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English Alen of Letters

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY

THOMAS CARLYLE

ἰ δὰ} 4" ζ

ΒΥ
/

JOHN NICHOL, LL.D., M.A., BALLIOL, Oxon

EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

London
MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK
1892

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 indig-
nation 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 the most ample 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

vi _ PREFATORY NOTE

withdrawn ; and that the initial permission to select finally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 for several of the Press
comments which appeared shortly after Carlyle’s death,
more especially that of the Si. James’s Gazette, giving
the most philosophical brief summary of his religious
views which 1 have seen; and for the kindness of Dr.
Eugene Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in
revising my proof-sheets, and supplying me with numerous
valuable hints, especially in 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 Diction-
ary 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 previ-
ously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs. Carlyle
and the incidents of her death. To her inner history 1
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)

PAGE

Vili CONTENTS

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

ETHICOS—PREDECESSORS—INFLUENCE .

APPENDIX—

On CARLYLE’S RELIGION . .

161 4

188

214 .

246

THOMAS CARLYLE

ERRATA.

Page 5, line 1, for “‘church” read ‘‘ churchyard.”
» 7@1, ,, 11, for ‘‘his character” read ‘‘ Carlyle’s character.”

ULILE UL YU. UVL VE νῶν Ὡρῶν τ. ----- -- ν᾿

points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substi-
tuting 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

% B

Vili CONTENTS

CHAPTER VI
1853-1866

THE MinorauR—(To death of Mrs, Carlyle) .

CHAPTER VII

1866-1881
DECADENCE

CHAPTER VIII

136

CARLYLE

THOMAS CARLYLE

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY

Four ScOTOHMEN, 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.

Davip 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 substi-
tuting 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.

g B

2 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 Scort (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 medizval 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 crea-
tion 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 com-
mon types of his countrymen. Burns, despite his perfervid

I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY 8

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 dis-
paraged, 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, however,
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 sub-
stantial honesty ; but, in the one, there is a dominant faith,

4 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

tempered by pride, in the “caste of Vere de Vere,” in Free-
dom for itseli—a faith marred by shifting purposes, the gar-
rulous 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,
& 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 as
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, pas-
sions 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 con-
temporary English prose he has left no adequate successor :}
the throne that does not pass by primogeniture is vacant,
and the bleak northern skies seem colder and grayer since

1 The nearest being the now foremost prose writers of our time, Mr.
Ruskin and Mr, Froude.

I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY ' 5

that venerable head was laid to rest in the village eteurct,
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 “ Dubarry-
dom” hurrying from the “ Armida Palace,” where Louis
XV. and the ancien régime lay dying; later to the ticking
of the clocks in Launay’s deomed Bastile ; again to the tocsin
of the steeples that roused the singers of the Marseillaise
to march from “their bright Phocean city” and grapple
with the Swiss guard, last bulwark of the Bourbons. ‘“ ‘The

Ρ
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area Oe f ‘

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 four, Byron’s by seven years—in the year when Goethe
went to feel the pulse of the “cannon-fever” at Argonne—
already these sounds are like sounds across a sea. Two
whole generations have passed with the memory of half
their storms. ‘“ Another race has 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 Kast doubled its area, two peoples (the German
with, the Italian without, his sympathy) were consolidated

6 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 com-
mencement by the so-called Romantic movement, more
recently influenced by the Classic reaction, the Pre-
Raphaelite protest, the Aisthetic méde,—followed various
even contradictory standards. But, in one line of pro-
gress, 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 par-
tially 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 faster, 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

INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY 7

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
formule 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 uphol-
sterers,” he exclaims in his half comic, sometimes nonsensi-
cal, 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

8 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 rail-
ways ; I want what Novalis calls “ God, Freedom, and Immor-
tality.” Will swift railways and sacrifices to Hudson help me
_ towards that ἢ

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 and 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.” Indi-
vidualism was still a mark of the early years of the century.
The spirit of “L’Etat c’est moi” survived in Mirabeau,
“never name to me that bée 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.

I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY | 9

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 incon-
siderable 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 Atheneum, 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. LEcclefechan 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

10 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 floods of
light on the inter-relations of the organic world. But
there are troops of serfs, ullius “addicti jurare 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 “ἃ mind diseased,”
to Grimm’s Law or to the Magnetic Belt.

Let us grant that Cesar was evolved from the currents
in the air about the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius
was ἃ 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 medisval 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

I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY 11

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.

This, 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 over-
wrought activity, of superficial, however free, education,
when we run the risk of being associated into nothing-
ness 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, through 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—in reality, in thought, and more in
action, older than Buddha or than Achilles, but which he
first, as a dogma, sprang on our recent times, clenched with
the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau and Napoleon,

12 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP, I

mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of
Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made is still graven
on the minds of the men of light who lead, and cannot
be wholly effaced by the tongues 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. Otherwise, to
account for his attitude, we must refer to his life and to its
surroundings, ὁ.6. to the circumstances amid which he was
“ evolved.” ἘΝ

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 Atheneum 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 unfor-
tunate mortals: a Fuseli stroke of the critic ’ rivalling any
of the author criticised ; yet the comment has a grain of
truth.

The Carlyles are said to have come from the English town
somewhat differently spelt, to Annandale, with David IL.,
and, according to a legend, which the great author did not
disdain to accept, among them was a certain Lord of Tor-
thorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The

1 Even the most adverse critics of Carlyle are often his imitators, their
hands taking a dye from what they work in.

14 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 High-
landers 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 tough-
ness and springiness of steel; an honest but not an indus-
trious 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 awfw’ fighters.”
The second of the group, James, born 1757, married—first,
a cousin, Janet Carlyle (the issue of which marriage, John
of Cockermouth, died before his grandfather); 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,

II ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 15

extract a few passages which throw light, on the characters,
ie. 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 vera-

city. . . . 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 especi-
ally 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

16 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 re-
mained 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 Lockerby, 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 un-
sympathetic side recalls rather the father of the Brontés 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 Teufelsdréckh,
and the dramatic drollery of the child’s advent takes the

— —— hand — oo; στο er, cD. ὥ-

it ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 17

place of ancestry: Entefuhl 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 Words-
worth 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 worldly 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

18 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 hinter-
schlag, 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

II ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 19

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 curri- |
culum 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: “José must have
been a loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn
reflection, probably to crying humours, with fits of vehe-
ment ill nature—subject to the terriblest fits of hypo-
chondria.” 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 capit&l 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 Clark
(Lord Eldin), of the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews, and of
the elder Alison. The Chairs of the University were con-
spicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of ability re-
quired 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

20 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

training of average minds by requirements and retractions
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 pro-
tests or growls of irrepressible individuality kicking against
the pricks. He was never in any sense a classic; read
- Greek with difficulty—Aischylus 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 fre-
quent 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. The social leader of a select set of
young men in his own rank, by choice and necessity integer
vite he divided his time between the seclusion of study
and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was per-
haps 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

1 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.”

δ" ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 21

posthumous publication of some of his writings, 6.0. 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 what
Sydney Smith asserts to be the only unpermissible style,
“the tiresome ἢ; and the thought, far from being precocious,
is distinctly commonplace, 6.9. 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 un-
bending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary fame.

That his critical and literary instincts were yet un-
developed 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.

22 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

“Can anything be grander?” To Johnstone (who with
Mitchell consumes a whole 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 previ-
ously 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 circum-
stances?” The whole first volume of this somewhat over-
expanded collection overflows with ebullitions of bile, in
comparison with which the misanthropy of Byron’s early
romances seems philanthropy, ¢.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 automa-
tons, despicable Yahoos, yea, they are altogether an insufferable
thing, ‘‘O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, some bound-
less 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 recep-
tion 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

I ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 28

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 acquaint-
ance 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 formal antitheses, advice
that reflects well on 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, “1 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, obstinacy, and outré-
ness, unredeemed by any social advantages, were guarantees
of frequent failure. Men with the literary form of genius
highly developed have rarely much endurance of defeat.

ne ee OE oe να... .» es ὦ =. — -- - «--

“~

24 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 him-
self to a worm that, trodden on, would turn into a torpedo.
He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, which
“ onawed 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, mathemati-
cal 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 a plain sense, to subscribe to the West-
minster Confession or any so-called orthodox articles, and
equally unable by any philosophical reconciliation of con-
traries to write black with white on a ground of neutral
gray. 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 wilder-

ness.” 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 are not among the martyr-
ologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets.” Car-
lyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness to
the absence of a popularity vy yet professes to scorn.

