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Title: Thomas Carlyle
Famous Scots Series
Author: Hector Carsewell Macpherson
Release Date: May 31, 2010 [eBook #32626]
Language: English
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THOMAS CARLYLE
* * * * *
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
_The following Volumes are now ready_:--
THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson.
ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton.
HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask.
JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes.
ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun.
THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie.
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless.
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson.
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie.
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask.
TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton.
FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond.
THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir George Douglas.
NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood.
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury.
KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis A. Barbé.
ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart.
JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne.
MUNGO PARK. By T. Banks Maclachlan.
DAVID HUME. By Professor Calderwood.
* * * * *
THOMAS CARLYLE
by
HECTOR C MACPHERSON
Famous Scots Series
Published by Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier
Edinburgh and London
The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr Joseph Brown, and the
printing from the press of Messrs Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh.
Second Edition completing Seventh Thousand.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Of the writing of books on Carlyle there is no end. Why, then, it may
pertinently be asked, add another stone to the Carlylean cairn? The
reply is obvious. In a series dealing with famous Scotsmen, Carlyle has
a rightful claim to a niche in the temple of Fame. While prominence has
been given in the book to the Scottish side of Carlyle's life, the fact
has not been lost sight of that Carlyle owed much to Germany; indeed, if
we could imagine the spirit of a German philosopher inhabiting the body
of a Covenanter of dyspeptic and sceptical tendencies, a good idea would
be had of Thomas Carlyle. Needless to say, I have been largely indebted
to the biography by Mr Froude, and to Carlyle's _Reminiscences_. After
all has been said, the fact remains that Froude's portrait, though
truthful in the main, is somewhat deficient in light and
shade--qualities which the student will find admirably supplied in
Professor Masson's charming little book, "Carlyle Personally, and in his
Writings." To the Professor I am under deep obligation for the interest
he has shown in the book. In the course of his perusal of the proofs,
Professor Masson made valuable corrections and suggestions, which
deserve more than a formal acknowledgment. To Mr Haldane, M.P., my
thanks are also due for his suggestive criticism of the chapter on
German thought, upon which he is an acknowledged authority.
I have also to express my deep obligations to Mr John Morley, who, in
the midst of pressing engagements, kindly found time to read the proof
sheets. In a private note Mr Morley has been good enough to express his
general sympathy and concurrence with my estimate of Carlyle.
_EDINBURGH, October 1897._
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE 9
CHAPTER II
CRAIGENPUTTOCK--LITERARY EFFORTS 29
CHAPTER III
CARLYLE'S MENTAL DEVELOPMENT 42
CHAPTER IV
LIFE IN LONDON 65
CHAPTER V
HOLIDAY JOURNEYINGS--LITERARY WORK 79
CHAPTER VI
RECTORIAL ADDRESS--DEATH OF MRS CARLYLE 112
CHAPTER VII
LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF CARLYLE 129
CHAPTER VIII
CARLYLE AS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKER 138
CHAPTER IX
CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE 152
THOMAS CARLYLE
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE
'A great man,' says Hegel, 'condemns the world to the task of explaining
him.' Emphatically does the remark apply to Thomas Carlyle. When he
began to leave his impress in literature, he was treated as a confusing
and inexplicable element. Opinion oscillated between the view of James
Mill, that Carlyle was an insane rhapsodist, and that of Jeffrey, that
he was afflicted with a chronic craze for singularity. Jeffrey's verdict
sums up pretty effectively the attitude of the critics of the time to
the new writer:--'I suppose that you will treat me as something worse
than an ass, when I say that I am firmly persuaded the great source of
your extravagance, and all that makes your writings intolerable to many
and ridiculous to not a few, is not so much any real peculiarity of
opinion, as an unlucky ambition to appear more original than you are.'
The blunder made by Jeffrey in regard both to Carlyle and Wordsworth
emphasises the truth which critics seem reluctant to bear in mind, that,
before the great man can be explained, he must be appreciated.
Emphatically true of Carlyle it is that he creates the standard by which
he is judged. Carlyle resembles those products of the natural world
which biologists call 'sports'--products which, springing up in a
spontaneous and apparently erratic way, for a time defy classification.
The time is appropriate for an attempt to classify the great thinker,
whose birth took place one hundred years ago.
Towards the close of the last century a stone-mason, named James
Carlyle, started business on his own account in the village of
Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. He was an excellent tradesman, and frugal
withal; and in the year 1791 he married a distant kinswoman of his own,
Janet Carlyle, who died after giving birth to a son. In the beginning of
1795 he married one Margaret Aitken, a worthy, intelligent woman; and on
the 4th of December following a son was born, whom they called Thomas,
after his paternal grandfather. This child was destined to be the most
original writer of his time.
Little Thomas was early taught to read by his mother, and at the age of
five he learnt to 'count' from his father. He was then sent to the
village school; and in his seventh year he was reported to be 'complete'
in English. As the schoolmaster was weak in the classics, Tom was
taught the rudiments of Latin by the burgher minister, of which strict
sect James Carlyle was a zealous member. One summer morning, in 1806,
his father took him to Annan Academy. 'It was a bright morning,' he
wrote long years thereafter, 'and to me full of moment, of fluttering
boundless Hopes, saddened by parting with Mother, with Home, and which
afterwards were cruelly disappointed.' At that 'doleful and hateful
Academy,' to use his own words, Thomas Carlyle spent three years,
learning to read French and Latin, and the Greek alphabet, as well as
acquiring a smattering of geometry and algebra.
It was in the Academy that he got his first glimpse of Edward
Irving--probably in April or May 1808--who had called to pay his
respects to his old teacher, Mr Hope. Thomas's impression of him was
that of a 'flourishing slip of a youth, with coal-black hair, swarthy
clear complexion, very straight on his feet, and except for the glaring
squint alone, decidedly handsome.' Years passed before young Carlyle saw
Irving's face again.
James Carlyle, although an austere man, and the reverse of
demonstrative, was bound up in his son, sparing no expense upon the
youth's education. On one occasion he exclaimed, with an unwonted
outburst of glee, 'Tom, I do not grudge thy schooling, now when thy
Uncle Frank owns thee to be a better Arithmetician than himself.' Early
recognising the natural talent and aptitude of his son, he determined
to send him to the nearest university, with a view to Thomas studying
for the ministry. One crisp winter's morning, in 1809, found Thomas
Carlyle on his way to Edinburgh, trudging the entire distance--one
hundred miles or so.
He went through the usual university course, attended the divinity
classes, and delivered the customary discourses in English and Latin.
But Tom was not destined to 'wag his head in a pulpit,' for he had
conscientious objections which parental control in no way interfered
with. Referring to this vital period of his life, Carlyle wrote: 'His
[father's] tolerance for me, his trust in me, was great. When I declined
going forward into the Church (though his heart was set upon it), he
respected my scruples, my volition, and patiently let me have my way.'
Carlyle never looked back to his university life with satisfaction. In
his interesting recollections Mr Moncure Conway represents Carlyle,
describing his experiences as follows:--'Very little help did I get from
anybody in those years, and, as I may say, no sympathy at all in all
this old town. And if there was any difference, it was found least where
I might most have hoped for it. There was Professor ----. For years I
attended his lectures, in all weathers and all hours. Many and many a
time, when the class was called together, it was found to consist of one
individual--to wit, of him now speaking; and still oftener, when others
were present, the only person who had at all looked into the lesson
assigned was the same humble individual. I remember no instance in which
these facts elicited any note or comment from that instructor. He once
requested me to translate a mathematical paper, and I worked through it
the whole of one Sunday, and it was laid before him, and it was received
without remark or thanks. After such long years, I came to part with
him, and to get my certificate. Without a word, he wrote on a bit of
paper: "I certify that Mr Thomas Carlyle has been in my class during his
college course, and has made good progress in his studies." Then he rang
a bell, and ordered a servant to open the front door for me. Not the
slightest sign that I was a person whom he could have distinguished in
any crowd. And so I parted from old ----.'
Professor Masson, who in loving, painstaking style has ferreted all the
facts about Carlyle's university life, sums up in these words: 'Without
assuming that he meant the university described in _Sartor Resartus_ to
stand literally for Edinburgh University, of his own experience, we have
seen enough to show that any specific training of much value he
considered himself to owe to his four years in the Arts classes in
Edinburgh University, was the culture of his mathematical faculty under
Leslie, and that for the rest he acknowledged merely a certain benefit
from being in so many class-rooms where matters intellectual were
professedly in the atmosphere, and where he learned to take advantage
of books.' As Carlyle put it in his Rectorial Address of 1866, 'What I
have found the university did for me is that it taught me to read in
various languages, in various sciences, so that I go into the books
which treated of these things, and gradually penetrate into any
department I wanted to make myself master of, as I found it suit me.'
In 1814, Carlyle obtained the mathematical tutorship at Annan. Out of
his slender salary of £60 or £70 he was able to save something, so that
he was practically independent. By and by James Carlyle gave up his
trade, and settled on a small farm at Mainhill, about two miles from
Ecclefechan. Thither Thomas hied with unfeigned delight at holiday time,
for he led the life of a recluse at Annan, his books being his sole
companions.
Edward Irving, to whom Carlyle was introduced in college days, was now
settled as a dominie in Kirkcaldy. His teaching was not favourably
viewed by some of the parents, who started a rival school, and resolved
to import a second master, with the result that Carlyle was selected.
Irving, with great magnanimity, gave him a cordial welcome to the 'Lang
Toon,' and the two Annandale natives became fast friends. The elder
placed his well-selected library at the disposal of the younger, and
together they explored the whole countryside. Short visits to Edinburgh
had a special attraction for both, where they met with a few kindred
spirits. On one of those visits, Carlyle, who had not cut off his
connection with the university, called at the Divinity Hall to put down
his name formally on the annual register. In his own words: 'Old Dr
Ritchie "not at home" when I called to enter myself. "Good!" answered I;
"_let the omen be fulfilled_."' Carlyle's studies in Kirkcaldy made him
eager to contribute to the fulfilment of the omen. Among the authors
which he read out of the Edinburgh University library was Gibbon, who
pushed Carlyle's sceptical questionings to a definite point. In a
conversation with Professor Masson, Carlyle stated that to his reading
of Gibbon he dated the extirpation from his mind of the last remnant
that had been left in it of the orthodox belief in miracles.
In the space of two years, Carlyle and Irving 'got tired of
schoolmastering and its mean contradictions and poor results.' They bade
Kirkcaldy farewell and made for Edinburgh,--Irving to lodge in Bristo
Street, 'more expensive rooms than mine,' naively remarks Carlyle, where
he gave breakfasts to 'Intellectualities he fell in with, I often a
guest with them. They were but stupid Intellectualities, etc.' As for
their prospects, this is what Carlyle says: 'Irving's outlooks in
Edinburgh were not of the best, considerably checkered with dubiety,
opposition, or even flat disfavour in some quarters; but at least they
were far superior to mine, and indeed, I was beginning my four or five
most miserable, dark, sick, and heavy-laden years; Irving, after some
staggerings aback, his seven or eight healthiest and brightest. He had,
I should guess, as one item several good hundreds of money to wait upon.
My _peculium_ I don't recollect, but it could not have exceeded £100. I
was without friends, experience, or connection in the sphere of human
business, was of shy humour, proud enough and to spare, and had begun my
long curriculum of _dyspepsia_ which has never ended since!'[1]
Carlyle's intention was to study for the Bar, if perchance he could eke
out a livelihood by private teaching. He obtained one or two pupils,
wrote a stray article or so for the 'Encyclopædias'; but as he barely
managed to pay his way, he speedily gave up his law studies. He was at
this time--the winter of 1819--'advancing,' as he phrases it, 'towards
huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my
Edinburgh purgatory.' It was about a couple of years thereafter ere
Carlyle went through what he has described as his 'spiritual new birth.'
