_ +of the eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image from its +pedestal, as by the music of the "Winter's Tale," to live among men and +inspire them. He inherited and _coûte que coûte_ determined to persist in +the belief that there was a personal God--"a Maker, voiceless, formless, +within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, "My belief in a +special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable"; and +later, "Some strange belief in a special Providence was always in me at +intervals." Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as good +as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days. + +"To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew +prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the God +on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is +He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's God is not a mere +"tendency that makes for righteousness"; He is a guardian and a guide, to +be addressed in the words of Pope's _Universal Prayer_, which he adopted +as his own. A personal God does not mean a great Figure Head of the +Universe,--Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before he became "a +knight" of the Holy Ghost,--it means a Supreme Power, Love, or Justice +having relations to the individual man: in this sense Carlyle believed in +Him, though more as Justice, exacting "the terriblest penalties," than +as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives. He never entered into +controversies about the efficacy of prayer; but, far from deriding, he +recommended it as "a turning of one's soul to the Highest." In 1869 he +writes:-- + + I occasionally feel able to wish, with my whole softened + heart--it is my only form of prayer--"Great Father, oh, if + Thou canst, have pity on her and on me and on all such!" In + this at least there is no harm. + +And about the same date to Erskine:-- + + "Our Father;" in my sleepless tossings, these words, that + brief and grand prayer, came strangely into my mind with an + altogether new emphasis; as if written and shining for me + in mild pure splendour on the black bosom of the night there; + when I as it were read them word by word, with a sudden + check to my imperfect wanderings, with a sudden softness of + composure which was much unexpected. Not for perhaps thirty + or forty years had I once formally repeated that prayer: nay, + I never felt before how intensely the voice of man's soul it + is, the inmost inspiration of all that is high and pious in + poor human nature, right worthy to be recommended with an + "After this manner pray ye." + +Carlyle holds that if we do our duty--the best work we can--and +faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, God will do the best +for us in this life. As regards the next we have seen that he ended with +Goethe's hope. At an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his +father's death (_Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 65) he wrote:-- + + Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told: + yet under time does there not lie eternity? ... Perhaps my + father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near + me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so + please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one + another, recognise one another. ... The possibility, nay (in + some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows + plainer to me. + +On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife: "We shall yet go to her. +God is great. God is good": and earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the +loss of his brother:-- + + "What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead. + + Your brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both + you and I are.... Perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and + the tears be wiped from all eyes. One thing is no perhaps: + surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of + us. If it be not His will, then is it not better so?" + +After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immortality came +uppermost in his mind; but his conclusions are, like those of Burns, +never dogmatic:-- + + The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us. + "In my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are + God you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do + you know more than I, or any of us? + +And later-- + + What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor + mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted + to go farther"? + +To Emerson in 1867 he writes:-- + + I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily + serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final + chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and + Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to + discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their + sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring + nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger + to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my + door against. + +There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's conviction that +he had to make war on credulity and to assail the pretences of a _formal +Belief_ (which he regards as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple +with real Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, the +Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the miracle of miracles; +sight and knowledge leave us no "less forlorn," and beneath all the +soundings of science there is a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind +that qualified him to be the exponent of the religious epochs in history. +"By this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, "he has done so much to vindicate +and bring to light the Augustan age of Christianity in England," adding +that it is the secret also of the great writer's appreciation of the +higher Teutonic literature. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of +"God in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to constrain +unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good and evil are absolute +opposites, are his links with the Puritans, whom he habitually exalts in +variations of the following strain:-- + + The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest + purpose awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts. + Not the body of heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to + die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been, + and yet shall be immortal, has, for the present, passed away. + +Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he regarded with a feeling +akin to worship, was in all essentials the reverse of a Puritan. + +To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, may be applied +the phrase made use of in reference to the greatest of all the series of +ancient books-- + + Hic liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata quaerit, + Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua. + +From passages like those above quoted--his complaints of the falling +off of old Scotch faith; his references to the kingdom of a God who has +written "in plain letters on the human conscience a Law that all may +read"; his insistence that the great soul of the world is just; his +belief in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the divine +depths of sorrow--from all these many of his Scotch disciples persist in +maintaining that their master was to the end essentially a Christian. The +question between them and other critics who assert that "he had renounced +Christianity" is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomenclature; it +is hard exactly to decide it in the case of a man who so constantly found +again in feeling what he had abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was +to the last an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's and +of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies; he attempts in vain to tear +off the husk that cannot be separated from its kernel. He believes in no +historical Resurrection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts +for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the +Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is +withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards +of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives +way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out," +and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity +Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Masson says that "Carlyle had +abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its +Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain on the other side: +but the _Metaphysic_ of Calvinism is precisely what he retained; the +alleged _Facts_ of Revelation he discarded; of the _Ethic_ of the Gospels +he accepted perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard +the teaching of Christ as final. + +[Footnote: A passage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life and Letters of Robert +Browning_, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic for +general quotation.] + +His doctrine of Renunciation (suggested by the Three Reverences in +_Wilhelm Meister's Travels_) is Carlyle's transmutation, if not +transfiguration, of Puritanism; but it took neither in him nor in Goethe +any very consistent form, save that it meant Temperance, keeping the +body well under the control of the head, the will strong, and striving, +through all the lures of sense, to attain to some ideal life. + +Both write of Christianity as "a thing of beauty," a perennial power, +a spreading tree, a fountain of youth; but Goethe was too much of a +Greek--though, as has been said, "a very German Greek"--to be, in any +proper sense of the word, a Christian; Carlyle too much of a Goth. His +Mythology is Norse; his Ethics, despite his prejudice against the race, +are largely Jewish. He proclaimed his code with the thunders of Sinai, +not in the reconciling voice of the Beatitudes. He gives or forces on us +world-old truths splendidly set, with a leaning to strength and endurance +rather than to advancing thought. He did not, says a fine critic of +morals, recognise that "morality also has passed through the straits." He +did not really believe in Content, which has been called the Catholic, +nor in Progress, more questionably styled the Protestant virtue. His +often excellent practical rule to "do the duty nearest to hand" may be +used to gag the intellect in its search after the goal; so that even his +Everlasting Yea, as a predetermined affirmation, may ultimately result in +a deeper negation. + +[Footnote: _Vide_ Professor Jones's _Browning as a Philosophical and +Religious, Teacher_, pp. 66-90.] + +"Duty," to him as to Wordsworth, "stern daughter of the voice of God," +has two aspects, on each of which he dwells with a persistent iteration. +The _first_ is _Surrender_ to something higher and wider than ourselves. +That he has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the +self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly means that correct +theories of our complex life are impossible; but Matthew Arnold's +criticism, that his Ethics "are made paradoxical by his attack on +Happiness, which he should rather have referred to as the result of +Labour and of Truth," can only be rebutted by the assertion that the +pursuit of pleasure as an end defeats itself. The _second_ aspect of his +"Duty" is _Work_. His master Goethe is to him as Apollo to Hercules, as +Shakespeare to Luther; the one entire as the chrysolite, the other like +the Schreckhorn rent and riven; the words of the former are oracles, of +the latter battles; the one contemplates and beautifies truth, the other +wrestles and fights for it. Carlyle has a limited love of abstract truth; +of action his love is unlimited. His lyre is not that of Orpheus, but +that of Amphion which built the walls of Thebes. _Laborare est orare._ He +alone is honourable who does his day's work by sword or plough or pen. +Strength is the crown of toil. Action converts the ring of necessity that +girds us into a ring of duty, frees us from dreams, and makes us men. + + The midnight phantoms feel the spell, + The shadows sweep away. + +There are few grander passages in literature than some of those litanies +of labour. They have the roll of music that makes armies march, and if +they have been made so familiar as to cease to seem new, it is largely +owing to the power of the writer which has compelled them to become +common property. + +Carlyle's practical Ethics, though too little indulgent to the light and +play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the +relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his +conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical +imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in +flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite +above and around, but not _in_ the finite. He insisted on the community +of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am I my brother's +keeper?" + + All things, the minutest that man does, influence all men, + the very look of his face blesses or curses.... It is a + mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my + hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe. + +But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and so failed to +attain to the Optimism after which he often strove. He held, with +Browning, that "God's in His heaven," but not that "All's right with the +world." His view was the Zoroastrian _*athanatos machae*_, "in God's +world presided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a "divine +infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who said "The world is a +lie, but God is truth," landed him in an _impasse_; he could not answer +the obvious retort,--Did then God make and love a lie, or make it hating +it? There must have been some other power _to eteron_, or, as Mill in +his Apologia for _Theism_ puts it, a limit to the assumed Omnipotence. +Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, inconsequently halts between them; +and his prevailing view of mankind adds to his dilemma. + +[Footnote: Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist +Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer," +ejaculated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er Remit nicht diese +verdarnmte Basse."] + +He imposes an "infinite duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an +infinite punishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind sets +its hardest tasks to itself; or that, as Emerson declares, "the assertion +of our weakness and deficiency is the fine innuendo by which the soul +makes its enormous claim." Hence, according to Mazzini, "He stands between +the individual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes the +human being by comparing him with God. From, his lips, so daring, we seem +to hear every instant the cry of the Breton mariner, 'My God, protect me; +my bark is so small and Thy ocean so vast.'" Similarly, the critic of +Browning above referred to concludes of the great prose writer, whom he +has called the poet's twin: + +"He has let loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight of the +future: he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there and was +denied the view from Pisgah." + +Carlyle's Theism is defective because it is not sufficiently Pantheistic; +but, in his view of the succession of events in the "roaring loom of +time," of the diorama of majesty girt by mystery, he has found a +cosmic Pantheism and given expression to it in a passage which is the +culmination of the English prose eloquence, as surely as Wordsworth's +great Ode is the high-tide [A phrase applied by Emerson to the +Ode.] mark of the English verse, of this century:-- + + Are we not sprite shaped into a body, into an Appearance; + and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is + no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of + Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us as + round the veriest spectre is Eternity, and to Eternity + minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love + and Faith as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of + beatified Souls? And again do we not squeak and gibber and + glide, bodeful and feeble and fearful, and revel in our mad + dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the morning air + summons us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake + and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon; does the steel + host that yelled in fierce battle shouts at Issus and + Arbela remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, + even as perturbed goblins must? Napoleon, too, with his + Moscow retreats and Austerlitz campaigns, was it all other + than the veriest spectre hunt; which has now with its + howling tumult that made night hideous flitted away? + Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the + earth openly at noontide; some half hundred have vanished + from it, some half hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch + ticks once. O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider + that we not only carry each a future ghost within him, but are + in very deed ghosts. + + [Footnote: _Cf._ "Tempest," "We are such stuff as dreams are + made of."] + + These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life- + blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow; a + shadow system gathered round our _me_, wherein through some + moments or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the + Flesh. So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the + end. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a + body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night on Heaven's mission + appears. What force and fire there is in each he expends, one + grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the + giddy Alpine heights of science; one madly dashed in pieces on + the rocks of Strife in war with his fellow, and then the heaven- + sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even + to sense becomes a vanished shadow. Thus, like some wild naming, + wild thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this + mysterious Mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick- + succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God- + created fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge from the Inane, + haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again + into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas + filled up. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is + stamped; the rear of the host read traces of the earliest van. + But whence, O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not. Faith knows not; + only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. + +Volumes might be written on Carlyle's relations, of sentiment, belief, +opinion, method of thought, and manner of expression, to other thinkers. +His fierce independence, and sense of his own prophetic mission to the +exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often +unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who +impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to +acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been +wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which +exercised so marked an influence on his New England disciples. He never +realised the part played by the philosophers of Greece in moulding the +speculations of modern Europe. He knew Plato mainly through the Socratic +dialogues. There is, however, a passage in a letter to Emerson (March 13th +1853) which indicates that he had read, comparatively late in life, some +portions of _The Republic_. "I was much struck with Plato last year, and +his notions about Democracy--mere _Latter-Day Pamphlets, saxa et faces_ +... refined into empyrean radiance and the lightning of the gods." The +tribute conveyed in the comparison is just; for there is nothing but +community of political view between the bitter acorns dropped from the +gnarled border oak and the rich fruit of the finest olive in Athene's +garden. But the coincidences of opinion between the ancient and the modern +writer are among the most remarkable in literary history. We can only +refer, without comments, to a few of the points of contact in this strange +conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both +possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they +attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:--_Laissez faire_; the growth +of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, +education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian +spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, +which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of +the ages and circumstances admit. They propose the same remedies:-- +a return to simpler manners, and stricter laws, with the best men in the +State to regulate and administer them. Philosophers, says Plato, are to be +made guardians, and they are to govern, not for gain or glory, but for the +common weal. They need not be happy in the ordinary sense, for there is a +higher than selfish happiness, the love of the good. To this love they +must be _systematically educated_ till they are fit to be kings and +priests in the ideal state; if they refuse they _must_, when their turn +comes, be _made to govern_. Compare the following declarations of +Carlyle:-- + + Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teaching + class--these two sometimes combined in one, a Pontiff + King--there did not society exist without those two vital + elements, there will none exist. Whenever there are born + Kings of men you had better seek them out and _breed them + to the work_.... The few wise will have to take command + of the innumerable foolish, they _must be got to do it_. + +The Ancient and the Modern, the Greek and the Teuton, are further +curiously at one:--in their dislike of physical or mental +Valetudinarianism (cf. _Rep._ Bs. ii. and iii. and _Characteristics_); +in their protests against the morality of consequences, of rewards and +punishments as motives for the highest life (the just man, says Plato, +crucified is better than the unjust man crowned); in their contempt for +the excesses of philanthropy and the pampering of criminals (cf. +_Rep._ B. viii.); in their strange conjunctions of free-thinking and +intolerance. Plato in the Laws enacts that he who speaks against the gods +shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and at last, if he persists in his +impiety, put to death; yet he had as little belief in the national +religion as Carlyle. + +[Footnote: Rousseau, in the "Contrat Social," also assumes this position; +allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows +disrespect to the State Religion.] + +They both accept Destiny,--the Parcae or the Norns spin the threads of +life,--and yet both admit a sphere of human choice. In the Republic the +souls select their lots: with Carlyle man can modify his fate. The +juxtaposition in each of Humour and Pathos (cf. Plato's account of the +dogs in a Democracy, and Carlyle's "Nigger gone masterless among the +pumpkins," and, for pathos, the image of the soul encrusted by the world +as the marine Glaucus, or the Vision of Er and Natural Supernaturalism) is +another contact. Both held that philosophers and heroes were few, and yet +both leant to a sort of Socialism, under State control; they both assail +Poetry and deride the Stage (cf. _Rep._ B. ii. and B. x. with Carlyle on +"The Opera"), while each is the greatest prose poet of his race; they are +united in hatred of orators, who "would circumvent the gods," and in +exalting action and character over "the most sweet voices"--the one +enforcing his thesis in the "language of the gods," the other preaching +silence in forty volumes of eloquent English speech. + +Carlyle seems to have known little of Aristotle. His Stoicism was +indigenous; but he always alludes with deference to the teaching of the +Porch. Marcus Aurelius, the nearest type of the Philosophic King, must +have riveted his regard as an instance of the combination of thought and +action; and some interesting parallels have been drawn between their +views of life as an arena on which there is much to be done and little +to be known, a passage from time to a vague eternity. They have the same +mystical vein, alongside of similar precepts of self-forgetfulness, +abnegation, and the waiving of desire, the same confidence in the power +of the spirit to defy or disdain vicissitudes, ideas which brought both +in touch with the ethical side of Christianity; but their tempers and +manner are as far as possible apart. Carlyle speaks of no one with more +admiration than of Dante, recognising in the Italian his own intensity +of love and hate and his own tenacity; but beyond this there is little +evidence of the "Divina Commedia" having seriously attuned his thought: +nor does he seem to have been much affected by any of the elder English +poets. He scarcely refers to Chaucer; he alludes to Spenser here and +there with some homage, but hardly ever, excepting Shakespeare, to the +Elizabethan dramatists. + +Among writers of the seventeenth century, he may have found in Hobbes +some support of his advocacy of a strong government; but his views on +this theme came rather from a study of the history of that age. Milton +he appreciates inadequately. To Dryden and Swift he is just; the latter, +whether consciously