1 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,”

- ees eee 8 eee

- -ι--.- «6 - «ὦ me Ὁ a Ree ee σῷ τς - - ~- ——_——

II ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 25

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 kin& 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, “1 am not happy,” which his
afterwards stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-
Jack 3 :

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 bogpost of disgust.

The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radi-
cal rising in Glasgow against the poverty which was the
natural aftermath of the gre#t war; oppressions, half real,
half imaginary, of the military force, and the yeomanry in
particular. Carlyle’s contribution to the reminiscences of ᾿"

26 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 illus-
trate 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 import-
ant. . . . 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 oppor-
tunities. None of Carlyle’s answers have been preserved,
but the sole trace of his having been influenced by his
friend’s advice is his contribution (1820-1823) of sixteen!

1 The subjects of these were—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mon-
taigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker,
Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamrtonshire,
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-

ΤΙ ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 27

articles to the Edinburgh Encyclopedia under the editor-
ship of Sir David Brewster. The scant remuneration
obtained from these was well timed, but they contain no
original matter, and did nothing for hisfame. 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,
“T have the ends of my thoughts to bring together. . .
my views of life to reform, my health to recover, and then
once more [ shall venture my bark on the waters of this
wide realm, and if she cannot weather it 1 shall steer west
and try the waters of another world.”

The resolves, sometimes the efforts of celebrated Eng-
lishmen, ‘nos manet oceanus,” as Cromwell, Burns, Cole-
ridge, and Southey (allured, some critic suggests, by the
poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough, Richard
Hengist Horne, and Browning’s “Waring,”* to elude

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 service.”
‘‘ 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 Mon-
taigne, 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.”

1 Cf. the American Byrant 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.

28 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

“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. 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 re-
cognition 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 a 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 argu-

ΙΙ ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 29

ment 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 his (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 first pages of the Le-
miniscences an account of a long walk with Irving, who
had arranged to accompany Carlyle for the first stage, 1.6.
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

30 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

articles, and visiting his friend at Annan, when there came
an offer of the charge of a son of a Yorkshire farmer,
which Irving urged him to accept, advancing the old plea,
“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 splen-
dours 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 pub-
lished, 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
Beotia 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

II ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 31

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 1 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 delli-
cately-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 Everlast-
ing 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 pro-
claiming 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;

82 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

a condition set forth with a superabundant paraphernalia
of eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of
Teufelsdréckh 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 receiv-
ing 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 bate no jot of my
allegiance. . . . Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me
for following her ; no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubber-
land were the price of apostacy.

With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough
of despond and asserts himself :—
Ich bin ein Mensch geboren
Und das muss ein Kimpfer 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. The Leith Walk revolt was rather

II ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 83

the attitude of a man turning at bay than 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 1 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 ἢ 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

34 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 contradic-
tion, 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

II ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 35 ’

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 Muszus, Fouqué, Tieck, Hoff-
mann, 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; but 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

36 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 re-
mained 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 pre-
mature death at the entrance on a sphere!-of wider
influence made a serious blank in his old master’s life.

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

1 Charles Buller became Carlyle’s pupil at the age of fifteen. He
died as Commissioner of the Poor in 1848 (a. forty-two).

eee eee ee ee

8 ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 37

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 eomplaints 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 1 had ever
witnessed. One man seems a drop in the ocean; you feel anni-
hilated 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

38 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 exasperate the libels, in some
cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being
addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his fre-
quent 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 Cam-
bridge. He declined both, and they parted, shaking hands
with dry eyes. “1 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.” |

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 Warwick-
shire. 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.”

1 Vide Carlyle’s Life of Sterling, chap. viii. p. 79

i ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH «9

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 saw Legendre and Laplace,
heard Cuvier lecture and Talma act, and, what was of more
moment, had his first sight 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 neigh-
bouring room in Southampton Street ; he was cheered by
Goethe’s own acknowledgment of the translation of Meister,
and wrote more epistolary satires, welcome at Haddington.

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 con-
tented periods of his life, there is a truce to complaining. ἃ
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 con-
tinued 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 quiet-
est on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly important
of my life. . . . I found that I had conquered all my scepti-

40 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

cisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and
vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch, and was emerg-
ing 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 re-
collect 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 con-
sciousness—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 convic-
tion. 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—

The storm and night is on the waste,
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—

- 3»

ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 41

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 jigmen, 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.’”—HappINGaTon ΝΎΒΒΕ.

‘¢ My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard ata
furlong’s distance.”—T. CARLYLE, from Craigenputtock, Oct. 1830.

DuR1NG the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the
verge of a crisis of his career, ἴ.6. 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.
Treland in her judicious and interesting abridgment of the
material amplysupplied. Jane Baillie Welsh (d. 1801, d. 1866)
—descended on the paternal side from Elizabeth, the young-
est daughter of John Knox ; on the maternal owning to an

CHAP. III CRAIGENPUTTOCK 43

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 from 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 acknow-
ledged, this brilliant creature was essentially “a mocking-
bird,” 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 ambi-
tious, 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,

44 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

reserve, and his soured temper about the world”; but when
he came to take leave, she confesses, “1 scarcely heard a word
he said, my own heart beat so loud.” Years after, in Lon-
don, 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 com-
miseration 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 ward, as guide, philosopher, and friend, his old
ally and successor, Thomas Carlyle. Between this ex-
ceptional pair there began in 1821 a relationship of
constant growth in intimacy, marked by frequent visits, ἡ
conversations, confidences, and a correspondence, long,
full, and varied, starting with interchange of literary
sympathies, and sliding by degrees into the dangerous
friendship called Platonical. 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

1π΄ CRAIGENPUTTOCK 45

critical consists of remarks, good, bad, and indifferent, on
books and their writers. Carlyle began his siege by talk-
ing German to her, now extolling Schiller and Goethe to
the skies, now, with a rare stretch of deference, half con-
niving 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 three-
score 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 :
“1 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

48 THOMAS CARLYLE ‘OHAP.

writes, “1 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 celeb-
rity of their brilliant conversational powers attracted the
brightest spirits of the northern capital, among them Sir
William Hamilton, Sir David Brewster, 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.

It CRAIGENPUTTOCK 49

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
Iiterature, 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 Car-
lyles, 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 judici-
ous, 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 Univer-
sity, ‘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.

1 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

50 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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, makeup therecord. 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, ἃ 6.
in monologue that did not wait or care for answer. There was
respect, there was affection, but there was little companion-
ship. 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 if he could longer 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

‘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 !

IIt CRAIGENPUTTOCK 51

in all the British dominions.” On ἃ sunny day it is an
inland home, with wide billowy straths of grass around,
inestimable silence broke 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 any wiser words than those
in which the veteran warns the young men, whose questions
he answers with touching solicitude, against its adoption.
“Tt 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 never-
theless 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 deter-
mination to pluck out the heart of the mystery, be it of

~~»

52 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 con-
sider 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, “1 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, “1 married for am-
bition, 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

ΠῚ CRAIGENPUTTOCK 58

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,tabout 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.”

Rome 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—

54 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 correspond-
ences 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 Litera-
ture, 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. Kames was a lawyer, Roscoe
a merchant, Hans Sachs a cobbler, Burns a gauger, etc.