When Carlyle was in diligent search for congenial employment, a certain
Captain Basil Hall crossed his path, to whom Edward Irving had given
lessons in mathematics. The 'small lion,' as he calls the captain, came
to Carlyle, and wished the latter to go out with him 'to Dunglas,' and
there do 'lunars' in his name, he looking on and learning of Carlyle
'what would come of its own will.' The said 'lunars' meanwhile were to
go to the Admiralty, 'testifying there what a careful studious Captain
he was, and help to get him promotion, so the little wretch smilingly
told me.' Carlyle adds: 'I remember the figure of him in my dim lodging
as a gay, crackling, sniggering spectre, one dusk, endeavouring to
seduce me by affability in lieu of liberal wages into this adventure.
Wages, I think, were to be smallish ("so poor are we"), but then the
great Playfair is coming on visit. "You will see Professor Playfair." I
had not the least notion of such an enterprise on these shining terms,
and Captain Basil with his great Playfair _in posse_ vanished for me
into the shades of dusk for good.'[2] When private teaching would not
come Carlyle's way, he timorously aimed towards 'literature.' He had
taken to the study of German, and conscious of his own powers in that
direction, he applied in vain to more than one London bookseller,
proposing a complete translation of Schiller. Irving not only did his
utmost to comfort Carlyle in his spiritual wrestlings, but he tried to
find him employment. The two friends continued to make pleasant
excursions, and in June 1821 Irving brought Carlyle to Haddington, an
event which was destined to colour all his subsequent life; for it was
then and there he first saw Jane Welsh, a sight, he acknowledged, for
ever memorable to him.
'In the ancient County Town of Haddington, July 14, 1801, there was
born,' wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1869, 'to a lately wedded pair, not
natives of the place but already reckoned among the best class of people
there, a little Daughter whom they named _Jane Baillie Welsh_, and whose
subsequent and final name (her own common signature for many years) was
_Jane Welsh Carlyle_, and now so stands, now that she is mine in death
only, on her and her Father's Tombstone in the Abbey Kirk of that Town.
July 14th, 1801; I was then in my sixth year, far away in every sense,
now near and infinitely concerned, trying doubtfully after some three
years' sad cunctation, if there is anything that I can profitably put on
record of her altogether bright, beneficent and modest little Life, and
Her, as my final task in this world.'[3] The picture was never completed
by the master-hand; the 'effort was too distressing'; so all his notes
and letters were handed over to a literary executor.
At the time of Carlyle's introduction to Miss Welsh, she was living with
her widowed mother. Her father, Dr John Welsh, came of a good family,
and was a popular country physician. Her mother was Grace Welsh of
Capelgill, and was reckoned a beautiful, but haughty woman. Their
marriage took place in 1800, and their only child, Jane, was born, as we
have seen, the year following. Her most intimate friend, Miss Geraldine
Jewsbury, tells us that Miss Welsh had 'a graceful and beautifully-formed
figure, upright and supple, a delicate complexion of creamy white, with
a pale rose tint in the cheeks, lovely eyes full of fire and softness,
and with great depths of meaning.' She had a musical voice, was a good
talker, extremely witty, and so fascinating in every way that a relative
of hers told Miss Jewsbury that every man who spoke to her for five
minutes felt impelled to make her an offer of marriage. Be that as it
may, it _is_ certain that Miss Jane Welsh had troops of suitors in and
around the quiet country town. She always spoke of her mother with deep
affection and great admiration. Her father she reverenced, and he was
the only person during her girlhood who had any real influence over her.
This, then, was the young lady of whom Thomas Carlyle carried back to
Edinburgh a sweet and lasting impression. They corresponded at
intervals, and Thomas was permitted to send her books occasionally.
Edward Irving used to live in Dr Welsh's house when he taught in the
local school, and he led Jeannie--a winsome, wilful lass--to take an
interest in the classics. She entertained a girlish passion for the
handsome youth, and there can be little doubt that they would have
ultimately been married, were it not that the eldest daughter of a
Kirkcaldy parson, Miss Martin, had 'managed to charm Irving for the time
being,' and an engagement followed.
Before Carlyle had drifted into Edinburgh he had, of course, heard of
the fame of Francis Jeffrey. He heard him once speaking in the General
Assembly 'on some poor cause.' Jeffrey's pleading seemed to Carlyle
'abundantly clear, full of liveliness, free flowing ingenuity.' 'My
admiration,' he adds, 'went frankly with that of others, but I think it
was hardly of very deep character.' When Carlyle was in the 'slough of
despond,' he bethought him of Jeffrey, this time as editor of the
_Edinburgh Review_. He resolved to try the 'great man' with an actual
contribution. The subject was a condemnation of a new French book, in
which a mechanical theory of gravitation was elaborately worked out by
the author. He got 'a certain feeble but enquiring quasi-disciple' of
his own to act as amanuensis, from whom he kept his ulterior purpose
quite secret. Looking back through the dim vista of seven-and-forty
years, this is what Carlyle says of that anxious time: 'Well do I
remember those dreary evenings in Bristo Street; oh, what ghastly
passages and dismal successive spasms of attempt at "literary
enterprise"!... My "Review of Pictet" all fairly written out in George
Dalgliesh's good clerk hand, I penned some brief polite Note to the
great Editor, and walked off with the small Parcel one night to his
address in George Street. I very well remember leaving it with his valet
there, and disappearing in the night with various thoughts and doubts!
My hopes had never risen high, or in fact risen at all; but for a
fortnight or so they did not quite die out, and then it was in absolute
zero; no answer, no return of MS., absolutely no notice taken, which was
a form of catastrophe more complete than even I had anticipated! There
rose in my head a pungent little Note which might be written to the
great man, with neatly cutting considerations offered him from the small
unknown ditto; but I wisely judged it was still more dignified to let
the matter lie as it was, and take what I had got for my own benefit
only. Nor did I ever mention it to almost anybody, least of all to
Jeffrey in subsequent changed times, when at anyrate it was fallen
extinct.'[4]
Carlyle's star was, however, in the ascendant, for in 1822 he became
tutor to the two sons of a wealthy lady, Mrs Charles Buller, at a salary
of £200 a year. It was through Irving that this appointment came. The
young lads boarded with 'a good old Dr Fleming' in George Square,
whither Carlyle went daily from his lodgings at[5]3 Moray Street,
Pilrig Street. The Bullers finally returned to London, Carlyle staying
at his father's little homestead of Mainhill to finish a translation of
'Wilhelm Meister.' He followed the Bullers to London, where he resigned
the tutorship in the hope of getting some literary work.
Irving introduced him to the proprietor of the _London Magazine_, who
offered Carlyle sixteen guineas a sheet for a series of 'Portraits of
Men of Genius and Character.' The first was to be a life of Schiller,
which appeared in that periodical in 1823-4. Mr Boyd, the Edinburgh
publisher, accepted the translation of 'Wilhelm Meister.' 'Two years
before,' wrote Carlyle in his _Reminiscences_, 'I had at length, after
some repulsions, got into the heart of "Wilhelm Meister," and eagerly
read it through; my sally out, after finishing, along the vacant streets
of Edinburgh, (a windless, Scotch-misty Saturday night), is still vivid
to me. "Grand, surely, harmoniously built together, far-seeing, wise,
and true: when, for many years, or almost in my life before, have I read
such a book?"' A short letter from Goethe in Weimar, in acknowledgment
of a copy of his 'Wilhelm Meister,' was peculiarly gratifying to
Carlyle.
Carlyle was not happy in London; dyspepsia and 'the noises' sorely
troubled him. He was anxious to be gone. To the surprise of Irving--who
was now settled in the metropolis--and everybody else, he resolutely
decided to return to Annandale, where his father had leased for him a
compact little farm at Hoddam Hill, three miles from Mainhill, and
visible from the fields at the back of it. 'Perhaps it was the very day
before my departure,' wrote Carlyle, 'at least it is the last I
recollect of him [Irving], we were walking in the streets multifariously
discoursing; a dim grey day, but dry and airy;--at the corner of
Cockspur Street we paused for a moment, meeting Sir John Sinclair
("Statistical Account of Scotland" etc.), whom I had never seen before
and never saw again. A lean old man, tall but stooping, in tartan cloak,
face very wrinkly, nose blue, physiognomy vague and with distinction as
one might have expected it to be. He spoke to Irving with benignant
respect, whether to me at all I don't recollect.'
Carlyle shook the dust of London from off his feet, and by easy stages
made his way northwards. Arrived at Ecclefechan, within two miles of his
father's house, while the coach was changing horses, Carlyle noticed
through the window his little sister Jean earnestly looking up for him.
She, with Jenny, the youngest of the family, was at school in the
village, and had come out daily to inspect the coach in hope of seeing
him. 'Her bonny little blush and radiancy of look when I let down the
window and suddenly disclosed myself,' wrote Carlyle in 1867, 'are still
present to me.' On the 26th of May 1825, he established himself at
Hoddam Hill, and set about 'German Romance.' His brother Alick managed
the farm, and his mother, with one of the girls, was generally there to
look after his comforts.
During the intervening years, Carlyle's intimacy with Miss Jane Welsh
gradually increased, with occasional differences. She had promised to
marry him if he could 'achieve independence.' Carlyle's idea was that
after their marriage they should settle upon the farm of Craigenputtock,
which had been in the possession of the Welsh family for generations,
and devote himself to literary work. By and by Miss Welsh accepted his
offer of marriage, but not until she had acquainted him of the Irving
incident. The wedding took place on the 17th of October 1825, and the
young couple took up housekeeping in a quiet cottage at Comely Bank,
Edinburgh. Of his life at this period, the best description is given by
Carlyle himself, in a letter to Mrs Basil Montague, dated Christmas Day
1826:--
'In spite of ill-health I reckon myself moderately happy here, much
happier than men usually are, or than such a fool as I deserve to be. My
good wife exceeds all my hopes, and is, in truth, I believe, among the
best women that the world contains. The philosophy of the heart is far
better than that of the understanding. She loves me with her whole soul,
and this one sentiment has taught her much that I have long been vainly
at the schools to learn.... On the whole, what I chiefly want is
occupation; which, when the times grow better, or my own genius gets
more alert and thorough-going, will not fail, I suppose, to present
itself.... Some day--oh, that the day were here!--I shall surely speak
out those things that are lying in me, and give me no sleep till they
are spoken! Or else, if the Fates would be so kind as to shew me--that I
had nothing to say! This, perhaps, is the real secret of it after all;
a hard result, yet not intolerable, were it once clear and certain.
Literature, it seems, is to be my trade, but the present aspects of it
among us seem to me peculiarly perplexed and uninviting.'[6]Here, as in
undertone, we discover what Professor Masson calls the constitutional
sadness of Carlyle--a sadness which, along with indifferent health, led
him to be impatient at trifles, morbid, proud, and at times needlessly
aggressive in speech and demeanour. These traits, however, in the early
years of married life were not specially visible; and on the whole the
Comely Bank period may be described as one of calm happiness. Carlyle's
forecast was correct. Literature was to be his trade.