to Carlyle or not, was in some respects his English +master, and the points of resemblance in their characters suggest +detailed examination. Their styles are utterly opposed, that of the one +resting almost wholly on its Saxon base, that of the other being a +coat of many colours; but both are, in the front rank of masters of +prose-satire, inspired by the same audacity of "noble rage." Swift's +humour has a subtler touch and yet more scathing scorn; his contempt of +mankind was more real; his pathos equally genuine but more withdrawn; +and if a worse foe he was a better friend. The comparisons already +made between Johnson and Carlyle have exhausted the theme; they remain +associated by their similar struggle and final victory, and sometimes by +their tyrannous use of power; they are dissociated by the divergence of +their intellectual and in some respects even their moral natures; both +were forces of character rather than discoverers, both rulers of debate; +but the one was of sense, the other of imagination, "all compact." The +one blew "the blast of doom" of the old patronage; the other, against +heavier odds, contended against the later tyranny of uninformed and +insolent popular opinion. Carlyle did not escape wholly from the +influence of the most infectious, if the most morbid, of French writers, +J.J. Rousseau. They are alike in setting Emotion over Reason: in +referring to the Past as a model; in subordinating mere criticism to +ethical, religious or irreligious purpose; in being avowed propagandists; +in their "deep unrest"; and in the diverse conclusions that have been +drawn from their teaching. + +Carlyle's enthusiasm for the leaders of the new German literature was, in +some measure, inspired by the pride in a treasure-trove, the regard of a +foster-father or _chaperon_ who first substantially took it by the hand +and introduced it to English society: but it was also due to the feeling +that he had found in it the fullest expression of his own perplexities, +and at least their partial solution. His choice of its representatives is +easily explained. In Schiller he found intellectually a younger brother, +who had fought a part of his own fight and was animated by his own +aspirations; in dealing with his career and works there is a shade +of patronage. Goethe, on the other hand, he recognised across many +divergencies as his master. The attachment of the belated Scotch Puritan +to the greater German has provoked endless comment; but the former has +himself solved the riddle. The contrasts between the teacher and pupil +remain, but they have been exaggerated by those who only knew Goethe as +one who had attained, and ignored the struggle of his hot youth on the +way to attainment. Carlyle justly commends him, not for his artistic +mastery alone, but for his sense of the reality and earnestness of life, +which lifts him to a higher grade among the rulers of human thought +than such more perfect artists and more passionate lyrists as Heine. He +admires above all his conquest over the world, without concession to it, +saying:-- + + With him Anarchy has now become Peace ... the once + perturbed spirit is serene and rich in good fruits.... + Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been + attained by a surrender to Necessity, or any compact with + Delusion--a seeming blessing, such as years and dispiritment + will of themselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no + blessing, since ever-continued battle is better than + captivity. Many gird on the harness, few bear it + warrior-like, still fewer put it off with triumph. Euphorion + still asserts, "To die in strife is the end of life." + +Goethe ceased to fight only when he had won; his want of sympathy with +the so-called Apostles of Freedom, the stump orators of his day, was +genuine and shared by + +Carlyle. In the apologue of the _Three Reverences_ in _Meister_ the +master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike his pupil, verges +on sentimental paradox, declaring through the lips of the Chief in that +imaginary pedagogic province--which here and there closely recalls the +_New Atlantis_--that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery and +despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine--nay, even on sin and crime to +look not as hindrances, but to honour them, as furtherances of what is +holy." In answer to Emerson's Puritanic criticisms Carlyle replies:-- + + Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than + I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John + Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable + _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty + was infinite,--Knox would have passed on wondering, not + reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like + Goethe. His is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, + that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it + was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold + even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when + all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that + man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you + love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is + not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse + to bear than bad, and on the whole whether the glorious + serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane--as + Light, the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning. + +Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in accord with Carlyle +was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of sayings--as "There is but one temple +in the universe, and that is the body of man," "Who touches a human hand +touches God"--that especially commended themselves to his commentator. +Among philosophers proper, Fichte, in his assertion of the Will as a +greater factor of human life and a nearer indication of personality than +pure Thought, was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The _Vocation of the Scholar_ +and _The Way to a Blessed Life_ anticipated and probably suggested much +of the more speculative part of _Sartor_. But to show their relation +would involve a course of Metaphysics. + +We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life +and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man +with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter--_Jean Paul +der einzige_, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted +on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of +humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a +lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have +influenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of queer +titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, and endless +digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream in the first _Flower Piece_ +from the life of Siebenkäs, and that on _New Year's Eve_, are like +pre-visions of _Sartor_, and we find in the fantasies of both authors +much of the same machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of +_Schmelzle's Journey to Flätz_ might pass current for Carlyle's own; and +it is evident that the latter was saturated with _Quintus Fixlein_. The +following can hardly be a mere coincidence. Richter writes of a dead +brother, "For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself +among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him, +melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sank his heart of fire +amid the ice and waves"; while in _Cui Bono_ we have-- + + What is life? a thawing ice-board + On a sea with sunny shore. + +Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of _Fixlein_, especially the +passage, "Then begun the Æolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest +pathos of _Sartor_. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common +"reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness, +and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the _Foreign +Quarterly_ of 1830 might be taken for a criticism of himself. + +Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magnanimity in estimating +his English contemporaries; but the deliberate judgments of his essays +were often more genial than those of his letters and conversation; and +perhaps his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew round +him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful than his severity; it is +good for no man to live with satellites. His practical severance from +Mazzini was mainly a personal loss: the widening of the gulf between +him and Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been better +qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other. Carlyle was the +greater genius; but the question which was the greater mind must be +decided by the conflict between logic and emotion. They were related +proximately as Plato to Aristotle, the one saw what the other missed, and +their hold on the future has been divided. Mill had "the dry light," and +his meaning is always clear; he is occasionally open to the charge +of being a formalist, allowing too little for the "infusion of the +affections," save when touched, as Carlyle was, by a personal loss; yet +the critical range indicated by his essay on "Coleridge" on the one side, +that on "Bentham" on the other, is as wide as that of his friend; and +while neither said anything base, Mill alone is clear from the charge of +having ever said anything absurd. His influence, though more indirect, +may prove, save artistically, more lasting. The two teachers, in their +assaults on _laissez faire,_ curiously combine in giving sometimes +undesigned support to social movements with which the elder at least had +no sympathy. + +Carlyle's best, because his most independent, friend lived beyond the +sea. He has been almost to weariness compared with Emerson, initial +pupil later ally, but their contrasts are more instructive than their +resemblances. They have both at heart a revolutionary spirit, marked +originality, uncompromising aversion to illusions, disdain of traditional +methods of thought and stereotyped modes of expression; but in Carlyle +this is tempered by greater veneration for the past, in which he holds +out models for our imitation; while Emerson sees in it only fingerposts +for the future, and exhorts his readers to stay at home lest they should +wander from themselves. The one loves detail, hates abstraction, delights +to dwell on the minutiæ of biography, and waxes eloquent even on dates. +The other, a brilliant though not always a profound generaliser, tells +us that we must "leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and +study the sentiment as it appeared in hope not in history ... with the +ideal is the rose of joy. But grief cleaves to names and persons, and +the partial interests of to-day and yesterday." The one is bent under a +burden, and pores over the riddle of the earth, till, when he looks up at +the firmament of the unanswering stars, he can but exclaim, "It is a sad +sight." The other is blown upon by the fresh breezes of the new world; +his vision ranges over her clear horizons, and he leaps up elastic under +her light atmosphere, exclaiming, "Give me health and a day and I will +make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a half-Germanised +Scotchman, living near the roar of the metropolis, with thoughts of +Weimar and reminiscences of the Covenanting hills. Emerson studies +Swedenborg and reads the _Phædo_ in his garden, far enough from the din +of cities to enable him in calm weather to forget them. "Boston, London, +are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke; so is society, so is the world." +The one is strong where the other is weak. Carlyle keeps his abode in +the murk of clouds illumined by bolts of fire; he has never seen the sun +unveiled. Emerson's "Threnody" shows that he has known the shadow; but he +has fought with no Apollyons, reached the Celestial City without crossing +the dark river, and won the immortal garland "without the dust and heat." +Self-sacrifice, inconsistently maintained, is the watchword of the one: +self-reliance, more consistently, of the other. The art of the two +writers is in strong contrast. The charm of Emerson's style is its +precision; his sentences are like medals each hung on its own string; the +fields of his thought are combed rather than ploughed: he draws outlines, +as Flaxman, clear and colourless. Carlyle's paragraphs are like streams +from Pactolus, that roll nuggets from their source on their turbid way. +His expressions are often grotesque, but rarely offensive. Both writers +are essentially ascetic,--though the one swallows Mirabeau, and the other +says that Jane Eyre should have accepted Eochester and "left the world in +a minority." But Emerson is never coarse, which Carlyle occasionally is; +and Carlyle is never flippant, as Emerson often is. In condemning the +hurry and noise of mobs the American keeps his temper, and insists on +justice without vindictiveness: wars and revolutions take nothing from +his tranquillity, and he sets Hafiz and Shakespeare against Luther and +Knox. Careless of formal consistency--"the hobgoblin of little minds"--he +balances his aristocratic reserve with a belief in democracy, in +progression by antagonism, and in collective wisdom as a limit to +collective folly. Leaving his intellectual throne as the spokesman of a +practical liberty, Emerson's wisdom was justified by the fact that he was +always at first on the unpopular, and ultimately on the winning, side. +Casting his rote for the diffusion of popular literature, a wide +suffrage, a mild penal code, he yet endorsed the saying of an old +American author, "A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will +sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is +a raft that will never sink, but then your feet are always in water." + +[Footnote: Carlyle, on the other hand, holds "that," as has been said, "we +are entitled to deal with criminals as relics of barbarism in the midst of +civilisation." His protest, though exuberated, against leniency in dealing +with atrocities, emphatically requisite in an age apt to ignore the rigour +of justice, has been so far salutary, and may be more so.] + +Maintaining that the State exists for its members, he holds that the +enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular +governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law +need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men, +"to educate whom the State exists"; but he regards them as inspired +mouthpieces rather than controlling forces: their prime mission is to +"fortify our hopes," their indirect services are their best. The career +of a great man should rouse us to a like assertion of ourselves. We ought +not to obey, but to follow, sometimes by not obeying, him. "It is the +imbecility not the wisdom of men that is always inviting the impudence of +power." + +It is obvious that many of these views are in essential opposition to the +teaching of Carlyle; and it is remarkable that two conspicuous men so +differing and expressing their differences with perfect candour should +have lived so long on such good terms. Their correspondence, ranging +over thirty-eight years (begun in 1834, after Emerson's visit to +Craigenputtock, and ending in 1872, before his final trip to England), +is on the whole one of the most edifying in literary history. The +fundamental accord, unshaken by the ruffle of the visit in 1847, is a +testimony to the fact that the common preservation of high sentiments +amid the irksome discharge of ordinary duties may survive and override +the most distinct antagonisms of opinion. Matthew Arnold has gone so far +as to say that he "would not wonder if Carlyle lived in the long run by +such an invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson +and not by his works." This is paradoxical; but the volumes containing +it are in some respects more interesting than the letters of Goethe and +Schiller, as being records of "two noble kinsmen" of nearer intellectual +claims. The practical part of the relationship on the part of Emerson is +very beautiful; he is the more unselfish, and on the whole appears the +better man, especially in the almost unlimited tolerance that passes with +a smile even such violences as the "Ilias in nuce"; but Carlyle shows +himself to be the stronger. Their mutual criticisms were of real benefit. +Emerson succeeded in convincing his friend that so-called anarchy might +be more effective in subduing the wilderness than any despotism; while +the advice to descend from "Himalaya peaks and indigo skies" to concrete +life is accepted and adopted in the later works of the American, _Society +and Solitude_ and the _Conduct of Life,_ which Carlyle praises without +stint. Keeping their poles apart they often meet half-way; and in matters +of style as well as judgment tinge and tend to be transfused into each +other, so that in some pages we have to look to the signature to be sure +of the writer. Towards the close of the correspondence Carlyle in this +instance admits his