The following singular passage, the style of which sug-
gests 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
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 {

ΠῚ CRAIGENPUTTOCK 55

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, what-
ever 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 the 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 transfer-
ence to London, he tried to negotiate for Carlyle’s appoint-
ment 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 tran-
scendental 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,

56 ‘THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 acknow-
ledges 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 anticipated the Clothes Philosophy; there are’
_ besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs, Jean Paul
Richter, and other German authors: but in our days origin-
ality is only possible in the handling; Carlyle has made
an imaginary German professor the mere mouthpiece of
his own and the higher aspiration 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

ΠῚ CRAIGENPUTTOCK 57

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 of benefits is the worst feature
of their pride. Carlyle made his second visit to London to
seek types far 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 18380, Teufelsdrickh 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 Gf memory serve) for Schiller six or
seven years before, and for Sartor, at least twice as good, [ 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 Long-
mans and another publisher, in hopes of a better bar-
gain, 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

-.-“ ee oo ee

58 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

Magazine to which the writer had already contributed
several of his German essays, and it was even then pub-
lished 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,” pro-
nounced 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: “1 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 disap-
pointing more or less 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 1 always suspect the guilty clear had it; but the
conscript fathers declined to vote at all.”’ In America
Sartor was pieced together from /’raser, published in a
volume introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by

1 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,

πτ CRAIGENPUTTOCK 59

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 deen
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 them-
selves, 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 meta-
physical, 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 in-
augurated 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 Tran-
scendentalism 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

60 THOMAS CARLYLE . CHAP.

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
whieh 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 boome-
rang. A sheaf of sharp sayings of the same date owe their
sting to their half truth, 6.9. to a man who excused himself
for profligate journalism on the old plea, “1 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 maga-
zines”—to which he had contributed, inéer alia, the great
Essay on Voltaire and the consummate sketch of Novalis;
with the second paper on Lichter to the Foreign Review, the
reviews of History and of Schiller to Fraser, and that
on Goethés Works to the Foreign Quarterly. During this
period he was introduced to Molesworth, Austin, and
J.S. Mill. On his summons, October lst 1832, Mrs. Carlyle
came up to Ampton Street, where he then resided, ts
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 friend-
ship 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 after-
wards 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

III CRAIGENPUTTOCK 61

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 soli-
tude, 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 per-
verse eccentricity which had retarded and might continue
to retard his advancement. 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

1 The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.

62 . THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP. III

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 prophe
not readily acknowledged in his own country”; “
Leben geht sehr iibel : 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
reck 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 Confes-
sions, 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, winding as slowly by the reaches of Barnes
and Battersea as Cowper’s Ouse, 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 Squaré.”
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 adu-
lated of men, lived over a stretch of forty-seven years.
Here were his headquarters, but he was a frequent wan-
derer. 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,

- 64 THOMAS CARLYLE _ CHAP.

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 liter-
ary 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.” |

ΠῚ. 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 Friedrich 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,

IV CHEYNE ROW 65

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 Hunt! in 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 bril-
liant 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

1 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.”
F

66 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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, pre-
vailed by reason of the colossal strength that made him a
Gulliver in Liliput. 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 pos-
sible for him to entertain towards a proximate equal. The
following is characteristic: ‘He had taken a great attach-
ment to me (which lasted about ten years and then sud-

Iv CHEYNE ROW 67

denly 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 “ delira-
tions” are the tears due to the sufferings of errant minds.
Their last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days
was in October 1634, 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 the 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, “Iam 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.

The work “stern and grim” was the French Revolution,

68 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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, #.e. to show that rulers, like those of the French
in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the plea-
sures 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 dis-
couragement. 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 a
knight 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

IV CHEYNE ROW 69

the most open, as it is the most lucrative, to literary aspir-
ants. 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 en-
shrinéd in one of the most beautiful of biographies. Car-
lyle’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 editor of the Times, and the latter promptly 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.
He 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 inde-

pendent 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

-΄

70 THOMAS CARLYLE | CHAP.

“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 his in-
vectives, and the phrase may have rankled in Carlyle’s mind.
Living in a glass case, while throwing stones about, super-
sensitive to criticism though professing to despise critica, 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.
. . . Tam tempted to go to America, . . . I shall quit litera-
ture, 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 Teufelsdréckh, looking for a rest
for the sole of his foot. And yet all the time, with in-
comparable 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 clos-
ing 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—

IV CHEYNE ROW 71

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 throw-
ing one of the finest lights on hig character. Carlyle’s 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 leave it lying about when read, so that,
as appears from the received accounts, it was mistaken by
the 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 dis-
aster which seemed to cancel the work of years! should
be set against his nearly contemporaneous criticisms of

1 Carlyle had only been writing the volume for five months ; but he
was preparing for it during much of his life at Craigenputtock.

"72 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

Coleridge, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Macaulay,
etc.

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 him-
self 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 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

Iv. CHEYNE ROW 73

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 burning.” Con-
sequently his readers confess that he has never forgot the
Horatian maxin—

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 of Mill’s contribution, have been “bitter
thrift” in Cheyne Row 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: “Ὁ 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 previ-
ous 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

74 THOMAS CARLYLE . CHAP,

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 feel as if I could not examine it 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 tem-
porary 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 organis-

ing a course of lectures to an audience collected by canvass
to hear 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

IV CHEYNE ROW 75

second of twelve, on the “ History of European Literature,”
at 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, had a net result of
£300; the ¢hird, 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 Inau-
gural Address as Lord Rector to the students of Edinburgh.

The impression he produced on his unusually select audi-
ences 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. Car-
lyle 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 Por-
traits 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 Ezaminer,
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 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 D’QOssoli, re-
ferred 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 :—

76 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 audi-
ences 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 foul-
est Circeean 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,” be 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

IV CHEYNE ROW 77

“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 desti-
nation 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 re-
quirements 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

78 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 cour-
age 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.
Clannish almost as Carlyle himself, 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

IV CHEYNE ROW 79

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 compli-
mented as “triumphant.” She performed them, ungrudg-
ingly 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 excep-
tions, 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 super-
sensitive and nervous people to live together: when they
are sensitive in opposite ways the alliance is fatal; fortu-
nately the Carlyles were, in this respect, in the main sym-
pathetic. With most of the household troubles which
occupy so exaggerated a space in the letters and journals
of both—papering, plastering, painting, deceitful or dis-
orderly 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 interest, to which we have before and must here
again finally refer, premising that it affected not one period
but the whole of their lives, ὁ.6. 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

80 . THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

like a sword,” of abating a “ Der Freischiitz of cats,” or a
pandemonium of barrel organs, of suppressing macaws for
which Carlyle “ could neither think nor live” ; now mitigat-
ing 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 philo-
sophy ; but, in the following to Sterling, she somewhat
bitterly protests against her own absorption: “In spite of
the honestest efforts to annihilate my 1—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. “Ὁ. 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 be-
tween 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

IV CHEYNE ROW 81

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 attrac-
tion increased, contrary to Kepler’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 recipro-
cated by a confidence and pride in him unruffled from
cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic differ-
ences, 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 bereave-
ment 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 Penfillan 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

82 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

household incident, though often quoted, is too character-
istic 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 entertain-
ment, 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 truth, reading them alongside of his angry

IV CHEYNE ROW 88

invectives, with his wife’s own accounts of the bilious
earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or
worse, his 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 οὗ.
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 Teufelsdréckh 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,

84 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 leav-
ing to his wife and himself practically from £200 to £300 a
year: why not finally return to the home of their early
married life, “in reduct& valle canicule,”. with no noise
around it but the trickle of rills and the nibbling of sheep ἢ
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 knew that within a year
Carlyle would again be calling it the Devil’s Den and
lamenting Cheyne Row. He gave way with the protest,
“T 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 recog-
nition 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

Iv CHEYNE ROW 85

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 belteve
and value, their own self-conceit: they are rattlesnakes then.” }
Tolerance for the frank expression of views which clash
with the sincere or professed faith of the majority is
rare everywhere ; in Scotland rarest. Episcopalians, high
and broad, were content to condone the grim Calvinism
that still infiltrated 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 inhabit-
ants “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
of Chartism. Thackeray admired and reviewed him well.
Even 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 it
in almost the same words as Byron did, he loved praise
equally well. In 1840 he had crossed the Rubicon that
lies between aspiration and attainment. The populace

1 The italics are Mr. Froude’s.

86 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP. IV

might be blind or dumb, the “rattlesnakes”—the “irre-
sponsible 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,”

OHAPTER 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 reveille 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 follow-
ing on the track of the first, Chartism, and written in a
similar spirit, takes higher artistic rank. Past and Present,
suggested by a visit to the almshouse of St. Ives and
reading the chronicle of Jocelin de Brakelond, was under-
taken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a

88 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP,

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 recom-
mend it to the Ministers Peel and Russell.