In the following spring came a letter to Carlyle from Procter (Barry
Cornwall), whom he had met in London, offering to introduce him formally
to Jeffrey, whom he certified to be a 'very fine fellow.' One evening
Carlyle sallied forth from Comely Bank for Jeffrey's house in George
Street, armed with Procter's letter. He was shown into the study. 'Fire,
pair of candles,' he relates, 'were cheerfully burning, in the light of
which sate my famous little gentleman; laid aside his work, cheerfully
invited me to sit, and began talking in a perfectly human manner.' The
interview lasted for about twenty minutes, during which time Jeffrey had
made kind enquiries what his visitor was doing and what he had
published; adding, 'We must give you a lift,' an offer, Carlyle says,
which in 'some complimentary way' he managed to Jeffrey's satisfaction
to decline. Jeffrey returned Carlyle's call, when he was captivated by
Mrs Carlyle. The intimacy rapidly increased, and a short paper by
Carlyle on Jean Paul appeared in the very next issue of the _Edinburgh
Review_. 'It made,' says the author, 'what they call a sensation among
the Edinburgh buckrams; which was greatly heightened next Number by the
more elaborate and grave article on "German Literature" generally, which
set many tongues wagging, and some few brains considering, _what_ this
strange monster could be that was come to disturb their quiescence and
the established order of Nature! Some Newspapers or Newspaper took to
denouncing "the Mystic School," which my bright little Woman declared to
consist of me alone, or of her and me, and for a long while after
merrily used to designate us by that title.'
Mrs Carlyle proved an admirable hostess; Jeffrey became a frequent
visitor at Comely Bank, and they discovered 'mutual old cousinships' by
the maternal side. Jeffrey's friendship was an immense acquisition to
Carlyle, and everybody regarded it as his highest good fortune. The
_literati_ of Edinburgh came to see her, and 'listen to her husband's
astonishing monologues.' To Carlyle's regret, Jeffrey would not talk in
their frequent rambles of his experiences in the world, 'nor of things
concrete and current,' but was 'theoretic generally'; and seemed bent
on converting Carlyle from his 'German mysticism,' back merely, as the
latter could perceive, into 'dead Edinburgh Whiggism, scepticism, and
materialism'; 'what I felt,' says Carlyle, 'to be a forever impossible
enterprise.' They had long discussions, 'parryings, and thrustings,'
which 'I have known continue night after night,' relates Carlyle, 'till
two or three in the morning (when I was his guest at Craigcrook, as once
or twice happened in coming years); there he went on in brisk logical
exercise with all the rest of the house asleep, and parted usually in
good humour, though after a game which was hardly worth the candle. I
found him infinitely witty, ingenious, sharp of fence, but not in any
sense deep; and used without difficulty to hold my own with him.'
Jeffrey did everything in his power to further Carlyle's prospects and
projects. He tried to obtain for him the professorship of Moral
Philosophy at St Andrews University, vacated by Dr Chalmers.
Testimonials were given by Irving, Brewster, Buller, Wilson, Jeffrey,
and Goethe. They failed, however, in consequence of the opposition of
the Principal, Dr Nicol.
To Carlyle, doubtless, the most memorable incidents of the Edinburgh
period was his correspondence with Goethe. The magnetic spell thrown
over Carlyle by Goethe will ever remain a mystery. Between the two men
there was no intellectual affinity. One would have expected Goethe the
Pagan to have repelled Carlyle the Puritan, unless we have recourse to
the philosophy of opposites, and conclude that the tumultuous soul of
Carlyle found congenial repose in the Greek-like restfulness of Goethe.
The great German had been deeply impressed by the profound grasp which
Carlyle was displaying of German literature. After reading a letter
which he had received from Walter Scott, Goethe remarked to Eckermann:
'I almost wonder that Walter Scott does not say a word about Carlyle,
who has so decided a German tendency that he must certainly be known to
him. It is admirable in Carlyle, that, in his judgment of our German
authors, he has especially in view the _mental and moral core_ as that
which is really influential. Carlyle is a _moral force of great
importance_; there is in him much for the future and we cannot foresee
what he will produce and effect.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 141.
[2] _Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 142.
[3] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 69.
[4] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. 18, 19.
[5] Now 2 Spey Street.
[6] Masson's 'Edinburgh Sketches and Memories,' pp. 329-30.
CHAPTER II
CRAIGENPUTTOCK--LITERARY EFFORTS
Carlyle was feeling the force of Scott's remark that literature was a
bad crutch--his prospects being far from bright. The Carlyles had been a
little over eighteen months at Comely Bank, when their extensive circle
of friends were surprised to hear of their intended withdrawal to
Craigenputtock. Efforts were made to dissuade Carlyle from pursuing what
at the time appeared a suicidal course. He was the intimate associate of
the brilliant Jeffrey; he was within the charmed circle of Edinburgh
Reviewers; he had laid the foundation of a literary reputation.
Outwardly all seemed well with Carlyle; but 'the step,' himself says,
'had been well meditated, saw itself to be founded on irrefragable
considerations of health, _finance_, &c., &c., unknown to bystanders,
and could not be forborne or altered.' Next to his marriage with Miss
Welsh, Carlyle's retirement to the howling wilds of Craigenputtock at
that juncture was the most momentous step in his long life. He was
conscious of his own powers, and he clearly discerned how those powers
could best be utilised and developed. Hence his determination to bid
adieu to Edinburgh. And in that resolve he was fortified by the loyal
support of his wife.
Jeffrey promised to visit the Carlyles at Craigenputtock as soon as they
got settled. Meanwhile, they stayed a week at his own house in Moray
Place, after their furniture was on the road, and they were waiting till
it should arrive and 'render a new home possible amid the moors and the
mountains.' 'Of our history at Craigenputtock,' says Carlyle, 'there
might a great deal be written which might amuse the curious; for it was
in fact a very singular scene and arena for such a pair as my Darling
and me, with such a Life ahead.... It is a History I by no means intend
to write, with such or with any object. To me there is a _sacredness_ of
interest in it consistent only with _silence_. It was the field of
endless nobleness and beautiful talent and virtue in Her who is now
gone; also of good industry, and many loving and blessed thoughts in
myself, while living there by her side. Poverty and mean Obstruction had
given origin to it, and continued to preside over it, but were
transformed by human valour of various sorts into a kind of victory and
royalty: something of high and great dwelt in it, though nothing could
be smaller and lower than very many of the details.'[7]
The Jeffreys were not slow in appearing at Craigenputtock. Their 'big
Carriage,' narrates the humorous host, 'climbed our rugged Hill-roads,
landed the Three Guests--young Charlotte ("Sharlie"), with Pa and
Ma--and the clever old Valet maid that waited on them; ... but I
remember nothing so well as the consummate art with which my Dear One
played the domestic field-marshal, and spread out our exiguous
resources, without fuss or bustle; to cover everything with a coat of
hospitality and even elegance and abundance. I have been in houses ten
times, nay, a hundred times, as rich, where things went not so well.
Though never bred to this, but brought up in opulent plenty by a mother
that could bear no partnership in housekeeping, she, finding it become
necessary, loyally applied herself to it, and soon surpassed in it all
the women I have ever seen.'[8] Of Mrs Carlyle's frankness her husband
gives this amusing glimpse: 'One day at dinner, I remember, Jeffrey
admired the fritters or bits of pancake he was eating, and she let him
know, not without some vestige of shock to him, that she had made them.
"What, you! twirl up the frying-pan, and catch them in the air?" Even
so, my high friend, and you may turn it over in your mind!' When the
Jeffreys were leaving, 'I remarked,' says Carlyle, that they 'carried
off our little temporary paradise; ... to which bit of pathos Jeffrey
answered by a friendly little sniff of quasi-mockery or laughter
through the nose, and rolled prosperously away.'
The Carlyles in course of time visited the Jeffreys at Craigcrook, the
last occasion being for about a fortnight. Carlyle says it was 'a
shining sort of affair, but did not in effect accomplish much for any of
us. Perhaps, for one thing, we stayed too long, Jeffrey was beginning to
be seriously incommoded in health, had bad sleep, cared not how late he
sat, and we had now more than ever a series of sharp fencing bouts,
night after night, which could decide nothing for either of us, except
our radical incompatibility in respect of World Theory, and the
incurable divergence of our opinions on the most important matters. "You
are so dreadfully in earnest!" said he to me once or oftener. Besides, I
own now I was deficient in reverence to him, and had not then, nor,
alas! have ever acquired, in my solitary and mostly silent existence,
the art of gently saying strong things, or of insinuating my dissent,
instead of uttering it right out at the risk of offence or otherwise.'
Then he adds: 'These "stormy sittings," as Mrs Jeffrey laughingly called
them, did not improve our relation to one another. But these were the
last we had of that nature. In other respects Edinburgh had been barren;
effulgences of "Edinburgh Society," big dinners, parties, we in due
measure had; but nothing there was very interesting either to _Her_ or
to me, and all of it passed away as an obliging pageant merely. Well do
I remember our return to Craigenputtock, after nightfall, amid the
clammy yellow leaves and desolate rains with the clink of Alick's stithy
alone audible of human.'[9]
It was during his first two years' residence at Craigenputtock that
Carlyle wrote his famous essay on Burns; but his principal work was upon
German literature, especially upon Goethe. His magazine writings being
his only means of support, and as he devoted much time to them, it is
not surprising that financial matters worried him. About this time
Jeffrey, to whom doubtless he confided his trouble, generously offered
to confer upon him an annuity of £100, which Carlyle declined to accept.
Jeffrey repeated the offer on two subsequent occasions, with a like
result. Carlyle in his _Reminiscences_ says that he could not doubt but
Jeffrey had intended an act of real generosity; and yet Carlyle penned
the ungracious remark, that 'perhaps there was something in the manner
of it that savoured of consciousness and of screwing one's self up to
the point; less of god-like pity for a fine fellow and his struggles,
than of human determination to do a fine action of one's own, which
might add to the promptitude of my refusal.' It is not surprising,
therefore, to find Carlyle suspecting that Jeffrey's feelings were
cooling towards him. Jeffrey had powers of penetration as well as the
friend whom he was anxious to assist.
By the month of February 1831, Carlyle's finances fell so low that he
had only £5 in his possession, and expected no more for months. Then he
borrowed £100 from Jeffrey, as his 'pitiful bits of periodical
literature incomings,' as he puts it, 'having gone awry (as they were
liable to do), but was able, I still remember with what satisfaction, to
repay punctually within a few weeks'; adding, 'and this was all of
pecuniary chivalry _we_ two ever had between us.' The chivalry was all
on the one side--of Jeffrey. The outcome of his labours at
Craigenputtock, in addition to the fragmentary articles already referred
to, was the essays which form the first three volumes of the
'Miscellanies.' They appeared chiefly in the _Edinburgh Review_, the
_Foreign Review_, and _Fraser's Magazine_. Jeffrey's resignation of the
editorship of the 'Review' was a great disappointment to Carlyle,
because it stopped a regular source of income.
German literature, of which Carlyle had begun a history, not being a
'marketable commodity,' he cut it up into articles. 'My last
considerable bit of _Writing_ at Craigenputtock,' says Carlyle, 'was
"Sartor Resartus"; done, I think, between January and August 1830; (my
sister Margaret had died while it was going on). I well remember where
and how (at Templand one morning) the _germ_ of it rose above ground.