debt. + + I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can + speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him. + Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes + to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world + there were still but this one voice that responded + intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all + hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive. + My blessings on you, good Ralph Waldo. + +Emerson answers in 1872, on receipt of the completed edition of his +friend's work: "You shall wear the crown at the Pan-Saxon games, with no +competitor in sight ... well earned by genius and exhaustive labour, and +with nations for your pupils and praisers." + +The general verdict on Carlyle's literary career assigns to him the first +place among the British authors of his time. No writer of our generation, +in England, has combined such abundance with such power. Regarding his +rank as a writer there is little or no dispute: it is admitted that the +irregularities and eccentricities of his style are bound up with its +richness. In estimating the value of his thought we must discriminate +between instruction and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has +taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answer must be, +"few." This is a perhaps inevitable result of the manner of his writing, +or rather of the nature of his mind. Aside from political parties, he +helped to check their exaggerations by his own; seeing deeply into the +under-current evils of the time, even when vague in his remedies he +was of use in his protest against leaving these evils to adjust +themselves--what has been called "the policy of drifting"--or of dealing +with them only by catchwords. No one set a more incisive brand on the +meanness that often marks the unrestrained competition of great cities; +no one was more effective in his insistence that the mere accumulation +of wealth may mean the ruin of true prosperity; no one has assailed with +such force the mammon-worship and the frivolity of his age. Everything he +writes comes home to the individual conscience: his claim to be regarded +as a moral exemplar has been diminished, his hold on us as an ethical +teacher remains unrelaxed. It has been justly observed that he helped +to modify "the thought rather than the opinion of two generations." His +message, as that of Emerson, was that "life must be pitched on a higher +plane." Goethe said to Eckermann in 1827 that Carlyle was a moral force +so great that he could not tell what he might produce. His influence has +been, though not continuously progressive, more marked than that of any +of his compeers, among whom he was, if not the greatest, certainly the +most imposing personality. It had two culminations; shortly after the +appearance of _The French Revolution,_ and again towards the close of the +seventh decade of the author's life. To the enthusiastic reception of his +works in the Universities, Mr. Froude has borne eloquent testimony, and +the more reserved Matthew Arnold admits that "the voice of Carlyle, +overstrained and misused since, sounded then in Oxford fresh and +comparatively sound," though, he adds, "The friends of one's youth cannot +always support a return to them." In the striking article in the _St. +James' Gazette_ of the date of the great author's death we read: "One who +had seen much of the world and knew a large proportion of the remarkable +men of the last thirty years declared that Mr. Carlyle was by far the +most impressive person he had ever known, the man who conveyed most +forcibly to those who approached him [best on resistance principles] +that general impression of genius and force of character which it is +impossible either to mistake or to define." Thackeray, as well as Ruskin +and Froude, acknowledged him as, beyond the range of his own _métier_, +his master, and the American Lowell, penitent for past disparagement, +confesses that "all modern Literature has felt his influence in the right +direction"; while the Emersonian hermit Thoreau, a man of more +intense though more restricted genius than the poet politician, +declares--"Carlyle alone with his wide humanity has, since Coleridge, +kept to us the promise of England. His wisdom provokes rather than +informs. He blows down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light, +like the Jöthuns, to throw the old woman Time; in his work there is too +much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay-making under the sun. He +makes us act rather than think: he does not say, know thyself, which is +impossible, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, no clear +goal, but an endless Atlantic horizon. He exaggerates. Yes; but he makes +the hour great, the picture bright, the reverence and admiration strong; +while mere precise fact is a coil of lead." Our leading journal on the +morning after Carlyle's death wrote of him in a tone of well-tempered +appreciation: "We have had no such individuality since Johnson. Whether +men agreed or not, he was a touchstone to which truth and falsehood were +brought to be tried. A preacher of Doric thought, always in his pulpit +and audible, he denounced wealth without sympathy, equality without +respect, mobs without leaders, and life without aim." To this we may add +the testimony of another high authority in English letters, politically +at the opposite pole: "Carlyle's influence in kindling enthusiasm for +virtues worthy of it, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one +hand and the unreality on the other, of all that men can do and suffer, +has not been surpassed by any teacher now living. Whatever later teachers +may have done in definitely shaping opinion ... here is the friendly +fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark; here the prophet who +first smote the rock." Carlyle, writes one of his oldest friends, "may +be likened to a fugleman; he stood up in the front of Life's Battle and +showed in word and action his notion of the proper attitude and action of +men. He was, in truth, a prophet, and he has left his gospels." To those +who contest that these gospels are for the most part negative, we may +reply that to be taught what not to do is to be far advanced on the way +to do. + +In nothing is the generation after him so prone to be unjust to a fresh +thinker as with regard to his originality. A physical discovery, as +Newton's, remains to ninety-nine out of a hundred a mental miracle; but a +great moral teacher "labours to make himself forgotten." When he begins +to speak he is suspected of insanity; when he has won his way he receives +a Royal Commission to appoint the judges; as a veteran he is shelved for +platitude. So Horace is regarded as a mere jewelry store of the Latin, +Bacon in his _Essays_, of the English, wisdom, which they each in +fact helped to create. Carlyle's paradoxes have been exaggerated, his +partialities intensified, in his followers; his critical readers, not his +disciples, have learnt most from him; he has helped across the Slough of +Despond only those who have also helped themselves. When all is said of +his dogmatism, his petulance, his "evil behaviour," he remains the master +spirit of his time, its Censor, as Macaulay is its Panegyrist, and +Tennyson its Mirror. He has saturated his nation with a wholesome tonic, +and the practice of any one of his precepts for the conduct of life is +ennobling. More intense than Wordsworth, more intelligible than Browning, +more fervid than Mill, he has indicated the pitfalls in our civilisation. +His works have done much to mould the best thinkers in two continents, +in both of which he has been the Greatheart to many pilgrims. Not a +few could speak in the words of the friend whose memory he has so +affectionately preserved, "Towards me it is still more true than towards +England that no one has been and done like you." A champion of ancient +virtue, he appeared in his own phrase applied to Fichte, as "a Cato Major +among degenerate men." Carlyle had more than the shortcomings of a Cato; +he had all the inconsistent vehemence of an imperfectly balanced mind; +but he had a far wider range and deeper sympathies. The message of the +modern preacher transcended all mere applications of the text _delenda +est._ He denounced, but at the same time nobly exhorted, his age. A +storm-tossed spirit, "tempest-buffeted," he was "citadel-crowned" in his +unflinching purpose and the might of an invincible will. + + + + +APPENDIX + +CARLYLE'S RELIGION + +The _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11, 1881, writes:-- + +"It is obvious