In this mood, the book was written-off in the first seven
weeks of 1843, a four de force comparable to Johnson’s
writing of Rasselas, and 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 fun-
damental 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. “1 heard Milnes saying,” notes
the Lady Sneerwell of real life, “at the Shuttleworths that

Vv CHEYNE ROW 89

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 youcan. But
at bottom that is not the aim of my life . . . it is mere hypo-

crisy' to call it such, as is continually done nowadays... .
Avoid cant. Do not think that your life means a mere search-
ing 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 ex-
cept 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 re-
buff 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 of 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

90 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 Eng-
lish 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 ; first to
visit a worthy devotee called Redmond, and then to 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 Llanberis 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

= =

v CHEYNE ROW 91

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,” 6.9. “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 capa-
city 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 frag-
mentary 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. Arch-

92 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

deacon 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 unobtru-
sive 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 Words-
worth, frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as gener-
ous 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 :1 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 human-
ity.” The same epoch, however,—that of the start of the

1 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 be 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.”

Υ͂ CHEYNE ROW 98

great writer’s almost uninterrupted triumph—brings us in
face of an episode singularly delicate and difficult to deal
with, but impossible to evade.

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 Meecenas, an admirer of genius though no mere
worshipper of success, R. Monckton Milnes ; meeting Hal- ἡ
lam, Bunsen, Pusey, etc., at his house in London, and after-
wards 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 Wilber-
force, 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 dis-
trust of political economy, as shown in Unio 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

94 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 educa-
tion, 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

Υ CHEYNE ROW 95

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 intellect-
ual 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 Addis-
combe, 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 Royal. 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

96 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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, were aggrava-
tions of 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 favour-
ite 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,” 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 would seem 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

Vv CHEYNE ROW 97

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 ;' 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.
. . . 1 am carrying a burden even heavier than you, and have
undergone even bitterer deceptions. Your life proves an empty
thing, you say. Empty! Donot blaspheme. Have you never
done good? Have you never loved? ... Pain and joy, decep-
tion 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 re-
proach 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” ; and 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-

1 Carlyle often speaks, sometimes slightingly, of Miss Jewsbury, as
a sensational novelist and admirer of George Sand, but he appreciated

her genuine worth,
H

98 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

tone of misery which finds voice in Mrs. Carlyle’s diary from
October 1855 to May 1856, 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
which follow are in the same strain, 6... to Carlyle when
visiting his sister at the Gill, “I never forget kindness,
nor, alas, unkindness either”: to Luichart, “1 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 dootor’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

Υ CHEYNE ROW 99

north with her, to take a seat in an ordinary railway car-
riage, 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. Ste transit.

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 insected,

100 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 de-
scribed 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 [ had anticipated.” They had an interest-
ing 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

-
oh

Ceee

v CHEYNE ROW 101

philanthropy and moonshine.” Emerson’s notes of this date,
on the other hand, mark his emancipation from mere dis-
cipleship. ‘Carlyle had all the kleinstidtlicher 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 gigant-
esque, 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

1 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 fabula. Emerson answers defending Landor, and indicating
points of likeness between him and Carlyle.

102 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

is full of plans for 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.

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.” He re-
turned 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

1 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 Re-
miniscences 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, 6.0. ‘* 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 !”

Vv CHEYNE ROW 103

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 being 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 departed from the views they set
forth, that Ireland is in the main a country of idle 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 popu-
lation 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

“9

104 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 prob-
ably 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 and gloom and bottomless
dubitation, came Latter-Day Pamphlets, which unpleasantly
astonished everybody, set the world upon the strangest supposi-
tions—“ 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 pro-
voked the assault of the newspapers ; which, by the author's
confession, did something to arrest and restrict the sale.

v CHEYNE ROW 105

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 Zhe Lye, attributed to Raleigh, or Swift's Gulli-
ver or the letters of Junius. The method of direct denunci-
ation has advantages: it cannot be mistaken, nor, if strong
enough, ignored ; but it must lay its account with conse-~
quences, 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

106 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 Re-
public. 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 aspira-
tions, with beliefs in all manner of swift regeneration—

Magnus ab integro seclorum 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 Rail-
way 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 sentimental-
ists, insurgents who could not win. The reaction pro-
duced 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

Υ͂ CHEYNE ROW 107

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, how-
ever, 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. “1 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 grow-
ing feeble ; a quiet time only disturbed by indignation at

108 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

‘one ass whom I heard the bray of in some Glasgow news-
paper,” 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 aggra-
vated in this case by his very limited command of the
language for conversational purposes. Fortunately, on
reaching London he found that the poet Browning and
his wife, whose acquaintance he had made ten years
before, were about to start for the same destination, and
he prevailed upon them, though somewhat reluctant,
to take charge of him.! 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.

1 Mrs, Sutherland Orr’s Life of Robert Browning.

Vv CHEYNE ROW 109

. . . 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! 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 Théatre
Frangais, 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 com-
patible with his Puritan vein ; but as regards French litera-
ture 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 condescen-
sion, 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, uncon-

1 Partially reproduced, Pall Mall Gazette, April 9th 1890, with illus-
trative connecting comments.

110 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

scious 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 earnest—probably the
former. “Jean Paul,” he said, getting on the theme of
German literature, ‘was a hollow fool of the first magni-
tude,” and Goethe was “insignificant, unintelligible, a paltry
kind of Scribe manqué.” “41 could stand no more of it, but
lighted a cigar, and adjourned to the street. ‘You im-
pertinent blasphemous blockhead!’ this was sticking in
my throat: better to retire without bringing it out.” 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 Cavai-
gnac, “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

1 The two men were mutually antagonistic ; Mérimée tried to read
the French Revolution, but flung the book aside in weariness or disdain.

Vv CHEYNE ROW 111

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 1 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, “ Mon-
sieur, vous ne le connaissez pas du tout, du tout.” At Chel-
sea, 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.” Ulti-
mately 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

112 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 80 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 way-
faring 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 sleep.” 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

v CHEYNE ROW 118

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 under-
stand and do,”

»-

CHAPTER VI
THE MINOTAUR

[1853-1866]

CARLYLE was now engaged on a work which required, re-
ceived, and wellnigh exhausted all his strength, resulting in
the greatest though the least generally read of all his books.
Cromwell achieved, he had thrown hiniself 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. None of his
generous replies to young men asking his advice are 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 ful-
filling, whatever others do... . And be not surprised that
“people have no sympathy with you.” That is an accompani-
ment 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

CHAP, VI THE MINOTAUR 115

from the present to the past, from the latter days of discord
to seek countenance in some great figure of history, under
whose «gis 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 Norse-
men, 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 mon-
archy had been the main centre of modern stability, and
that it had been made so by its virtual creator, Friedrich IT.,
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 con-
tinual 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.

116 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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. Reaching Rotterdam
on September Ist, 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 Rémer—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 Kisenach, 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

γι THE MINOTAUR 117

the inkstand had been thrown at the devil and his noises:
an incident to which eloquent reference is made in the lec-
tures 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 invita-
tion 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. “ How-
ever,” 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 Téplitz. ‘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 Téplitz the companions proceeded
in weary stillwagens 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

118 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of the
month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we
have, October Ist :—

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 Ambas-
gador), discovering at length an excellent portrait of Fritz,
meeting Tieck, Cornelius, Rauch, Preuss, ete., 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 ex-
pedition 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 antici-
pated. 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 Riigen, 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
Riigen he went quickly south by Stettin to Berlin, then
to Ciistrin 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

vI THE MINOTAUR 119

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,—lIrish 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 prob-
ably in Europe.” Thence he made for Prague, whose
picturesque grandeur he could not help extolling. ‘ Here,”
he writes, enclosing the flower to his wife, “18 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 tribula-
tions, 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, 1.¢. 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,

120 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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
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 re-
presentative 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,” ¢.g.—

As to Russian increase of strength, he writes, I would wait
till Russia meddled with me before I drew sword to stop his in-
crease 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.

vI THE MINOTAUR 121

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 “ brigandy” 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 Napo-
leon IIL: but his approval of the policy of the Czars
remains open to the criticism of M. Lanin. In refer-
ence to the next great struggle of the age, Carlyle was
in full sympathy with the mass of his countrymen. He
was as mutch 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 that in-
spired Millais’s picture, before it was amended or spoilt, “the
horrors that were done on the English by these mutinous
hyenas. Allow hyznas 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 ex-
pressed 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 :—

122 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 Khayam,
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 ala he says: “I have an
impression that one always dreams, but that only in cases
where the nerves are disturbed by bad health, which pro-
duces 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

/
VI THE MINOTAUR 128

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 “Conser-
vative 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 11]. 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 Philan-
thropy. 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 :—

124 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP,

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
isasham. ... Elect him and you bid God-speed to Pantheism
and spiritualism.! 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. Dis-
raeli, 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.” Itis 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 worn-
out “ 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—

1 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.