"Nine months," I used to say, "it had cost me in writing." Had the
perpetual fluctuation, the uncertainty and unintelligible whimsicality
of Review Editors not proved so intolerable, we might have lingered
longer at Craigenputtock, perfectly left alone, and able to do _more_
work, beyond doubt, than elsewhere. But a Book did seem to promise some
_respite_ from that, and perhaps further advantages. Teufelsdröckh was
ready; and (first days of August) I decided to make for London. Night
before going, how I still remember it! I was lying on my back on the
sofa in the drawing-room; she sitting by the table (late at night,
packing all done, I suppose); her words had a guise of sport, but were
profoundly plaintive in meaning. "About to part, who knows for how long;
and what may have come in the interim!" this was her thought, and she
was evidently much out of spirits. "Courage, Dearie, only for a month!"
I would say to her in some form or other. I went next morning
early.'[10]
Jeffrey, who was by that time Lord Advocate, Carlyle found much
preoccupied in London, but willing to assist him with Murray, the
bookseller. Jeffrey, with his wife and daughter, lived in Jermyn Street
in lodgings, 'in melancholy contrast to the beautiful tenements and
perfect equipments they had left in the north.' 'If,' says Carlyle, 'I
called in the morning, in quest perhaps of Letters (though I don't
recollect much troubling _him_ in that way), I would find the family
still at breakfast, ten A.M. or later; and have seen poor Jeffrey
emerge in flowered dressing-gown, with a most boiled and suffering
expression of face, like one who had slept miserably, and now awoke
mainly to paltry misery and bother; poor Official man! "I am made a mere
Post-Office of!" I heard him once grumble, after tearing open several
Packets, not one of which was internally for himself.'[11]
Mrs Carlyle joined her husband on the 1st of October 1831, and they took
lodgings at 4 Ampton Street, Gray's Inn Lane, with a family of the name
of Miles, belonging to Irving's congregation. Jeffrey was a frequent
visitor there, and sometimes the Carlyles called at Jermyn Street.
Carlyle says that they were at first rather surprised that Jeffrey did
not introduce him to some of his 'grand literary figures,' or try in
some way to be of help to one for whom he evidently had a value. The
explanation, Carlyle thinks, was that he himself 'expressed no trace of
aspiration that way'; that Jeffrey's 'grand literary or other figures'
were clearly by no means 'so adorable to the rustic hopelessly
Germanised soul as an introducer of one might have wished.' Besides,
Jeffrey was so 'heartily miserable,' as to think Carlyle and his other
fellow-creatures happy in comparison, and to have no care left to bestow
upon them.
Here is a characteristic outburst in the 'Reminiscences': 'The beggarly
history of poor "Sartor" _among the blockheadisms_ is not worth my
recording or remembering--least of all here! In short, finding that
whereas I had got £100 (if memory serve) for "Schiller" six or seven
years before, and for "Sartor," at least _thrice_ as good, I could not
only _not_ get £200, but even get no Murray, or the like, to publish it
on half-profits (Murray, a most stupendous object to me; tumbling about,
eyeless, with the evidently strong wish to say "yes and no"; my first
signal experience of that sad human predicament); I said, "We will make
it No, then; wrap up our MS.; wait till this Reform Bill uproar
abate."'[12]
On Tuesday, January 26th, 1832, Carlyle received tidings of the death of
his father. He departed on the Sunday morning previous 'almost without a
struggle,' wrote his favourite sister Jane. It was a heavy stroke for
Carlyle. 'Natural tears,' he exclaimed shortly afterwards, 'have come to
my relief. I can look at my dear Father, and that section of the Past
which he has made alive for me, in a certain sacred, sanctified light,
and give way to what thoughts rise in me without feeling that they are
weak and useless.' Carlyle determined that the time till the funeral was
past (Friday) should be spent with his wife only. All others were
excluded. He walked 'far and much,' chiefly in the Regent's Park, and
considered about many things, his object being to see clearly what his
calamity meant--what he lost, and what lesson that loss was to teach
him. Carlyle considered his father as one of the most interesting men he
had known. 'Were you to ask me,' he said, 'which had the greater natural
faculty,' Robert Burns or my father, 'I might, perhaps, actually pause
before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider Education, my Father a
far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of Musical Utterance; the
other wholly a man of Action, even with Speech subservient thereto.
Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in
whom the endowment from Nature and the Arena from Fortune were so
utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly _know_
it. As a man of Speculation--had Culture ever unfolded him--he must have
gone wild and desperate as Burns; but he was a man of Conduct, and Work
keeps all right. What strange shapeable creatures we are!'[13] Nothing
that the elder Carlyle undertook to do but he did it faithfully, and
like a true man. 'I shall look,' said his distinguished son, 'on the
houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound
to the heart all over his little district. No one that comes after him
will ever say, "Here was the finger of a hollow eye-servant." They are
little texts for me of the gospel of man's free will. Nor will his deeds
and sayings in any case be found unworthy--not false and barren, but
genuine and fit. Nay, am not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I
owe him much more than existence; I owe him a noble inspiring example
(now that I can read it in that rustic character). It was he
_exclusively_ that determined on _educating_ me; that from his small
hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I
am or may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of
him. So shall he still live even here in me, and his worth plant itself
honourably forth into new generations.'[14] One of the wise men about
Ecclefechan told James Carlyle: 'Educate a boy, and he grows up to
despise his ignorant parents.' His father once told Carlyle this, and
added: 'Thou hast not done so; God be thanked for it.' When James
Carlyle first entered his son's house at Craigenputtock, Mrs Carlyle was
greatly struck with him, 'and still farther,' says her husband, 'opened
my eyes to the treasure I possessed in a father.'
The last time Carlyle saw his father was a few days before leaving for
London. 'He was very kind,' wrote Carlyle, 'seemed prouder of me than
ever. What he had never done the like of before, he said, on hearing me
express something which he admired, "Man, it's surely a pity that thou
should sit yonder with nothing but the eye of Omniscience to see thee,
and thou with such a gift to speak."' In closing his affectionate
tribute, Carlyle exclaims: 'Thank Heaven, I know and have known what it
is to be a _son_; to _love_ a father, as spirit can love spirit.'
The last days of March 1832 found the Carlyles back at Craigenputtock. A
new tenant occupied the farm, and their days were lonelier than ever.
Meanwhile 'Sartor Resartus' was appearing in _Fraser's Magazine_. The
Editor reported that it 'excited the most unqualified disapprobation.'
Nothing daunted, Carlyle pursued the 'noiseless tenor of his way,'
throwing off articles on various subjects. Finding that Mrs Carlyle's
health suffered from the gloom and solitude of Craigenputtock, they
removed to Edinburgh in January 1833. Jeffrey was absent in 'official
regions,' and Carlyle notes that they found a 'most dreary contemptible
kind of element' in Edinburgh. But their stay there was not without its
uses, for in the Advocates' Library Carlyle found books which had a
great effect upon his line of study. He collected materials for his
articles upon 'Cagliostro' and the 'Diamond Necklace.' At the end of
four months, the Carlyles were back again at Craigenputtock.
August was a bright month for Thomas Carlyle, for it was then that Ralph
Waldo Emerson visited him at his rural retreat. The Carlyles thought him
'one of the most lovable creatures' they had ever seen, and an unbroken
friendship of nearly fifty years was begun. As winter approached,
Carlyle's prospects were not very bright, and he once more turned his
eyes towards London, where the remainder of his life was to be spent.
Before following him thither, it may be well to turn from the outer to
the inner side of Carlyle's life, and study the forces which went to the
making of his unique personality.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 30.
[8] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 31.
[9] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. 40, 41.
[10] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. 161, 162.
[11] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 47.
[12] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 162.
[13] _Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 19.
[14] _Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 6.
CHAPTER III
CARLYLE'S MENTAL DEVELOPMENT
Through all the material struggles Carlyle's mind at Craigenputtock was
gradually shaping itself round a theory of the Universe and Man, from
which he drew inspiration in his future life work. Through his
contributions to Magazines and Reviews there is traceable an original
vein of thought and feeling which had its origin in the study of German
literature. Carlyle's studies and musings took coherent, or, as some
would say incoherent, shape in _Sartor Resartus_,--a book which
appropriately was written in the stern solitude of Craigenputtock.
In order to acquire an adequate understanding of Carlyle as a thinker,
attention has to be paid to the two dominating influences of his mental
life--his early home training and German literature. In regard to the
former, ancestry with Carlyle counts for much. He came of a sturdy
Covenanting stock. Carlyle himself has left a graphic description of the
religious environment of the Burghers, to which sect his father
belonged. The congregation, under the ministry of a certain John
Johnston, who taught Carlyle his first Latin, worshipped in a little
house thatched with heath. Of the simple faith, the stern piety and the
rugged heroism of the old Seceders, Carlyle himself has left a
photograph: 'Very venerable are those old Seceder clergy to me now when
I look back.... Most figures of them in my time were hoary old men; men
so like evangelists in modern vesture and poor scholars and gentlemen of
Christ I have nowhere met with among Protestant or Papal clergy in any
country in the world.... Strangely vivid are some twelve or twenty of
those old faces whom I used to see every Sunday, whose names,
employments or precise dwellingplaces I never knew, but whose portraits
are yet clear to me as in a mirror. Their heavy-laden, patient,
ever-attentive faces, fallen solitary most of them, children all away,
wife away for ever, or, it might be, wife still there and constant like
a shadow and grown very like the old man, the thrifty cleanly poverty of
these good people, their well-saved coarse old clothes, tailed
waistcoats down to mid-thigh--all this I occasionally see as with eyes
sixty or sixty-five years off, and hear the very voice of my mother upon
it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about these persons of the
drama and endeavouring to describe and identify them.' And what a
glimpse we have into the inmost heart of the primitive Covenanting
religion in the portrait drawn by Carlyle of old David Hope, the farmer
who refused to postpone family worship in order to take in his grain.
David was putting on his spectacles when somebody rushed in with the
words: 'Such a raging wind risen will drive the stooks into the sea if
let alone.' 'Wind!' answered David, 'wind canna get ae straw that has
been appointed mine. Sit down and let us worship God.' Far away from the
simple Covenanting creed of his father and mother Carlyle wandered, but
to the last the feeling of life's mystery and solemnity remained vivid
with him, though fed from quite other sources than the Bible and the
_Shorter Catechism_.
Much has been said of Carlyle's father, but it is highly probable that
to his mother he owed most during his early years. The temperament of
the Covenanter was of the non-conductor type. Men like James Carlyle
were essentially stern, self-centred, unemotional. Fighting like the
Jews, with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, they had no time
for cultivating the softer side of human nature. Ready to go to the
stake on behalf of religious liberty, they exercised a repressive, not
to say despotic, influence in their own households. With them education
meant not the unfolding of the individual powers of the children, but
the ruthless crushing of them into a theological mould. Religion in such
an atmosphere became loveless rather than lovely, and might have had
serious influences of a reactionary nature but for the caressing
tenderness of the mother. With a heart which overflowed the ordinary
theological boundaries, the mother in many sweet and hidden ways
supplied the emotional element, which had been crushed out of the father
by a narrow conception of life and duty. Carlyle's experience may be
judged from his references to his parents. He always speaks of his
father with profound respect and admiration; towards his mother his
heart goes forth with a devotion which became stronger as the years
rolled on. Carlyle's love of his mother was as beautiful as it was
sacred. Long after Carlyle had parted with the creed of his childhood,
his heart tremulously responded to the old symbols. His system of
thought, indeed, might well be defined as Calvinism minus Christianity.
Had Carlyle not come into contact with German thought, he would probably
have jogged along the path of literature in more or less conventional
fashion. In fact, nothing is more remarkable than the comparatively
commonplace nature of Carlyle's early contributions to literature.
Germany touched the deepest chords of his nature. With German ideas and
emotions his mind was saturated, and _Sartor Resartus_ was the outcome.