that from an early age he entirely ceased to believe, in +its only true sense, the creed he had been taught. He never affected +to believe it in any other sense, for he was far too manly and +simple-hearted to care to frame any of those semi-honest transmutations +of the old doctrines into new-fangled mysticism which had so great a +charm for many of his weaker contemporaries. On the other hand, it is +equally true that he never plainly avowed his unbelief. The line he took +up was that Christianity, though not true in fact, had a right to be +regarded as the noblest aspiration after a theory of the Universe and of +human life ever formed: and that the Calvinistic version of Christianity +was on the whole the best it ever assumed; and the one which represented +the largest proportion of truth and the least amount of error. He also +thought that the truths which Calvinism tried to express, and succeeded +in expressing in an imperfect or partially mistaken manner, were the +ultimate governing principles of morals and politics, of whose systematic +neglect in this age nothing but evil could come. + +"Unwilling to take up the position of a rebel or revolutionist by stating +his views plainly--indeed if he had done so sixty years ago he might have +starved--the only resource left to him was that of approaching all the +great subjects of life from the point of view of grim humour, irony, and +pathos. This was the real origin of his unique style; though no doubt its +special peculiarities were due to the wonderful power of his imagination, +and to some extent--to a less extent we think than has been usually +supposed--to his familiarity with German. + +"What then was his creed? What were the doctrines which in his view +Calvinism shadowed forth and which were so infinitely true, so ennobling +to human life? First, he believed in God; secondly, he believed in an +absolute opposition between good and evil; thirdly, he believed that +all men do, in fact, take sides more or less decisively in this great +struggle, and ultimately turn out to be either good or bad; fourthly, he +believed that good is stronger than evil, and by infinitely slow degrees +gets the better of it, but that this process is so slow as to be +continually obscured and thrown back by evil influences of various +kinds--one of which he believed to be specially powerful in the present +day. + +"God in his view was not indeed a personal Being, like the Christian +God--still less was He in any sense identified with Jesus Christ; who, +though always spoken of with rather conventional reverence in his +writings, does not appear to have specially influenced him. The God in +which Mr. Carlyle believed is, as far as can be ascertained, a +Being possessing in some sense or other will and consciousness, and +personifying the elementary principles of morals--Justice, Benevolence +(towards good people), Fortitude, and Temperance--to such a pitch that +they may be regarded, so to speak, as forming collectively the will of +God.... That there is some one who--whether by the earthquake, or +the fire, or the still small voice--is continually saying to +mankind--'_Discite justitiam moniti'_; and that this Being is the +ultimate fact at which we can arrive ... is what Mr. Carlyle seems to +have meant by believing in God. And if any one will take the trouble to +refer to the first few sentences of the Westminster Confession, and to +divest them of their references to Christianity and to the Bible, he will +find that between the God of Calvin and of Carlyle there is the closest +possible similarity.... The great fact about each particular man is the +relation, whether of friendship or enmity, in which he stands to God. In +the one case he is on the side which must ultimately prevail, ... in the +other ... he will, in due time, be crushed and destroyed.... Our relation +to the universe can be ascertained only by experiment. We all have to +live out our lives.... One man is a Cromwell, another a Frederick, a +third a Goethe, a fourth a Louis XV. God hates Louis XV. and loves +Cromwell. Why, if so, He made Louis XV., and indeed whether He made him +or not, are idle questions which cannot be answered and should not be +asked. There are good men and bad men, all pass alike through this +mysterious hall of doom called life: most show themselves in their true +colours under pressure. The good are blessed here and hereafter; the bad +are accursed. Let us bring out as far as may be possible such good as a +man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the +hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr. +Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and +morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in +either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might +regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the +inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival of +the fittest has much in common with the doctrine of election, and +philosophical necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution, +comes practically to much the same result as predestination." + + + + INDEX + + Aberdour + Addiscombe + Addison + Æschylus + Ailsa Craig + Airy (the astronomer) + Aitken, James + Aitken, Mary + Aitken, Mrs. + Aix-la-Chapelle + Albert, Prince + Alison + Alma + America + Annan + Annandale + Annual Register + Antoinette, Marie + Aristotle + Arndt + Arnold, Dr. + Arnold, Matthew + Ashburton, Lord and Lady + Assaye + Atheism + _Athenæum_ + Augustenburg + Austerlitz + Austin + Austin, Mrs. + Azeglio + + Bacon + Badams + Badcort + Balaclava + Balzac + Bamford, Samuel + Barbarossa + Baring, see Ashburton + Bassompierre + Beaconsfield, Lord + Beaumarchais + Beethoven + Belgium + Bellamy + Bentham + Berkeley + Berlin + Bernstoff, Count + Biography (by Froude) + Birmingham + Bismarck + _Blackwood,_ + Boehm + Bohemia + Bolingbroke + Bonn + Boston + Boswell + Breslau + Brewster, Sir David + Bright + Brocken, spectre of the + Bromley, Miss + Bronte, Emily + Brougham + Brown, Prof. + Browne, Sir Thomas + Browning + Bryant _note_ + Buckle + Buller, Charles + Buller, Mrs. + Bunsen + Burke + Burness, William + Burns + Byron + + Caesar + _Cagliostro, Count_ + Cairnes + Calderon + Calvin + Campbell, Macleod + Campbell, Thomas + Carleton + Carlyle (family) + Carlyle, Alexander + Carlyle, James (brother) + Carlyle, James (father) + Carlyle, John, Dr. + Carlyle, Margaret (mother) + Carlyle, Margaret (sister) + Carlyle, Mrs. (Jane Welsh)(wife) + Carlyle, Thomas (grandfather) + Carlyle, Thomas, + birth; + education; + studies German; + lives in Edinburgh and takes pupils; + studies law; + tutor to the Bullers; + goes to London; + at Hoddam Hill; + marriage; + Edinburgh life; + married life; + life at Craigenputtock; + second visit to London; + publishes _Sartor_; + takes house in Chelsea; + life and work in London; + loss of first volume of _French Revolution_; + rewrites first volume of _French Revolution_; + lectures; + founds London Library; + publishes _Chartism_; + writes _Past and Present_; + writes _Life of Cromwell_; + visits Ireland; + visits Paris; + writes _History of Friedrich II._; + excursions to Germany; + nominated Lord Rector of Glasgow; + success of _Friedrich II._; + Lord Rector of Edinburgh; + death of his wife; + writes his _Reminiscences_; + defends Governor Eyre; + writes on Franco-German War; + writes on Russo-Turkish War; + honours; + declining years; + death; + Appreciation of; + authorities for his life; + complaints; + contemporary history; + conversation; + critic, as; + descriptive passages; + domestic troubles; + dreams; + dyspepsia; + elements of his character; + estimates (his) of contemporaries; + ethics; + financial affairs; + friends; + genius; historian, as; + ignorance; + influence; + journal; + jury, serves on a; + letters; + literary artist + mission + nicknaming + mania + noises + opinions + paradoxes + polities + popularity and praise + preacher, as, + rank as a writer + relations to other thinkers + religion + routine + scepticism + sound-proof room, + style + teaching + translations + travels, and visits + truth + verses + views, change of + walks + worker, as + Cassel + Castlebar + Cato + Cavaignac, General + Cervantes + Chalmers, Dr. + Changarnier, General + _Characteristics,_ + Charlemagne + _Chartism,_ + Chatham + Chaucer + Chelsea + Cheyne Row + China + Chotusitz + Christianity + Church, English + Cicero + Cid, the + Civil War + Civil War (American) + Clare, Lady + Clarendon + Clerkenwell explosions + Clough, Arthur + Cobden + Coblenz + Cockburn + Colenso, Bishop + Coleridge + Colonies + Columbus + Comte + Conservatism + Conway, Moncure + Cooper, Thomas + Cornelius + _Correspondence,_ + Cortes + Cousin + Craigcrook + Craigenputtock + Crimean War + Cromwell + _Cromwell, Life and Letters of,_ + Crystal Palace Exhibition + Cushman, Miss + Cüstrin + Cuvier + Czars, the + + Dante + Danton + Dardanelles + Darwin + David II. + _Deism,_ + Democracy, + De Morgan + Demosthenes + De Quincey + Derby, Countess of + Desmoulins + _Dial, The,_ + _Diamond Necklace,_ + Dickens + Diderot + Diogenes + Disraeli. _See_ Beaconsfield + Dobell + _Don Quixote,_ + Döring, Herr + Dresden + Drogheda + Drumclog + Dryden + Duffy, Sir C. Gavan + Dumfries + Dunbar + Dunbar (poet) + Duty + + Ecclefechan + Eckermann + Edinburgh + _Edinburgh Encyclopaedia_ + _Edinburgh Review_ + Education + Eisenach + Eldin, Lord + Eliot, George + Emerson + _Emigration_ + Ems + England + _English Traits_ (Emerson's) + Erasmus + Erfurt + Erskine + _Essay on Proportion_ + _Essays_ (Carlyle's) + Everett, Alexander + _Examiner,_ + "Exodus from Houndsditch," + Eyre, Governor + Eyre, Jane + + Faber + Factory Acts + Faust + Fawcett + Fergusson, Dr. John + Fichte + FitzGerald, Edward + Flaxman + _Foreign Quarterly Preview_ + _Foreign Review_ + Förster + Forster, John + Forster, W.E. + Fouqué + Fourier + Foxton, Mr. + France + Franchise + Francia, Dr. + Frankenstein + Frankfort + _Fraser_ + Free Trade + French Directory + French literature + _French Revolution_ + Friedrich II. + _Friedrich II., History of_ + Fritz. _See_ Friedrich + Fritz (Carlyle's horse) + Froude, Mr. + Fryston + Fuchs, Reinecke + + Galileo + Gallipoli + Galway + Game Laws + Gavazzi, Father + Georgel, Abbé + German literature + German worthies + Germany + Gibbon + Gladstone, Sir T + Gladstone, W. E. + Glasgow + _Glasgow Herald_ + Goethe + Goldsmith + Gordon, Margaret + Gordon (quadroon preacher) + Gotha + Grant, J. + Greek thought + Grimm's law + Gronlund + Grote + Guizot + Gully, Dr. + Gully, Miss + Guntershausen + + Haddington + Hafiz + Hakluyt + Hallam + Hallam, Arthur + Hamburg + Hamilton, Sir William + Hare, Archdeacon + Harrison, Frederick + _Harvard Discourse_ (Emerson's) + Hawthorne + Hayti + Heath (royalist writer) + Hedonism + Hegel + Heine, Heinrich + _Helena_ + Helps + Henry VIII. + _Hero-Worship_ (and _On Heroes_} + Herrnhut + Hertzka + Heyne + Hildebrand + Hill, Lord George + _Histories_ (Carlyle's) + History, definition of + _History_ review of + Hobbes + Hochkirk + Hoddam Hill + Hoffmann + Holinshed + Homburg + Homer + Home Rule + Horace + Home, E.H. + Houghton, Lord + Hudson (Railway King) + Hughes, T. + Hugo, Victor + Humboldt + Hume + Hunef + Hunt, Leigh + Huxley, Professor + + "Ilias Americana in nuce" + Immortality + Inkermann + _In Memoriam_ (Tennyson's) + Inquisition + Ireland + Ireland, Mrs. + Irish Question + Irving, Edward + + Jamaica + Jeffrey + Jena + Jerrold, Douglas + Jewsbury, Geraldine + _Jocelin de Brakelond_ + Johnson + _Johnson_ Review of Boswell's + Johnston, James + Jomini + Jonson, Ben + Journalism, definition of + Judengasse + Junius + Juvenal + + Kant + Keats + Keble + Kingsley, Charles + Kingsley, Henry + Kinnaird + Kirkcakly + Knox + Kolin + Körner + Kossuth + Kunersdorf + + Lamb + Landor + Landshut + Lanin, M. + Laplace + Larkin + _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ + Law, Carlyle's study of + Lawson, Mr., James Carlyle's estimate of + _Lectures_ + Legendre + Leibnitz + Leipzig + Leith + Leslie, Prof. + Leuthen + Leyden + "Liberal Association" + Liberalism + Liegnitz + Literature as a profession + Liverpool + Livy + Lobositz + Locke + "Locksley Hall" + London + London Library + _London Magazine_ + London Peace Congress + Longfellow + Longmans (the publisher) + Louis XIV. + Louis XV. + Louis XVIII. + Louisa, Electress + Lowell + Lucilius + Luichart, Loch + "Luria" + Luther + + Macaulay + Macbeth + Machiavelli + Mackenzie, Miss Stuart + Mahon, Lord + Mainhill + Mainz + Malthusianism + Malvern + Marat + Marburg + Marcus Aurelius + Marlborough + _Marseillaise_ + Marshall + Mavtineau, Miss H. + Marx, Carl + Massou, Prof. + _Materialism_ + Mathematics + Maurice, F. D. + Mazzini + M'Crie + _Meister, Wilhelm_ + Melanchthen + Mentone + Meredith, George + Mericourt + Merimée, Prosper + Metaphysics, Scotch + Michelet + Middle Ages + Mill, J.S. + Millais + Milman + Milton + Mirabeau + _Miscellanies_ + Mitchell, Robert + Mitchell (Young Ireland leader) + Model Prisons + Mohammed + Molesworth + Molwitz + Montague, Basil + Montaigne + Montgomery, Robert + More, Sir Thomas + Morris, William + Motley + Motte, Countess de la + Muirkirk + Murchison, Sir R. + Murray (the publisher) + Murray, Thomas + Musæus + + Napier, Macvey + Napoleon I. + Napoleon III. + Naseby + Nassau + Necker + Negroes + Nelson + "Nero" (Mrs. Carlyle's dog) + Neuberg + New England + Newman, Cardinal + Newspapers + Newton + Nibelungen Lied + Nicholas the Czar + "Nigger Question" + Noble (biographer of Cromwell) + North, Christopher + Norton, Charles E. + _Norway, Early Kings of_ + Novalis + + O'Brien, Smith + O'Connell + Optimism + Orsay, Count d' + Orthodoxy vetoed + Ossoli, Countess (Margaret Fuller) + Owen + Oxford + Oxford, Bishop of + + Paraguay + Pardubitz + Paris + _Past and Present_ + Paton, Noel + Paulets, the + Peel + Pericles + Peter the Hermit + Philanthropy + Philip of Hesse + Plato + Playfair + Political economy + Political philosophy + Pope + Popes + Prague + Prayer + Prescott + Preuss + _Prinzenraub_ + Procter + Procter, Mrs. Anne + Puritanism + Pusey + Putbus + + _Quarterly Review_ + Queen Victoria + + Radicalism + Railways + Raleigh + Ranke + Ranch + "Reading of Books" + Redwood + Reform Bills + _Reminiscences_ + Renan + Rennie, George + Revolution years + Rhine + Ricardo + Richter + Riesen-Gebirge + Riquetti + Ritualism + Robertson + Robespierre + Roland, Madame + Rolandseck + Romans + Rome, cause of its preservation + Romilly, Sir Samuel + Rossbach + Rossetti, Dante + Rotterdam + Rousseau + Rugby + Rügen + Rushworth + Ruskin + Russell, Lord John + Russell, Mrs., at Thornhill + Russia + Russo-Turkish War + + Sadowa + St. Andrews + St. Ives + _St. James's Gazette_ + St. Simon + Samson, Abbot + Sand, George + _Sartor Resartus_ + Saunders and Otley (publishers) + Saxons + Scepticism + Schiller + Schlosser + Science + Scotland + Scotsbrig + _Scotsman_ newspaper + Scott, W.B. + Scott, Sir Walter + Sedan + Sepoy rebellion + Seven Years' War + Shaftesbury, Lord + Shakespeare + Shelley + _Shooting Niagara_ + Sidney, Sir Philip + _Signs of the Times_ + Simon de Montfort + Sinclair, Sir George + Slavery + Sloane, Sir Hans + Smail, Tom + Smith, Adam + Smith, Goldwin + Smith, Sydney + Smollett + Snowdon + Socrates + Sophocles + Southey + Spain + Spedding + Spencer, Herbert + Spenser + Stanley, Dean + Stanley, Lady Augusta + Stanleys (of Alderley) + Steele + Stein + Stephen, Fitzjames + Stephen, Sir James + Sterling + _Sterling, Life of_ + Sterne + Stewart, Dugald + Stodart, Miss Eliza + Stonehenge + Strachey, Mr. + Strachey, Mrs. + Stralsund + Strauss + Stuart, Mary + Sturge + _Sun,_ newspaper + Swift + Swinburne + Switzerland + + Tacitus + Taine, M. + _Tale of a Tub_ (Swift's) + Talleyrand + Talma + Taylor, Henry + Taylor's _German Literature_ + Taylor, Mrs. + Tennyson + Teufelsdröckh + Thackeray + Theism + Thierry, M. + Thiers + Thirlwall, Bishop + Thoreau + Thucydides + Tieck + _Times,_ the + Toplitz + Torgau + Trafalgar + Turgot + Turks + Turner + Tyndall + + _Unto this Last_ (Ruskin's) + Usedom, Baron + + Varennes + Vauvenargues + Vehse + Verses (Carlyle's) + Verses (Mrs. Carlyle's) + Virginia + Voltaire + + _Wanderjahre_ + Wartburg + Washington + Waterloo + Watts, G. F. + Webster, Daniel + Weimar + Weissenfels + Wellington (Duke of) + Welsh, Jane. _See_ Mrs. Carlyle + Welsh, Mrs. + _Werner_ + _Werther_ (Goethe's) + Westminster Abbey + Westminster Confession + _Westminster Review_ + Westport + Wilberforce (Bishop) + William the Conqueror + William the Silent + Willis's Rooms + Wilson + Wolseley + Worcester + Wordsworth + _Work_ + Working classes + _World_ (newspaper) + _Wotton Reinfred_ + + Yarmouth + + Zittau + Zorndorf + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thomas Carlyle, by John Nichol + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS CARLYLE *** + +This file should be named 8carl10.txt or 8carl10.zip +Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 8carl11.txt +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 8carl10a.txt + +Produced by Jayam Subramanian, Robert Connal, +and PG Distributed Proofreaders + +Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US +unless a copyright notice is included. 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