? For the elucidation of some points of contact between Carlyle and
Lord Beaconsfield, vide Mr. Froude’s Life of the latter.

γι THE MINOTAUR 125

were discarded, and a Scotch nobleman of conspicuous
talent, alway. an active, if not intrusive, champion of ortho-
doxy, 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—TI 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 htard
of the Election till after it was finished; and I did not know
that anything of this melancholy element of MHeterodoxy,
‘‘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

126 THOMAS CARLYLE ' CHAP.

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

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, states-

~ ‘men, 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 sur-
vive ; 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, illus-
trated by the surrounding events of thirty years. Carlyle
found, to his dismay, that he had involved himself in writ-
ing the History of Germany, and in ἃ 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—
ἐς anti-solar systems of chaff.”

VI THE MINOTAUR 127

I read old German books dull as stupidity itself—nay super-
annuated 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 king-
doms, through frozen rain, sound of subterranean torrents,
leaden-coloured air”; and in the retrospect of the Re-
miniscences touchingly refers to his thirteen years of
rarely relieved isolation. ‘‘A desperate dead-lift pull all
that time; my whole strength devoted to it... with-
drawn 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, invitissimd
Minervd, 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

1 Carlyle himself writes: “1 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.”

128 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 ἃ
magnificent book this is going to be, the best of all your
books, forcible, clear, and sparkling as the French Re-
volution; 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 com-.
paratively brief space. Carlyle’s references to this—
after his return from another visit to the north and the
second trip to Germany—seem 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.

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 dis-
charged of the first instalment of his book: the remainder
lay upon him like a menacifg nightmare ; he never ceased
to feel that the work must be completed ere he could be

vI THE MINOTAUR 129

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 Fife-
shire, she compares herself to a keeper in a madhouse ; and
writes later from Sunnybank 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 any-
thing, 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
VIIT.,—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
K

130 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 suffi-
ciently 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 Ash-
burton’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 tiresome-
ness with the refrain, ‘‘I feel myself extremely neglected
for unborn generations.” Her once considerable ambitions
had been submerged, and her own vivid personality over-
shadowed 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 in-
consistencies 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 long life friend-
ship for Erskine of Linlathen is intelligible, though he did

VI THE MINOTAUR 131

not extend the same charity to what he regarded as the
muddle-headedness of Maurice (Erskine’s spiritual inspirer),
and keenly ridiculed the reconciliation pamphlet entitled
“Subscription no Bondage.” The Essayfgts and Re-
viewers, “Septem contra Christum,” “should,” he said,
“be shot for deserting their posts”; even Dean Stanley,
their amicus curie, 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 con-
tempt, 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 in-
volved ; 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 “δὴ ape,” and said of Cardinal Newman that he
had ‘no more brains than an ordinary-sized rabbit.”

182 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

These years are otherwise marked by his most glaring
political blundez. The Civil War, then raging in America,
brought, with ts close, the abolition of Slavery throughout
the States, a fonsummation for which he cared little, for he
had never professed to regard the negroes as fit for free-.
dom; 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 “TIlias
Americana in nuce,” published in Macmillan’s Magazine,
August 1863.

Peter of the North (to Paul of the South): “Paul, you un-
accountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for life, not
by the month or year as Ido. You are going straight to Hell,

Paul: “Good words, Peter. The risk is my own. Iam
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 remon-
strance had proved prophetic, Carlyle is said to have con-
fessed 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,

evr ey

vI THE MINOTAUR 138

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 inter-
mitted 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

134 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 inform-

1 For the most interesting, loyally sympathetic, and characteristic
account of Carlyle’s journey north on this occasion, and of the inci-
dents which followed, we may refer to New Fragments, by John Tyn-
dall, just published.

vI THE MINOTAUR 135

ing him that the companionship of more than 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 here of ours, my first unwelcomed by
her. She lay in her coffin, lovely in death. Pale death
and things not mine or ours had possession of our poor
darling.” On Wednesday they returned, and on Thurs-
day 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,

CHAPTER VII
DECADENCE
[1866-1881]

Arter 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 in-
domitable 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

OHAP. VII DECADENCE 157

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 Heminiscences, 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 threugh 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, overlenient 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 him-
self, he mourned with those who mourned ; afflicted, he held
out hands to all in affliction. Consequently “the poor

188 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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-
man, pretending to be a decayed tradesman ; and a shilling
to a street sweeper, who at once took it over his crossing to
agin 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 indig-
nation 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 doubt-
less 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,” ete.
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

VII DECADENCE 139

test of Carlyle’s theory of strong government; and he
stood to his colours. Years before, on John Sterling sug-
gesting 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 him-
self 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 de-
nunciation 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

140 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 and
Cromwell’s storm of Drogheda for his texts, 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 Kuropean 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 Ross-
bach, with exultation. When a feeling began 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

VII DECADENCE 141

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 Bis-
marck 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, Kérner, 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’

142 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 alli-
ance 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 :—

Smr—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 con-
templated 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 asa
real ignominy to be connected with such a Turk at 811, 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 news-
paper 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 know-
ledge, and to all friends of their country will recommend
“immediate attention to them while there is yet time, lest in a

VII DECADENCE 148

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 an, etc. T. CARLYLE.

5 CHEYNE Row, CHELSEA,
May Ath.

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 Dean-
ery of Westminster. Great artists as Millais, Watts, and
Boehme vied with each other, in painting or sculpture, to
preserve his lineaments ; prominent reviews to record their
impression of his work, and disciples to show their grati-
tude. One of these, Professor Masson of Edinburgh, in
memory of Carlyle’s own tribute to Goethe, started a sub-
scription 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) 8 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 ]ό 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 new
and unexpected stratum of genial dignity and manliness
of character.” To his brother John he wrote: “I do, how-
ever, 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

144 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 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 mis-
chief.” 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 them-
selves 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: de-
scribes as “evolving man’s soul from frog spawn,” adding,
“1 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

vu DECADENCE 145

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 Kings-
ley 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 pro-
fessed 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,” 1.6. 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 Liles as if it
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 contem-
plated 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 Craigenputtock 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

L .

146 | THOMAS CARLYLE OWAP.

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 desir-
able.” 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 in-
creasing 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, with the solicitous
attention of his niece, nurse, and amanuensis, Mary Aitken,
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 des-
tined to be left alone; his physical powers were waning.
In 1889 he and his last horse “Comet” 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

VII DECADENCE 147

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 loed 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 :

3 ἊΝ \ 3 “ “A “A ,
ἀνδρῶν yap ἐπιφανὼν πᾶσα γῆ τάφος.

148 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP,

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, and 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 Scots-
man 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 posthu- ©

mous depreciation for a factitious fame; “ but the game

VII DECADENCE 149

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 dog-
matism 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 80 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 con-
temporaries, and doing their best to perpetuate a baneful
influence.” /’raser, 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 im-
posed 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 ever 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

150 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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, 6.9., ‘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, in-
separable 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 re-
mark we read, “‘ He liked iJ] men like Humboldt, Laplace,
or the author of the -Vestiges. He refused Darwin’s trans-
mutation 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 in-

VII DECADENCE 151

justice and contempt for Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats,
Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and disparag-
ing 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.
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 dis-
dainful, 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 life-
long groaning under the Nemesis 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 Gold-
smith’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

1 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.

——

152 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 corona-
tion came too late, and the death of his wife paralysed his
later years.

Let those who from the Clyde to the Isis, from the
Forth to the Cam, 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; especi-
ally 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 attachés flaunting their intimacy, to assure us that
there were “depths of tenderness” in Carlyle. His
susceptibility to the softer influences of nature, of family

vir DECADENCE 158

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. ll 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 cando. . . . 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 ripe.

154 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP,

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 listen-
ing. 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 sun-
sets ‘‘ 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 bene-
factors 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

fien, tm. .

}

VII DECADENCE 155

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, “re-
member 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 misfor-
‘tune 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 turn not an inch aside for threat
or flattery ; integer vite, 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: “ Οἱ 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: “1
matters went well with himself, it never occurred to him
that they could be going ill with any one else ; and, on the

}

156 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 so much noise over it as this apostle
of silence. (‘Sins of passion he could forgive, but those of

᾿ er never.) Carlyle has no tinge of insincerity ;
his writing, his conversation, his life, is absolutely, danger-
ously 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, Sind “words at random sent,” those judg-
ing 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.