To that book students must go for a glance into Carlyle's mind while he
was wrestling with the great mysteries of Existence. In June 1821, as Mr
Froude tells us, took place what may be called Carlyle's conversion--his
triumph over his doubts, and the beginning of a new life. To understand
this phase of Carlyle's life, we must pause for a little to consider
German literature, whence Carlyle derived spiritual relief and
consolation.
What, then, was the nature of the message of peace which Germany,
through Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, brought to the storm-tossed soul of
Carlyle? When Carlyle began to think seriously, two antagonistic
conceptions of life, the orthodox and the rationalist, were struggling
for mastery in the field of thought. The orthodox conception, into which
he had been born, and with which his father and mother had fronted the
Eternities, had given way under the solvent of modern thought. Carlyle's
belief in Christianity as a revelation seems to have dropped from him
without much of a struggle, somewhat after the style of George Eliot.
His mental tortures appear to have arisen from spiritual hunger, from an
inability to fill the place vacated by the old beliefs. Had he lived
fifty years earlier, Carlyle would have been invited to find salvation
in the easy-going, drawing-room rationalism of Hume and Gibbon, or to
content himself with the ecclesiastical placidity known as Moderatism.
Much had occurred since the arm-chair philosophers of Edinburgh taught
that this was the best possible world, and that the highest wisdom
consisted in frowning upon enthusiasm and cultivating the comfortable.
The French Revolution had revolutionised men's thoughts and feelings.
There had been revealed to man the inadequacy of the old Deistical or
Mechanical philosophy, which, spreading from England to France, had
done so much to hasten the revolutionary epoch. Carlyle could find no
spiritual sustenance in the purely mechanical theory of life which was
offered as the substitute for the theory of the Churches. There was
another theory, which had its rise in Germany, and to which Carlyle
clung when he could no longer keep hold of the Supernatural. In
Transcendentalism, Carlyle found salvation.
What are the leading conceptions of the German form of salvation? The
answer to this will give the key to _Sartor Resartus_, and to Carlyle's
whole mental outlook. In the eyes of thinkers like Carlyle, the great
objection to Christianity was the breach it made between the natural and
the supernatural. Between them there was a great gulf which could only
fitfully and temporarily be bridged by the miraculous. Students who were
being inoculated with scientific ideas of law and order, were bewildered
by a theory of life which had no organic relation to the great germinal
ideas of the day. In their desire to abolish the supernatural, the
French thinkers constructed a theory of Nature in which everything, from
the movements of solar masses to the movements of the soul, were
interpreted in terms of matter. By adopting a mechanical view of the
Universe, the French thinkers robbed Nature of much of its charm, and
stunted the emotions on the side of wonder and admiration. The world was
reduced to a vast machine, man himself being simply a temporary
embodiment of material particles in a highly complex and unique form.
Instead of being what it was to the Greeks, a temple of beauty, the
Universe to the materialist resembled a prison in which the walls
gradually closed upon the poor wretch till he was crushed under the
ruins. Goethe has left on record the impression made upon him by the
materialistic view of life. As he says, 'The materialistic theory, which
reduces all things to matter and motion, appeared to me so grey, so
Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost.'
_Sartor Resartus_ is studded with vigorous protests against the
mechanical view of Nature and Man. Just as distasteful to Carlyle, and
equally mechanical in spirit, was the Deistical conception of Nature as
a huge clock, under the superintendence of a Divine clock-maker, whose
duty consisted in seeing that the clock kept good time and was in all
respects thoroughly reliable. The Germans attacked the problem from the
other side. They did not abolish the supernatural with the materialists,
or seek it in another world with the theologians; they found the
supernatural in the natural. To the materialists, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel and Goethe had one reply:--Reduce matter to its
constituent atoms, they argued, and you never seize the principle of
life; it evades you like a spirit; in this principle everything lives
and moves and has its being. German philosophy from Kant has been
occupied in attempts to trace the spiritual principle in the great
process of cosmic evolution. In poetry, Goethe attempted to represent
this as the energising principle of life and duty. The spiritual cannot
be weighed in the scales of logic; it refuses to be put upon the
dissecting-table. As a consequence, the truth of things is best seen by
the poet. The owl-like logic-chopper, from his mechanical and
utilitarian standpoint, sees not the Divine vision. This has been called
Pantheism. Call it what we please, it is contradictory to Deism and
Materialism, and is the root thought of _Sartor Resartus_, which may be
taken as Carlyle's Confession of Faith. A few extracts will justify the
foregoing analysis. The transcendental view of Nature is expressed by
Carlyle thus:--'Atheistic science babbles poorly of it with scientific
nomenclature, experiments and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing,
to be bottled up in Leyden jars, and sold over counter; but the native
sense of man in all times, if he will himself apply his sense, proclaims
it to be a living thing--ah, an unspeakable, God-like thing, towards
which the best attitude for us, after never so much science, is awe,
devout prostration and humility of soul, worship, if not in words, then
in silence.' Here, again, is a passage quite Hegelian in its tone: 'For
Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit; the manifestation of
Spirit, were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing Visible,
nay, the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible,
what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher celestial Invisible,
unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright.'
The defects of Carlyle, and they are many, take their root in his
speculative view of the Universe--a view which demands careful analysis
if the student hopes to understand Carlyle's strength and weakness. It
is not meant that Carlyle's mind remained anchored to the philosophic
idealism of _Sartor_. In later days he professed contempt for
transcendental moonshine, but his contempt was for the form and jargon
of the schools, not for the spirit, which dominated Carlyle to the end.
After Carlyle passed the early poetic stage, his views took more and
more an anthropomorphic mould, till in many of his writings he seems
practically a Theist. But at root Carlyle's thought was more
Pantheistical than Deistical. What, then, is the German conception of
the Ultimate Reality? The German answer grew out of an attempt to get
rid of the difficulties propounded by Hume. Hume, the father of all the
Empiricists, in giving logical effect to Berkeleyism, concluded that
just as we know nothing of the outer world beyond sense impressions, so
of the inner world of mind we know nothing beyond mental impressions. We
can combine and recombine these impressions as we choose, but from them
we cannot deduce any ultimate laws, either of the world or of mind.
Hume would not sanction belief in causation as a universal law. All that
could be said was that certain things happened in a certain manner so
frequently as to give rise to a law of expectation. But this is not to
solve, but to evade the problem? We are still driven to ask, What is
matter? What is motion? What is force? How do we get our knowledge of
the material world, and is that knowledge reliable? These are wide
questions that cannot be adequately handled here. It was a favourite
argument of Comte and his followers, that man's first conceptions of
Nature were necessarily erroneous, because they were anthropomorphic.
Theology was, therefore, dethroned without ceremony. But science is as
anthropomorphic as theology. We have no guarantee that the great facts
of Nature are as we think them. We talk of Force, but our idea of Force
is taken from experiences which may have no counterpart in Nature. It is
well known, for example, that the secondary qualities of objects,
colour, &c., do not exist in Nature. Our personality is so inextricably
mixed with the material universe that it is impossible to formulate a
philosophy like Naturalism, which makes mind a product of Nature, and
which sharply defines the provinces of the two.
But what Naturalism fails to do, Idealism or Transcendentalism promises
to perform. Idealism is simply Materialism turned upside down. The only
difference between the evolution of Spencer and of Hegel is that the
one puts matter, the other mind, first. For all practical purposes, it
signifies little whether mind is the temporary embodiment of an idea, or
the temporary product of a highly specialised form of matter. In either
case, man has no more freedom than the bubble upon the surface of the
stream. We may discourse of the bubble as poetically or as practically
as we please, the result is the same--absorption in the universal.
Hegelianism as much as Naturalism leaves man a prisoner in the hands of
Fate. The only difference is, that while Naturalism puts round the
prisoner's neck a plain, unpretentious noose, Hegelianism adds fringes
and embroidery. If there is no appeal from Nature's dread sentence, the
less poetry and embroidery there is about the doleful business the
better.
In _Sartor Resartus_, Carlyle talks finely but vaguely, of the peace
which came over his soul when he discovered that the universe was not
mechanical but Divine. The peace was not of long duration. What
consolation Carlyle derived from Idealism did not appear in his life.
What a contrast between the poetic optimism of _Sartor_ and the
heavily-charged pessimism of old age, when Carlyle, with wailing pathos,
exclaims that God does nothing. Carlyle's life abundantly illustrates
the fact that whenever it leaves cloudland, Idealism sinks into
scepticism more bitter and gloomy than the unbelief of Naturalism.
Carlyle approached the question of the Ultimate Reality from the wrong
standpoint. He had no reasoned philosophic creed. A poet, he had the
poetic dread of analysis, and his spirit revolted at the spectacle of
Nature on the dissecting-table. He waged a life-long warfare against
science. As the present writer has elsewhere remarked:--'Carlyle never
could tolerate the evolution theory. He always spoke with the utmost
contempt of Darwin, and everything pertaining to the development
doctrines. It is somewhat startling to find that Carlyle was an
evolutionist without knowing it. The antagonism between Carlyle and
Spencer disappears on closer inspection. When Carlyle speaks of the
universe as in very truth the star-domed city of God, and reminds us
that through every crystal and through every grass blade, but most
through every living soul, the glory of a present God still beams, he is
simply saying in the language of poetry what Spencer says in the
language of science, that the world of phenomena is sustained and
energised by an infinite Eternal Power. Evolution is as emphatic as
Carlyle on the absolute distinction between right and wrong. Carlyle and
all the German school confront the evolutionary ethics with the Kantian
categorical imperative. Surely the Evolutionists in the matter of an
imperative out-rival the Intuitionalists, when, in addition to the
dictates of conscience, they can call as a witness and sanction to
morality the testimony of all-embracing experience. In his famous
saying, Might is Right, Carlyle was unconsciously formulating one aspect
of evolutionary ethics. Carlyle did not mean anything so silly as that
brute force and ethical sanctions are identical; what he meant was that
in the long run Righteousness will prove the mightiest force in the
universe. What is this but another version of the Spencerian doctrine of
the survival of the fittest, which, in the most highly evolved state of
society, will mean the survival of the best? In the highest social state
the only Might that will survive will be the Might which is rooted in
Right. Carlyle's contemptuous attitude towards science is deeply to be
deplored. He waged bitter warfare against the evolution theory, quite
oblivious of the fact that by means of it there was revealed a deeper
insight into the Power behind Nature, and into the ethical constitution
of the universe, than ever entered into the minds of transcendental
philosophers.'
It is taken for granted that Carlyle's thoughts have no organic unity.
He is looked upon as a stimulating, but confused, writer, as a thinker
of original, but incoherent, power. True, he has not a logical mind, and
pays no deference to the canons of the schools or the market-place. But
there is a method in Carlyle's apparent caprice. When analysed, his
thoughts are discovered to have unity. His transcendentalism embraces
the ethic as well as the cosmic side of life. In the sphere of morals,
as of science, his writings are one long tumultuous protest against the
mechanical philosophy and the utilitarian theory of morals. From his
essay on Voltaire we take the following:--'It is contended by many that
our mere love of personal Pleasure or Happiness, as it is called, acting
in every individual with such clearness as he may easily have, will of
itself lead him to respect the rights of others, and wisely employ his
own.... Without some belief in the necessary eternal, or, which is the
same thing, in the supra mundane divine nature of Virtue existing in
each individual, could the moral judgment of a thousand or a thousand
thousand individuals avail us'? More picturesquely, Carlyle denounces
the utilitarian system in these words: 'What then? Is the heroic
inspiration we name Virtue but some passion, some bubble of the blood,
bubbling in the direction others profit by? I know not; only this I
know. If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all
astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion, man may front much. But what
in these dull, unimaginative days are the terrors of conscience to the
diseases of the Liver? Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our
stronghold: there, brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us offer
sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things _he_ has
provided for his Elect'! The exponent of such a theory of ethics will
have a natural distaste for the rational or calculating side of conduct.
He will depreciate the mechanical, and give undue emphasis to the
inspirational. His heroes will be not men of placid temperament,
methodical habits, and utilitarian aims, but men of mystical and
passionate natures, spasmodic in action, and guided by ideas not easily
justified at the bar of utility.
Just as in the sphere of speculative thought, he has profound contempt
for the Diderots and Voltaires, with their mechanical views of the
Universe, so in practical affairs Carlyle has contempt for the men who
endeavour to further their aims by appealing to commonplace motives by
means of commonplace methods. Specially opposed is he to the tendency of
the age to rely for progress, not upon appeals to the great elemental
forces of human nature, but upon organisations, committees, and all
kinds of mechanism. In his remarkable essay, 'Signs of the Times,' we
have ample verification of our exposition. After talking depreciatingly
of the mechanical tendency of the prevailing philosophies, Carlyle
comments upon the mechanical nature of the reforming agencies of
civilisation. The intense Egoism of his nature rebels against any kind
of Socialism or Collectivism. He says: 'Were we required to characterise
this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it,
not a Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Heroic Age, but, above
all, the Mechanical Age. It is the age of machinery in every outward and
inward sense of that word.... Men are grown mechanical in head and
heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour,
and in natural force of any kind.... We may trace this tendency in all
the great manifestations of our time: in its intellectual aspect, the
studies it most favours, and its manner of conducting them; in its
practical aspects, its politics, art, religious work; in the whole
sources, and throughout the whole current of its spiritual, no less than
its material, activity.' With Carlyle the secrets of Nature and Life
were discoverable, not so much by the intellect as by the heart. The man
with the large heart, rather than the clear head, saw furthest into the
nature of things. The history of German thought is strewn with the wreck
of systems based upon the Carlylian doctrine of intuition. Schelling and
Hegel showed the puerility to which great men are driven when they
started to construct science out of their own intuitions, instead of
patiently and humbly sitting down to study Nature. Tyndall has left on
record his gratitude to Carlyle. Tyndall had grip of the scientific
method, and was able to allow Carlyle's inspiration to play upon his
mind without fear of harm; but how many waverers has Carlyle driven from
the path of reason into the bogs of mysticism?
Carlyle's impatience with reasoning and his determination to follow the
promptings of _a priori_ conceptions gave his system of ethics a
one-sided cast, and made him needlessly aggressive towards what in his
day was called Utilitarianism, but what has now come to be known as
Evolutionary Ethics. What is the chief end of man considered as a moral
agent? The answer of the Christian religion is as intelligible as it is
comprehensive. Man's duty consists in obeying the laws of God revealed
in Nature and in the Bible. But apart from revelation, where is the
basis of ethical authority? Debarred from accepting the Christian view,
and instinctively repelled from Utilitarianism, Carlyle found refuge in
the Fichtean and similar systems of ethics. By substituting Blessedness
for Happiness as the aim of ethical endeavour, Carlyle endeavoured to
preserve the heroic attitude which was associated with Supernaturalism.
In his view, it was more consistent with human dignity to trust for
inspiration to a light within than painfully to piece together fragments
of human experience and ponder the inferences to be drawn therefrom.
In his 'Data of Ethics,' Herbert Spencer shows the hollowness of
Carlyle's distinction between Blessedness and Happiness. As Spencer puts
it: 'Obviously the implication is that Blessedness is not a kind of
Happiness, and this implication at once suggests the question, What mode
of feeling is this? If it is a state of consciousness at all, it is
necessarily one of three states--painful, indifferent, or
pleasurable.... If the pleasurable states are in excess, then the
blessed life can be distinguished from any other pleasurable life only
by the relative amount or the quality of its pleasures. It is a life
which makes happiness of a certain kind and degree its end, and the
assumption that blessedness is not a form of happiness lapses.... In
brief, blessedness has for its necessary condition of existence
increased happiness, positive or negative in some consciousness or
other; and disappears utterly if we assume that the actions called
blessed are known to cause decrease of happiness in others as well as in
the actor.'
To German philosophy and literature Carlyle owed his critical method, by
which he all but revolutionised criticism as understood by his Edinburgh
and London contemporaries. Carlyle began his apprenticeship with the
Edinburgh Reviewers, in whose hand criticism never lost its political
bias. Apart from that, criticism up till the time of Carlyle was mainly
statical. The critic was a kind of literary book-keeper who went upon
the double-entry system. On one page were noted excellences, on the
other defects, and when the two columns were _totalled_ the debtor and
creditor side of the transaction was set forth. Where, as in the cases
of Burns and Byron, genius was complicated with moral aberration,
anything like a correct estimate was impossible. The result was that in
Scotland criticism oscillated between the ethical severity of the pulpit
and the daring laxity of free thought. As the Edinburgh Reviewers could
not afford to set the clergy at defiance, they had to pay due respect to
conventional tastes and standards. Carlyle faced the question from a
different standpoint. He introduced into criticism the dynamic principle
which he found in the Germans, particularly in Goethe. In contemplating
a work of Art, the Germans talk much of the importance of seizing upon
the creative spirit, what Hegel called the Idea. The thought of Goethe
and Hegel, though differently expressed, resolves itself into the
conception of a life principle which shapes materials into harmony with
innate forms. In the sphere of life the determining factors are the
inner vitalities, which, however, are susceptible to the environment.
The critic who would realise his ideal does not go about with literary
and ethical tape-lines: he seeks to understand the spirit which animated
the author as shewn in his works and his life, and then studies the
influence of his environment. That this is a correct description of
Carlyle's critical method is evidenced by his own remarks in his essay
on Burns. He says: 'If an individual is really of consequence enough to
have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have
always been of opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with
all the springs and relations of his character. How did the world and
man's life from his particular position represent themselves to his
mind? How did co-existing circumstances modify him from without: how
did he modify these from within?'
This attention to the inner springs of character gives the key to
Carlyle's critical work. How fruitful this was is seen in his essay on
Burns. He steered an even course between the stern moralists, whose
indignation at the sins of Burns the man blinded them to the genius of
Burns the poet, and the flippant Bohemians, who thought that by bidding
defiance to the conventionalities and moralities Burns proved his title
to the name of genius, and whose voices are yet unduly with us in much
spirituous devotion and rhymeless doggerel at the return of each 25th of
January. While laying bare the springs of Burns' genius, Carlyle, with
unerring precision, also puts his finger on the weak point in the poet's
moral nature. So faithfully did Carlyle apply his critical method that
he may be considered to have said the final word about Burns.
When Goethe spoke of Carlyle as a great moral force he must have had in
his mind the ethical tone of Carlyle's critical writing--a tone which
had its roots in the idea that judgment upon a man should be determined,
not by isolated deviations from conventional or even ethical standards,
but by consideration of the deep springs of character from which flow
aspirations and ideals. In his _Heroes and Hero-Worship_ Carlyle
elaborates his critical theory thus: 'On the whole, we make too much of
faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults?
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who
is called there "the man according to God's own heart?" David, the
Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough--blackest crimes--there was no
want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask: Is this your
man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a
shallow one. What are faults? What are the outward details of a life, if
the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled,
never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten?... The deadliest sin, I say,
were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin: that is death....
David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I
consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress
and warfare here below.'
This canon faithfully applied enabled Carlyle to invest with a new and
living interest large sections of literary criticism. Burns, Johnson,
Cromwell and others of like calibre, were rescued by Carlyle from the
hands of Pedants and Pharisees. To readers wearied with the facile
criticism of conventional reviewers, it was a revelation to come into
contact with a writer like Carlyle, who not only gave to the mind great
inspirational impetus, but also a larger critical outlook; it was like
stepping out of a museum, or a dissecting-room into the free, fresh,
breezy air of Nature.
Moreover, Carlyle's interest in the soul is not of an antiquarian
nature; he studies his heroes as if they were ancestors of the Carlyle
family. He broods over their letters as if they were the letters of his
own flesh and blood, and his comments resemble the soliloquisings of a
pathos stricken kinsman rather than the conscious reflections of a
literary man. It is noteworthy that Carlyle's critical powers are
limited by his sympathies. His method, though suggestive of scientific
criticism, is largely influenced by the personal equation. Face to face
with writers like Scott and Voltaire, he flounders in helpless
incompetency. He tries Scott, the writer of novels, by purely Puritan
standards. Because there is in Scott no signs of soul-struggles, no
conscious devotion to heroic ends, no introspective torturings, Carlyle
sets himself to a process of belittling. So with Voltaire. Carlyle's
failure in this sphere was due to the fact that he overdid the ethical
side of criticism and became a pulpiteer; he was false to his own
principle of endeavouring to seize the dominant idea. Because Scott and
Voltaire were not dominated by the Covenanting idea, Carlyle dealt with
them in a tone of disparagement. Carlyle admired Goethe, but he
certainly made no attempt to cultivate Goethe's catholicity. Let us not
fall into Carlyle's mistake, and condemn him for qualities which were
incompatible with his temperament. After all has been said, English
literature stands largely indebted to Carlyle the critic.
CHAPTER IV
LIFE IN LONDON
Mrs Carlyle entered heartily into her husband's proposal to remove to
London. 'Burn our ships!' she gaily said to him one day (_i.e._,
dismantle our house); 'carry all our furniture with us'; which they
accordingly did. 'At sight of London,' Carlyle wrote, 'I remember
humming to myself a ballad-stanza of "Johnnie o' Braidislea," which my
dear old mother used to sing,
"For there's seven foresters in yon forest;
And them I want to see, see,
And them I want to _see_ (and shoot down)!"
Carlyle lodged at Ampton Street again; but presently did 'immense
stretches of walking in search of houses.' He found his way to Chelsea
and there secured a small old-fashioned house at 5 (now numbered 24)
Cheyne Row, at a rent of £35 a year. Mrs Carlyle followed in a short
time and approved of his choice. They took possession on the 10th June
1834, and Carlyle recounts the 'cheerful gipsy life' they had there
'among the litter and carpenters for three incipient days.' Leigh Hunt
was in the next street 'sending kind, _un_practical messages,' dropping
in to see them in the evenings.
When in London on a former occasion, Carlyle became acquainted with John
Stuart Mill, and the intimacy was kept alive by correspondence to and
from Craigenputtock. It was through Mill's letters that Carlyle's
thoughts were turned towards the French Revolution. When he returned to
London, Mill was very useful to him, lending him a fine collection of
books on that subject. Mill's evenings in Cheyne Row were 'sensibly
agreeable for most part,' remarks Carlyle. 'Talk rather wintry
("sawdustish," as old Sterling once called it), but always well-informed
and sincere.' Carlyle was making rapid progress with the first volume of
his _French Revolution_. Stern necessity gave a spurt to his pen, for in
February 1835 he notes that 'some twenty-three months' had passed since
he earned a single penny by the 'craft of literature.' The volume was
completed and he lent the only copy to Mill. The MS. was unfortunately
burnt by a servant-maid. 'How well do I still remember,' writes Carlyle
in his _Reminiscences_, 'that night when he came to tell us, pale as
Hector's ghost.... It was like _half_ sentence of death to us both, and
we had to pretend to take it lightly, so dismal and ghastly was _his_
horror at it, and try to talk of other matters. He stayed three mortal
hours or so; his departure quite a relief to us. Oh, the burst of
sympathy my poor darling then gave me, flinging her arms round my neck,
and openly lamenting, condoling, and encouraging like a nobler second
self! Under heaven is nothing beautifuller. We sat talking till late;
'_shall_ be written again,' my fixed word and resolution to her. Which
proved to be such a task as I never tried before or since. I wrote out
"Feast of Pikes" (Vol. II.), and then went at it. Found it fairly
_impossible_ for about a fortnight; passed three weeks (reading
Marryat's novels), tried, cautious-cautiously, as on ice paper-thin,
once more; and in short had a job more like breaking my heart than any
other in my experience. Jeannie, alone of beings, burnt like a steady
lamp beside me. I forget how much of money we still had. I think there
was at first something like £300, perhaps £280, to front London with.