I rhe 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 discon-
tent 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

VII : DECADENCE 157

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 theo-
logical 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 dis-
paragingly, all his own works, from Sartor, of which he
remarks that “only some ten pages are fused and μα 1}
monious,” to his self-entitled “rigmarole on the Norse ἰλ
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.

158 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; in-
tellectual 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 Crom-
well, is “my reverend imbecile friend”: his predecessors
in Friedrich, as Schlosser, Preuss, Ranke, Férster, 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, Cole-
ridge, and the leaders of Physics and Meta-
physics.

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
οἶστρος of their ambitious competition, and restless push,
wanting in repose, never like

a gentleman at ease
With moral breadth of temperament,

too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, “they call
this man as good as me.” Bacon, in one of his finest

VII DECADENCE 159

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 corner-
stone 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 proto-
plasms have allowed. His way of life,! duly admired for its

1 In the Times of February 7th 1881, there appeared an interesting
account of Carlyle’s daily routine. ‘‘ No book hack could have sur-
passed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and

160 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP. VII

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 uncompromis-
ing dignity. He was too great to be, in the common sense,
conceited. All his consciousness of power left him with
the feeling of Newton, “1 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 sus-
picion 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.

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, unamen-
able to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of the revolu-
tionary 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 uni-
versally 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 ulti-
mately 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 ;
M

162 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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,
farlyle 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 comprehen-
sion, 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 objec-
tion to Jeffrey’s fashion of saying, “1 like this; I do not
like that,” without giving the reason why. But in this
instance the writer did reck his own rede. The tempta-
tion 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 Ger-
man Playwrights, of Taylor's German Literature, and his
inimitable sketch of Herr Déring, the hapless biographer
of Richter, are as amusing as Macaulay’s coup de grdce to

vi AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 163

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 ἃ 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.

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 atany 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 ease. 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 ”

1 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
zs true,” prevented him from appreciating the great work of the Ency-

clopeedists

164 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP,

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. Com-
mander-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 con-
tempt 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 absurdly defined as “an
infinite capacity for taking trouble” ; no amount of pump-
ing 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 insist-
ent earnestness would run the risk of fatiguing us were

vit AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 16

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 contra-
diction. 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, ¢.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 bottom-
less 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.

146 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 with-
out 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 weari-
some 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

vir AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 167

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 “ἃ 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 skil-
fully 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 intrinsic-
ally 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 appreci-
ation 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

168 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

small, that bounds their being, enables him often to do
justice to those most widely differing in creed, sentiment,
and lines of activity from each other 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 Car-
lyle, 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 works, 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 recogni-
tion, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous.
If the old formulz 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 appear-
ance, the literature of Germany, to which half of these’
papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir

vir AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 169

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, Richter, 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 Lec-

1 Though a mere reproduction of the notes of Mr. Chisholm Anstley,
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

170 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

tures, delivered in 1838, when (σέ. 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 Soc-
rates are made up of a few wire-drawn notions about virtue ;
there is no conclusion, no word of life in him.

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 appreci-
ates is Tacitus, “a Colossus on edge of dark night.” Then
follows an exaltation of the Middle Ages, as those in which
“we see belief getting the victory over unbelief,” in a strain
suitable to Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Assent. In the
struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens, Car-
lyle’s whole sympathy is with Gregory and Hildebrand : he
refers to the surrender at Canossa with the characteristic
comment, “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 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
plan of Wilhelm Meister, with shadowy love episodes recalling the

manner of the ‘‘ Minerva press,” can add nothing to Carlyle’s reputa-
tion.

vir AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 171

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 1 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 it.” The Middle Ages
were “a healthy age,” and therefore there was next to no Liter-
ature. ‘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 sur-
vive in this sublime relic of antiquity—the Divina Commedia.”

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
@ 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.

1 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 grandes pensées viennent du
coeur.”

Ν
172 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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, Shake-
speare 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 scepti-
cism, 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.

ere ay

vir AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 17

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 HisTorixzs belongs to the
sphere of separate disquisitions. Here it is only possible
to take note of their general characteristics. His concep-
tion 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 pros-
perity 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

174 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

emselves. “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 individual-
ises everything he meets; his dislike of abstractions is
everywhere extreme. Thus while other writers have ex-
panded 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 in-
sight only rivalled by the most incisive passages of the
seventh book of Thucydides, of Tacitus, of Gibbon, and
of Michelet.?
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

1 Vide a comparison of Carlyle and Michelet in Dr. Oswald’s inter-
esting and suggestive little volume of criticism and selection, Thomas
Carlyle, ein Lebensbild und Goldkérner aus seinen Werken.

vit AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 175

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 enthusi-
asm, 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 errorg
in the famous account of the flight to Varennes, to wit:
the delay in the departure was due to Bouillé, 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, not the King, who asked for
hot water and eggs; the coach went rather faster than
is stated; and, above all, infandum/ it was not painted

yellow, but green and black. This criticism does not! 4. °.

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

(Leas

176 _ THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

Chronicles of Holinshed and the Voyages of Hakluyt to
the Plays of Shakespeare, plays which Marlborough con-
fessed to have been the main source of his knowledge of
English history. Some men are born philologists or anti-
quarians; but, as the former often fail to see the books
because of the words, 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, a8 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 misinter-
pretation. 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 of fact in our language. The French
Revolution _is a series of fiame- -pictures ; every page is οἱ 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 pane-
gyric: “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 anbjeet-
| and on his readers ; but, unlike De Quincey, who had a like
. love of excursus, he comes to the point before the close.

vi AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 177

The one claimed the privilége, assumed by Coleridge, of
starting from no premises and arriving at no conclusion ;
the other, in his capacity as a critic, arrives at a con-
clusion, 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 single 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 theo-
logical 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 to those to whom
they are not addressed.” 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.

1 In St. James’ Gazette, February 11th, 1881.
N

178 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP,

In Friedrich 1]. he undertodk 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, “1 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 such 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 histofic restoration.
The introductory portion, leading us through one of the most
tangled woods of genealogy and political adjustment, is re-
lieved 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,

vir AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 179

and wonderful gray eyes; Sophia Charlotte’s grace, wit,
and music; Wilhelmina and her book; the old Hyper-
borean; the black artists Seckendorf and Grumkow;
George I. and his blue-beard chamber; the little drum-
mer; the Old Dessauer; the cabinet ‘Venus; Gravenitz
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 show-
box 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. ῃ
Carlyle’s style, in the chiaro-oscuro of which his Histories
and three-fourths of his Essays are set, has naturally pro\ |
voked much criticism and some objurgation. M. Taine says
it is “exaggerated and demoniacal.” Hallam! could not '
read The French Revolution because of its “detestable” 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.” 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:

oan ey

1 Carlyle with equal unfairness disparaged Hallam’s Literature of
Hurope (containing among other fine criticisms the splendid summary
of ‘‘ Lear”) as a valley of dry bones. ;

180 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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, “nodo-
sities 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 throtigh 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.

vir AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 181

But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a care-
less 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 hues 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 othermen. 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, have been
more alive to the influences of external nature. His early
letters abound in passages like the following, on the view
from Arthur Seat :— ᾿ ν

The blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills swell-
ing 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

182 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 ainid 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-du-Ville,

Carlyle is, here and there, led astray by the love of con-
trast ; 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 1, 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

virr AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 183

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 adull page. Théroigne
de Méricourt, Marat, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Mirabeau,
Robespierre, Talleyrand, Louis the Simple, above all Marie
Antoinette—for whom Carlyle has an affection akin to that
of Mirabeau—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 like blows; 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 some-
times coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of

184 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 sen-
tence. 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 ; con-

vir AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 185

secrating him with a very storm of melodious, adoring admira-
tion, 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 Drabolt 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 reap-
ing 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 Hohen-
zollern 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 Teufelsdréckh “ left alone with the night ” when Blumine
and Herr Towgood ride down the valley ; of Oliver recall-
ing 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

186 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 Ciistrin, 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. Seven
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 con-
gratulation; 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. Pdéllnitz, who came
into the anteroom, found him in this state, “half-dressed, with
dishevelled hair, in tears, and as if beside himself.” ‘These

vit AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN 187

huzzahings only tell me what I have lost,” said the new King.
“He was in great suffering,” suggested Pollnitz ; “he is now at
rest.” True, he suffered; but he was here with us; and
now !