Nor can I in the least remember where we had gathered such a sum, except
that it was our own, no part of it borrowed or _given us_ by anybody.
"Fit to last till _French Revolution_ is ready!" and she had no
misgivings at all. Mill was penitently liberal; sent me £200 (in a day
or two), of which I kept £100 (actual cost of house while I had written
burnt volume); upon which he bought me "Biographie Universelle," which I
got bound, and still have. Wish I could find a way of getting the now
much macerated, changed, and fanaticised John Stuart Mill to take that
£100 back; but I fear there is no way.'[15]
Carlyle went diligently to work at the _French Revolution_. Some
conviction he had that the book was worth something. Once or twice among
the flood of equipages at Hyde Park Corner, when taking his afternoon
stroll, he thought to himself, 'Perhaps none of _you_ could do what I am
at!' But generally his feeling was, 'I will finish this book, throw it
at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic
Wildernesses, far from human beggaries and basenesses!' 'This,' he says,
'had a kind of comfort to me; yet I always knew too, in the background,
that this would not practically do. In short, my nervous system had got
dreadfully irritated and inflamed before I quite ended, and my desire
was _intense_, beyond words, to have done with it.' Then he adds: 'The
_last_ paragraph I well remember writing upstairs in the drawing-room
that now is, which was then my writing-room; beside _her_ there in a
grey evening (summer, I suppose), soon after tea (perhaps); and
thereupon, with her dear blessing on me, going out to walk. I had said
before going out, "What they will do with this book, none knows, my
Jeannie, lass; but they have not had, for a 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!" "Pooh, pooh! they cannot
trample that!" she would cheerily answer; for her own approval (I think
she had read always regularly behind me) especially in Vol. III., was
strong and decided.' Mrs Carlyle was right. No critic or clique of
critics could trample the _French Revolution_.
A month before the completion of the first book of the _French
Revolution_, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'My first friend Edward
Irving is dead. I am friendless here or as good as that.' In a week or
two thereafter he met Southey, whom he describes as a 'lean,
grey-white-headed man of dusky complexion, unexpectedly tall when he
rises and still leaner then--the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed
Roman nose, small carelined brow, huge brush of white-grey-hair on high
crown and projecting on all sides, the most vehement pair of faint hazel
eyes I have ever seen--a well-read, honest, limited (straitlaced even),
kindly-hearted, most irritable man. We parted kindly, with no great
purpose on either side, I imagine, to meet again.'[16] Later on Carlyle
admits to his brother John that his prospects in London were not
brightening; which fact left him gloomy and morose.
During his enforced leisure after the destruction of the first book of
the _French Revolution_, Carlyle saw more of his friends, among whom he
numbered John Sterling, fresh from Cambridge and newly ordained a
clergyman. Sterling was of a 'vehement but most noble nature,' and he
was one of the few who had studied _Sartor Resartus_ seriously. He had
been also caught by the Radical epidemic on the spiritual side.
Although dissenting from much of what Carlyle taught, Sterling
recognised in him 'a man not only brilliantly gifted, but differing from
the common run of people in this, that he would not lie, that he would
not equivocate, that he would say always what he actually thought,
careless whether he pleased or offended.' He introduced Carlyle to his
father, who was then the 'guiding genius' of the _Times_, and who
offered Carlyle work there on the usual conditions. 'Carlyle,' says
Froude, 'though with poverty at his door, and entire penury visible in
the near future, turned away from a proposal which might have tempted
men who had less excuse for yielding to it. He was already the sworn
soldier of another chief. His allegiance from first to last was to
_truth_, truth as it presented itself to his own intellect and his own
conscience.'
On the 16th of February 1835 Carlyle wrote to his brother John: 'I
positively do not care that periodical literature shuts her fist against
me in these months. Let her keep it shut for ever, and go to the devil,
which she mostly belongs to. The matter had better be brought to a
crisis. There is perhaps a finger of Providence in it.... My only new
scheme, since last letter, is a hypothesis--little more yet--about
National Education. The newspapers had an advertisement about a Glasgow
"Educational Association" which wants a man that would found a Normal
School, first going over England and into Germany to get light on that
matter. I wrote to that Glasgow Association afar off, enquiring who they
were, what manner of man they expected, testifying myself very friendly
to their project, and so forth--no answer as yet. It is likely they will
want, as Jane says, a "Chalmers and Welsh" kind of character, in which
case _Va ben, felice notte_. If otherwise, and they (almost by miracle)
had the heart, I am the man for them. Perhaps my name is so heterodox in
that circle, I shall not hear at all.'[17] Carlyle also remarks, in the
same letter, that John Stuart Mill is very friendly: 'He is the nearest
approach to a real man that I find here--nay, as far as negativeness
goes, he _is_ that man, but unhappily not very satisfactory much
farther.'
Not long thereafter Carlyle met Wordsworth. 'I did not expect much,' he
said in a letter, 'but got mostly what I expected. The old man has a
fine shrewdness and naturalness in his expression of face, a long
Cumberland figure; one finds also a kind of _sincerity_ in his speech.
But for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution, it excels all the other
speech I had heard from mortals. A genuine man, which is much, but also
essentially a small, genuine man.'
Early in October 1835 Carlyle started for his old home. His
mother-in-law had arrived on a visit at Cheyne Row, and remained there
with her daughter during Carlyle's absence in Scotland. He returned
improved in health and spirits. Nothing came of the National Education
scheme. Carlyle was not a person to push himself into notice, remarks
Froude; and his friends did not exert themselves for him, or they tried
and failed; 'governments, in fact, do not look out for servants among
men who are speculating about the nature of the Universe. Then, as
always, the doors leading into regular employment remained closed.'
Shortly after his return from the North, he was offered the editorship
of a newspaper at Lichfield. This was unaccepted for the same reason
that weighed with him when he refused a post on the _Times_. In the
following summer money matters had become so pressing that Carlyle wrote
the article on Mirabeau, now printed among the _Miscellanies_, for
Mill's review, which brought him £50. Mrs Carlyle's health began to
suffer, and a visit to Annandale became imperative. She returned 'mended
in spirits.' Writing of her arrival in London, she said: 'I had my
luggage put on the backs of two porters, and walked on to Cheapside,
when I presently found a Chelsea omnibus. By-and-bye the omnibus
stopped, and amid cries of "No room, sir; can't get in," Carlyle's face,
beautifully set off by a broad-brimmed white hat, gazed in at the door
like the peri "who, at the gate of heaven, stood disconsolate." In
hurrying along the Strand, his eye had lighted on my trunk packed on the
top of the omnibus, and had recognised it. This seems to me one of the
most indubitable proofs of genius which he ever manifested.'
On the 22nd of January 1837 Carlyle wrote to his mother: 'The book
[_French Revolution_] is actually done; all written to the last line;
and now, after much higgling and maffling, the printers have got fairly
afloat, and we are to go on with the wind and the sea.' But no money
could be expected from the book for a considerable time. Meanwhile, Miss
Harriet Martineau (who had introduced herself into Cheyne Row), and Miss
Wilson, another accomplished friend, thought that Carlyle should begin a
course of lectures in London, and thereby raise a little money. Carlyle,
it seems, gave 'a grumbling consent.' Nothing daunted, the ladies found
two hundred persons ready each to subscribe a guinea to hear a course of
lectures from him. The end of it was that he delivered six discourses on
German literature, which were 'excellent in themselves, and delivered
with strange impressiveness,' and £135 went into his purse.
In the summer the _French Revolution_ appeared. The sale at first was
slow, almost nothing, for it was not 'subscribed for' among the
booksellers. Alluding to the criticisms which appeared, Carlyle said:
'Some condemn me, as is very natural, for affectation; others are
hearty, even passionate, in their estimation; on the whole, it strikes
me as not unlikely that the book may take some hold of the English
people, and do them and itself a little good.' He was right. Other
historians have described the Revolution: Carlyle reproduces the
Revolution. He approaches history like a dramatist. Give him, as in the
French Revolution, a weird, tragic, awe-inspiring theme, and he will
utilise his characters, scenes, and circumstances in artistic
subordination to the central idea. Carlyle might be called a subjective
dramatist--that is to say, his own spirit, thoughts, and reflections get
so mixed up with the history that it is difficult to imagine the one
without the other. Every now and then the dramatist interrupts the
tragedy to interject his own reflections; in the history the Carlylean
philosophy plays the part of a Greek chorus. As an example of Carlyle's
genius for a dramatic situation, take his opening of the great drama
with the death scene of Louis XV. Who does not feel, in reading that
scene, as if the Furies were not far off? who does not detect in the
grotesque jostling of the comedy and tragedy of life premonitions of the
coming storm?
'But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching at his own
heart-strings; unlooked for, inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has
found thee. No palace walls or lifeguards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt
buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here, here
at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou, whose whole
existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a
reality; sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void
Immensity: Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked
with hideous clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there
must thou enter, naked, all unking'd, and await what is appointed
thee!... There are nods and sagacious glances, go-betweens, silk
dowagers mysteriously gliding, with smiles for this constellation, sighs
for that: there is tremor, of hope or desperation, in several hearts.
There is the pale, grinning Shadow of Death, ceremoniously ushered along
by another grinning Shadow, of Etiquette; at intervals the growl of
Chapel Organs, like prayer by machinery; proclaiming, as in a kind of
horrid diabolic horse-laughter, _Vanity of vanities, all is Vanity!_'
At every stage in the narrative, the reader is impressed with the
dramatic texture of Carlyle's mind. No dramatic writer surpasses him in
the art of producing effects by contrasts. In the midst of a vigorous
description of the storming of the Bastille, he rings down the curtain
for a moment in order to introduce the following scene of idyllic
beauty: 'O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant
on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on Balls at the Orangerie
of 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 a Hotel-de-Ville!'
Equally effective is Carlyle in rendering vivid the doings of the
individual actors in the drama. For photographic minuteness and
startling realism what can equal the following:--'But see Camille
Desmoulins, from the Café de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in face; his
hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the police
satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive
him alive. This time he speaks without stammering:--Friends! shall we
die like hunted hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating
for mercy, where is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is
come, the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man; when Oppressors are to try
conclusions with Oppressed; and the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance
forever. Let such hour be _well_-come! Us, meseems, one cry only befits:
To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of
the whirlwind, sound only: To arms!--"To arms!" yell responsive the
innumerable voices; like one great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the
air: for all faces wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In
such, or fitter words does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, in this
great moment--"Friends," continues Camille, "some rallying-sign!