Carlyle has said of Dante’s Francesca “ 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

PERHAPS the profoundest 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.”

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 contra-
dictions in his nature as his almost tyrannical premises

‘and his practically tender-hearted conclusions. A hard

thinker, he was never a close reasoner ; in al] that relates
to human affairs he relies on nobility of feeling rather than
on continuity of thought. Claiming the full latitude of

1 Browning as a Philosophical and Peligious Teacher, by Professor
Henry Jones, of St. Andrews.

CHAP, 1X HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 189

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 tome. 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 some-
thing better than themselves, and impress upon them the

190 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

vacuity of lip-services ; he insisted that the matter of most

| consequence was the grip with which they held their con-

victions 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 defini-
tion. It means that we are not entitled to regard our-
selves as the centres of the universe; that we aré 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 such eloquence as 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

ΙΧ HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 191

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 exalta-
tion 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 “méan
and demoralising ”—‘‘ we must destroy the faith in news-
papers”; 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 medieval
monks against the king—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 ; 1 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.
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 con-
servatism in terms recalled in the Hemtniscences. “He
objected clearly to my Reform Bill notions, found Demo-

1 Passage quoted (Chap. II.) about the Glasgow Radical rising in 1819.

——— .

οτος Ψ

192 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

cracy 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 repre-
sented by Emily Bronté 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. In 1832 he writes to his wife,
“Tell Mrs. Jeffrey that Iam that monster made up of all
the Whigs hate—a radical and an absolutist.” In the
result, the Absolutist, in a spirit made after Plato’s con-
ception 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.” As early as 1835, he writes to
Emerson :—

“

ΙΧ HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 198

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 ““ἃ democrat at heart”; while the representative
organ of northern Conservatism on the same ground con-
tinues to assail him—“‘ mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter
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

0 .

194 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 rubric: 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 re-
volved. It appears, from the testimony of Mr. Froude, that
the result of the Reform Bill of 1832 disappointed him in
merely shifting the power from the owners of land to the
owners of shops, and left 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 pean 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 equal
emphasis against the levelling doctrines of the French

ΙΧ HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 195

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 pre-
cision, 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, conces-
sions 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 Uni-
verse. 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 recog-
nisable 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 wis-
dom 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 ἢ
reverse of the same . . . for how should I follow a multitude
to do evil? Cease to brag to me of America and its model

196 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

institutions... . On this side of the Atlantic or on that, Demo-
cracy 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 latssez 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 explo-
sive masses for blowing down Bastiles with, for voting at hust-
ings for us—such men are of the questionable species. .. .

Obedience . . . is the primary duty of man. . . . Ofall “rights
of men” this right of the ignorant to be guided by the wiser,
gently or forcibly—is the indisputablest. . . . Cannot one dis-

cern, 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” 7

The last sentence indicates the transition from the
merely negative aspect of Carlyle’s political philosophy to
the positive, which is his HERO-WoRSsHIP, based on the ex-
cessive 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. Antiquity, then Feudalism, according to his view,
had their chiefs, captains, kings, and flourished or not as it
followed them well or ill, Democracy, the new and danger-
ous force of this age, must be represented and then de-

Ix HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY | 197

nominated by great men raised to independence over the
arbitrary will of a multitude, to be trusted and obeyed 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
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 un-
conscious disciple has only a few negative tests. The
watrior 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

198 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 peece 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 formule.
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 muscu-
larity 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 inter-
pretation, we can at once appeal to it. A yet graver, not

Ix HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 199

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 mis-
applied.

Mr. Carlyle has laid down the doctrine that MicuHT 18
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 mani-
fest 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 a letter to
Mr. Lecky, quoted by Mr. Froude (vol. iv. p. 288), “ Right
is the eternal symbol of Might”; and again in Chartism,
“Might and night 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.”
But, on the other handy we read in Past and Present :—

Savage fighting Heptarchies : their fighting is an ascertain-
ment who has the right to rule over them.

And again—

Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: etther of

these, once ascertained, puts an end to battle. °

And elsewhere—

Rights men have none save to be governed justly. ...

200 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 ex-

pression of the truism that moral might ismght. In his
ands if 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 en-
π΄ Φ Φ . Φ Φ Φ
durance, carries with it the seal and signal of its claim to

respect, that whatever has established i 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,—
καὶ ἔστιν ἀεὶ τὸ κρατοῦν ἐν ὑπεροχῇ ἀγαθοῦ tT Lv0s,—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

x | HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 201

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 fuligi-
nous 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, Bran-
denburg despots; the fulness of his contempt for the
conscientious indecision of Necker, the Girondists, the
Moderates of our qwn Commonwealth. He condones all
that ordinary judgments regard as the tyranny of conquest,
and has for the conquered only a ve 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 7

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

202 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

whose courage quailed. “It was their fate,” as ἃ recent
writer remarks, “that was the tragedy.” Reading Carlyle’s
maxim between the lines of his chapter on the Refor-
mation, and noting that the Inquisition triumphed in
Spain, while in Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia the new
truths were 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 per-
spective of the past. Let us, however, grant that in the
' ultimate issue the Platonic creed, “ Justice is stronger than
injustice,” holds good. 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 pes-
sima,” 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 φύσει δοῦλοι . .
δυνάμενοι ἄλλον εἶναι ; 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.
1 Vide Mill’s Liberty, chap. ii. pp. 52-54.

ΙΧ HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 208

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 re-
cognition 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 govern-
ment must be the best, 1.6. that in which power, in the last
resort supreme, is concentrated in the hands of a single ruler ;
the weakest, that in which they are 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 Dictator-
ship. In his last great work this view is developed in the
lessons he directs the reader to draw from Prussian history.
The following conveys his last 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

204 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 improve-
ments 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 Hum-
boldt 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 them-
selves 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 employ-
ing servants more skilful than themselves.

1 It should be noted that Mill lays as great stress, and a more prac-
tical stress, on Individualism as Carlyle does. He has the same
belief in the essential mediocrity of the masses of men whose “ think-

Ix HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 205

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. “ collect-
ive 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. Κρατεῖν δ᾽ ἔστι καὶ μὴ δικαίως,
The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have been bene-
ficent in times of revolution ; but their right to rule is apt
to pass before their power, and when the latter descends by
inheritance, 88 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
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,
41 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.”

206 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 opti-
mist nor pessimist is apparent from his faith in the power of
man in some degree to mould his fate. Not “ belief, belief,”
but “action, action,” is his working motto. On the title-page
of the Latter-Day Pamphles 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.”

“1 am nota 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 man-
kind, 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 indis-
pensable love” ; that is, the power to raise men above the
“Pig Philosophy,” the worship of clothes, the acquiescence

Ix HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 207

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 dis-
crimination 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 purelp yersonal 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, kéeps himself right
not by caveats but by contradictions of himself, and some-
times in a way least to be expected. Much of his writing
is a blast of war, or a protest against the philanthropy

208 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 οὗ ἢ

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 per-
haps 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
ridicule of such writers as Mrs. Austen, 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
medieval 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 de-
crees.! 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

1 Vide a remarkable instance of this in the best short Life of Carlyle,
that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147.

Ix HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 209

on our code, vindicating the assertion of the Times of
the day after his death, that “the novelties and para-
doxes 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, partially
embodied in the Abolition of Purchase Act; 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 Educa-
tion ; his dwelling on the duties as well as the rights of land-
owners,—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 the enfranchisement of our uni-
versities. 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 legisla-
tion. One of his desiderata, a statute of limitations 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 ἢ :—
a doctrine to which he 18 disposed to trace the Trades

210 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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.
(ς 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, withm 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 Econo-
mists 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 Gron-
lund, 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 empha-
tic support to a copartnership of employers and employed,

1x HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 211

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 fox-
covers . . . 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. Carlyle’s later
work is, however, an advance 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,” 1.¢ 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 E'migra-
tion, 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 work-
man 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

212 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not every-
where 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.

His countenance of Autocracy may have disastrous results
in Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohen-

Ὰὰς
a

zollerns is ostentatiously laying claim to “right divine.” In e

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 pene-
tration 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 many
rule for the many alone, may be a deadly engine of oppres-
sion; 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}

1 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.”

Ix HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 213

—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 supersti-
tion of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive
shafts, some of which may find a mark the archer little
meant.

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 in-.
consistent 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
botanise” 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.

-— wer = ce ee & eee = "ee - -- τ -α....-.. --

CHAP. X RELIGION—ETHICS—INFLUENCE 215

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 Presby-
terianism. We know that he never repented or regretted
his resolve; that he went, as continuously as possible for
a mind go 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,” “8 Calvinist without
Christianity,” “a Puritan who had lost his creed.” We
know that he revered the character of Christ, and theo-
retically 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 philo-
sophy, which taught that every man must “dree his
weird.” We know that he not only believed in God as re-
_ vealed 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.

216 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 spectralities” .. .
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 found-
ations 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.—

x RELIGION —ETHICS—INFLUENCE 217

Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very sub-

- lime achievement either. I often think . . . it is pretty much

all that science in this age has done. . . . Protoplasm (unpleas-
ant 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 hyena on finding that the whole uni-
verse 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.)

“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,” “ἃ 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

1 Cf. Othello, ‘‘ Not a jot, not a jot.” Carlyle writes on this ques-

tion with the agitation of one himself not quite at ease, with none of
the calmness of a faith perfectly secure.

218 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

appeals are beside the question ; and deserts the ground of
his answer to John Sterling’s expostulation, “that is down-
right 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, reli-
giosity 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 de-
finite 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
he of rhetorical devices, on such matters, to slur the differ-
ence 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 Thetsm ; 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 asa bird, among the birds
as a bat.

x RELIGION—ETHICS—INFLUENCE 219

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, codte que cotite, 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 inter-
vals.” 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 :—

220 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 alto-
gether 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.

x RELIGION—ETHICS—INFLUENCE 221

Your brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both
you and I are. . . . Perhaps we shall all meet YonpsEr, 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 Immor-
tality 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 :—

Ι 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 topice—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 con-
viction 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 religious epochs in history. “By this

299 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

alone,” wrote Dr. Chalmers, “he has done so much to
‘vindicate and bring to light the Augustan age of Christian-
ity 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 con-
strain 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 querit ;
Invenit hoc libro 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 relli-
gion 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,

-- ττττὯὧὖ΄) τ te τ΄ὄ;ὄ-ς.
- i

x RELIGION—-ETHICS—INFLUENCE 228

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 Rell-
gion 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 grave-

_ yards of his youth from following his doubts to their con-

clusion ; 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 Metaphystc of Calvin-
ism 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.! His doctrine of
Renunciation (suggested by the passage about the three
Reverences in 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.

1 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.

224 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 was Norse; his Ethics, despite his prejudice
against the race, 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 pre-
determined affirmation, may ultimately result in a deeper
negation.}

“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 some-
thing 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

1 Vide Professor Jones’s Browning as a Philosophical and Religious
Teacher, pp. 66-90.

x RELIGION—ETHICS—INFLUENCE 225

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 Schreck-
horn 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
ἀδιαφόρα, 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 mathe-

226 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

matical 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 ἀθάνατος μάχη, “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 τὸ ἕτερον, or, a8 Mill in
his Apologia for Theism puts it, a limit to the assumed
Omnipotence. Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, in-
consequently halts between them ; and his prevailing view
of mankind ! adds to his dilemma. He imposes an “infinite
duty on a finite being,” as Calvin imposes an infinite punish-
ment 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:

1 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 kennt nicht
diese verdammte Rasse,”

x RELIGION—-ETHICS—INFLUENCE 227

“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 mark of the English verse, of
this century :—

Are we not spirits 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 Nothing-
ness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us as round the
veriest spectre is Eternity, and to Eternity minutes are as years
and sons. 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 cam-
-paigns, 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.! These limbs, whence had
we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning

1 One of the strangest freaks of literary heredity is that this phrase
seems to have suggested the title of Ibsen’s much-debated play.

228 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 heen from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Gener-
ation 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
flaming, 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
Mane, haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge
again into the Mane. 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 Ger-
mans, who impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he:
disposed adequately to acknowledge them. Outside the
Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been wholly un-
affected 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 philo-
sophers 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

x RELIGION—-ETHICS—INFLUENCE 229

Emerson (March 13th 1853) which indicates that he had
_ Tread, comparatively late in life, some portions of The
Republic. “1 was much struck with Plato last year, and
his notions about Democracy—mere Latter-Day Pamphlets,
sawa ef faces ... refined into empyrean radiance and the
lightning of the gods” The tribute conveyed in the
comparison is just; for there 18. 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 tke
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 “purer manners,
nobler 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

΄-

μω

their turn comes, be made to govern. Compare the following °

declarations of Carlyle :—

230 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teach-
ing 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 i.

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
111, 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-think-
ing 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.
They both accept Destiny,—the Parcs 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 en-
crusted 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. 11. and

1 Rousseau, in the ‘‘Contrat Social,” also assumes this position ;

allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows
disrespect to the State Religion.

x RELIGION—-ETHICS—INFLUENCE 231

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

232 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 intel-
lectual 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 propa-
gandists ; in their “deep unrest”; and in the diverse con-
clusions 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

x RELIGION—ETHICS—IN FLUENCE 238

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 repre-
sentatives is easily explained. In Schiller he found intel-
lectually 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 alone for his artistic
mastery, 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 seem-
ing 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, “" ΤῸ die in strife is the end
of life.”

Goethe only ceased to fight 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

234 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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
fedelity of that man’s mind, and how to him also Duty was
infinite.—Knox would have passed on wondering, not reproach-
ing. 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 aman.” 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 hurri-
cane—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

x RELIGION—-ETHICS—-INFLUENCE 235

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 Paw der
einzige, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly
planted on German earth, a colossus of reading and in-
dustry, 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 Siebenkis, 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
Schmelzles Journey to Flitz might pass current for Carlyle’s
own; and it is evident that the latter was saturated with .
Quintus Fizlein. 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 Cut Bono we have—

What is life? a thawing ice-board
On ἃ sea with sunny shore.

Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of Figlein, especially
the passage, “Then began the Atolian harp of Creation,”
recalls the deepest pathos of Sartor. The two writers, it
has been observed, had in common ‘reverence, humour,

236 THOMAS CARLYLE OHAP.

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 mag-
nanimity 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 satel-
lites. 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 occasion-
ally 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 any-
thing 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

x RELIGION—ETHICS—INFLUENCE 237

lived beyond the sea. He has been almost to weariness
compared with Emerson, initial pupil later ally, but their ἡ
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 finger-
posts 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
minutiz 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, ex-
claiming, “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
metropohs, with thoughts of Weimar and reminiscences
of the Covenanting hills, Emerson studies Swedenborg
and reads the Phedo 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

288 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 Rochester 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 vindic-
tiveness: 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 col-
lective 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
vote for the diffusion of popular literature, a wide suffrage,

x RELIGION—-ETHICS—IN FLUENCE 239

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, byt
then your feet are always in water.” 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 mouth-
pieces 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

1 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 exaggerated, 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.

240 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 para-
doxical; 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 re-
lationship 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 con-
vincing 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 Con-
duct 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 one another, 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 1
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 in-
telligently 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.

x | RELIGION—-ETHICS—INFLUENCE 241

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 authors of his time.
No writer of our generation, in or out of England, has
combined such abundance with such power. Regard-
ing 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 distinguish between instruc-
tion and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has
taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answers
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 exag-
gerations 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

242 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP.

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 cul-
minations; shortly after the appearance of The French Revolu-
tion, 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 academically restrained 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 areturn tothem.” In the striking article in the S¢.
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, acknow-
ledged him as, beyond the range of his own méer, 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 Emersgonian hermit
Thoreau, ἃ 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

x RELIGION—ETHICS—INFLUENCE 243

lurid light, like the Jéthuns, 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.

244 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAP,

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 exag-
gerated, 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 lifeisennobling. fore
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 champton of ancient virtue, he ap-
peared in his own phrase applied to Fichte, as “ἃ Cato
Major among degenerate men.” Carlyle had more than the
shortcomings of a Cato; he had all the inconsistent vehe-
mence of an imperfectly balanced mind ; but he had a far
wider range and deeper sympathies. The message of the

x | RELIGION—ETHICS—INFLUENCE 245

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

ΤῊΣ 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 revolu-
tionist 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

. — cn a EE A «NS
ΞΡ αν που

APPENDIX 247

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 con-
ventional 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 sent-
ences 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

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