Cockades; green ones--the colour of Hope!"--As with the flight of
locusts, these green tree-leaves; green ribands from the neighbouring
shops: all green things are snatched, and made cockades of. Camille
descends from his table; "stifled with embraces, wetted with tears;" has
a bit of green riband handed him; sticks it in his hat. And now to
Curtius' Image-shop there; to the Boulevards; to the four winds, and
rest not till France be on fire!'
As a historical work, the _French Revolution_ is unique. It is precisely
the kind of book Isaiah would have written had there been a like
Revolution in the Jewish kingdom; and just as we go to Isaiah, not for
sociological guidance, but for ethical inspiration, so we turn to the
_French Revolution_ when the mind and heart are in a state of torpor in
order to get a series of shocks from the Carlylean electric battery.
From a historian a student expects light as well as heat, guidance as
well as inspiration. It is not enough to have the great French explosion
vividly photographed before his eyes; it is equally necessary to know
the causes which led to the catastrophe. Here, as a historian, Carlyle
is conspicuously weak. His habit of looking for dramatic situations, his
passion for making commonplace incidents and commonplace men merely the
satellites of commanding personalities, in a word, his theory that
history should deal with the doings of great men, prevents Carlyle from
dwelling upon the politico-economic side of national life. So absorbed
is he in painting the Revolution, that he forgets to explain the
Revolution. We have abundance of vague declamations against shams in
high places, plenty of talk about God's judgments, in the style of the
Hebrew prophets, but of patient diagnosis, there is none. As Mr Morley
puts it in his luminous essay on Carlyle: 'To the question whether
mankind gained or lost by the French Revolution, Carlyle nowhere gives a
clear answer; indeed, on this subject more than any other, he clings
closely to his favourite method of simple presentation, streaked with
dramatic irony.... He draws its general moral lesson from the
Revolution, and with clangorous note warns all whom it concerns from
King to Church that imposture must come to an end. But for the precise
amount and kind of dissolution which the West owes to it, for the
political meaning of it, as distinguished from its moral or its dramatic
significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the subject, nor even
evidence of consciousness that such word is needed.' Had Carlyle, in
addition to his genius as a historical dramatist, possessed the patient
diagnosing power of the writers and thinkers whom he derided, his
_French Revolution_ would have taken its place in historical literature
as an epoch-making book. As it stands, the reader who desires to have an
intelligible knowledge of the subject, is compelled to shake himself
free of the Carlylean mesmerism, and have recourse to those writers whom
Carlyle, under the opprobrious names of 'logic-choppers' and
'dry-as-dusts,' held up to public ridicule.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. 178-79.
[16] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 20.
[17] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 24.
CHAPTER V
HOLIDAY JOURNEYINGS--LITERARY WORK
Carlyle was so broken down with his efforts upon the _French Revolution_
that a trip to Annandale became necessary. He stayed at Scotsbrig two
months, 'wholly idle, reading novels, smoking pipes in the garden with
his mother, hearing notices of his book from a distance, but not looking
for them or caring about them.' Autumn brought Carlyle back to Cheyne
Row, when he found his wife in better health, delighted to have him
again at her side. She knew, as Froude points out, though Carlyle, so
little vain was he, had failed as yet to understand it, that he had
returned to a changed position, that he was no longer lonely and
neglected, but had taken his natural place among the great writers of
his day. He sent bright accounts of himself to Scotsbrig. 'I find John
Sterling here, and many friends, all kinder each than the other to me.
With talk and locomotion the days pass cheerfully till I rest and gird
myself together again. They make a great talk about the book, which
seems to have succeeded in a far higher degree than I looked for.
Everybody is astonished at every other body's being pleased with this
wonderful performance.'[18]
Carlyle did nothing all the winter except to write his essay on Sir
Walter Scott. His next task was to prepare for a second course of
lectures in the spring on 'Heroes.' The course ended with 'a blaze of
fire-works--people weeping at the passionately earnest tone in which for
once they heard themselves addressed.' The effort brought Carlyle £300
after all expenses had been paid. 'A great blessing,' he remarked, 'to a
man that had been haunted by the squalid spectre of beggary.'
Carlyle had no intention of visiting Scotland that autumn, but having
received a pressing invitation from old friends at Kirkcaldy, he took
steamer to Leith in August. While at Kirkcaldy he crossed to Edinburgh
and called on Jeffrey. 'He sat,' says Carlyle, 'waiting for me at Moray
Place. We talked long in the style of literary and philosophic
clitter-clatter. Finally it was settled that I should go out to dinner
with him at Craigcrook, and not return to Fife till the morrow.' They
dined and abstained from contradicting each other, Carlyle admitting
that Jeffrey was becoming an amiable old fribble, 'very cheerful, very
heartless, very forgettable and tolerable.'
On his return to London, equal to work again, Carlyle found all well. He
was gratified to hear that the eighth edition of the _French
Revolution_ was almost sold, and that another would be called for, while
there were numerous applications from review editors for articles if he
would please to supply them. Mill about this time asked him to
contribute a paper on Cromwell to the _London and Westminster Review_.
Carlyle agreed, and was preparing to begin when the negotiations were
broken off. Mill had gone abroad, leaving a Mr Robertson to manage the
_Review_. Robertson coolly wrote to say that he need not go on with the
article, 'for he meant to do Cromwell himself.' Carlyle was wroth, and
that incident determined him to 'throw himself seriously into the
history of the Commonwealth, and to expose himself no more to cavalier
treatment from "able editors."' But for that task he required books.
Then it was that the idea of founding a London library occurred to him.
Men of position took up the matter warmly, and Carlyle's object was
accomplished. 'Let the tens of thousands,' says Mr Froude, 'who, it is
to be hoped, "are made better and wiser" by the books collected there,
remember that they owe the privilege entirely to Carlyle.'
One of Carlyle's new acquaintances was Monckton Milnes, who asked him to
breakfast. Carlyle used to say that if Christ were again on earth Milnes
would ask Him to breakfast, and the clubs would all be talking of the
'good things' that Christ had said. He also became familiar with Mr
Baring, afterwards Lord Ashburton, and his accomplished wife, who in
course of time exercised a disturbing influence over the Carlyle
household. It would not tend to edification to dwell upon the domestic
misunderstandings at Cheyne Row; besides, are not they to be found
detailed at great length in Froude's _Life_, the _Reminiscences_, and
_Letters and Memorials_? Although Carlyle was taking life somewhat easy,
he was making preparations for his third course of lectures, his subject
being the 'Revolutions of Modern Europe.' They did not please the
lecturer, but the audiences were as enthusiastic as ever, and he made a
clear gain of £200.
About this time Emerson was pressing him to go to Boston on a lecturing
tour. But Carlyle thought better of it. More important work awaited him
in London. 'All his life,' says Froude, 'he had been meditating on the
problem of the working-man's existence in this country at the present
epoch.... He had seen the Glasgow riots in 1819. He had heard his father
talk of the poor masons, dining silently upon water and water-cresses.
His letters are full of reflections on such things, sad or indignant, as
the humour might be. He was himself a working-man's son. He had been
bred in a peasant home, and all his sympathies were with his own class.
He was not a revolutionist; he knew well that violence would be no
remedy; that there lay only madness and deeper misery. But the fact
remained, portending frightful issues. The Reform Bill was to have
mended matters but the Reform Bill had gone by and the poor were none
the happier. The power of the State had been shifted from the
aristocracy to the mill-owners, and merchants, and shopkeepers. That was
all. The handicraftsman remained where he was, or was sinking, rather,
into an unowned Arab, to whom "freedom" meant freedom to work if the
employer had work to offer him conveniently to himself, or else freedom
to starve. The fruit of such a state of society as this was the
Sansculottism on which he had been lecturing, and he felt that he must
put his thoughts upon it in a permanent form. He had no faith in
political remedies, in extended suffrages, recognition of "the rights of
man," etc.--absolutely none. That was the road on which the French had
gone; and, if tried in England, it would end as it ended with them--in
anarchy, and hunger, and fury. The root of the mischief was the
forgetfulness on the part of the upper classes, increasing now to flat
denial, that they owed any duty to those under them beyond the payment
of contract wages at the market price. The Liberal theory, as formulated
in Political Economy, was that every one should attend exclusively to
his own interests, and that the best of all possible worlds would be the
certain result. His own conviction was that the result would be the
worst of all possible worlds, a world in which human life, such a life
as _human_ beings ought to live, would become impossible.'[19]
He wrote to his brother when his lectures were over: "Guess what
immediate project I am on; that of writing an article on the
working-classes for the "Quarterly." It is verily so. I offered to do
the thing for Mill about a year ago. He durst not. I felt a kind of call
and monition of duty to do it, wrote to Lockhart accordingly, was
altogether invitingly answered, had a long interview with the man
yesterday, found him a person of sense, good-breeding, even kindness,
and great consentaneity of opinion with myself on the matter. Am to get
books from him to-morrow, and so shall forthwith set about telling the
Conservatives a thing or two about the claims, condition, rights, and
mights of the working order of men."
When the annual exodus from London came, the Carlyles went north for a
holiday. They returned much refreshed at the end of two months. His
presence, moreover, was required in London, as _Wilhelm Meister_ was now
to be republished. He set about finishing his article for the
"Quarterly," but as he progressed he felt some misgiving as to its ever
appearing in that magazine. "I have finished," he wrote on November 8,
1839, "a long review article, thick pamphlet, or little volume, entitled
"Chartism." Lockhart has it, for it was partly promised to him; at
least the refusal of it was, and that, I conjecture, will be all he
will enjoy of it." Lockhart sent it back, 'seemingly not without
reluctance,' saying he dared not. Mill was shown the pamphlet and was
'unexpectedly delighted with it.' He was willing to publish it, but
Carlyle's wife and brother insisted that the thing was too good for a
magazine article. Fraser undertook to print it, and before the close of
the year _Chartism_ was in the hands of the public.
The sale was rapid, an edition of a thousand copies being sold
immediately. 'Chartism,' Froude narrates, was loudly noticed:
"considerable reviewing, but very daft reviewing." Men wondered; how
could they choose but wonder, when a writer of evident power stripped
bare the social disease, told them that their remedies were quack
remedies, and their progress was progress to dissolution? The Liberal
journals, finding their "formulas" disbelieved in, clamoured that
Carlyle was unorthodox; no Radical, but a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet
what he said was true, and could not be denied to be true. "They approve
generally," he said, "but regret very much that I am a Tory. Stranger
Tory, in my opinion, has not been fallen in with in these later
generations." Again a few weeks later (February 11): "The people are
beginning to discover that I am not a Tory. Ah, no! but one of the
deepest, though perhaps the quietest, of all the Radicals now extant in
the world--a thing productive of small comfort to several persons. They
have said, and they will say, and let them say."
His final course of lectures now confronted him, and these he entitled
_Heroes and Hero Worship_. He tells his mother (May 26, 1840): 'The
lecturing business went off with sufficient _éclat_. The course was
generally judged, and I rather join therein myself, to be the bad _best_
I have yet given. On the last day--Friday last--I went to speak of
Cromwell with a head _full of air_; you know that wretched physical
feeling; I had been concerned with drugs, had awakened at five, etc. It
is absolute martyrdom. My tongue would hardly wag at all when I got
done. Yet the good people sate breathless, or broke out into all kinds
of testimonies of goodwill.... In a word, we got right handsomely
through.' That was Carlyle's last appearance as a public lecturer. He
was now the observed of all observers in London society; but he was
weary of lionising and junketings. 'What,' he notes in his journal on
June 15, 1840, 'are lords coming to call on one and fill one's head with
whims? They ask you to go among champagne, bright glitter,
semi-poisonous excitements which you do not like even for the moment,
and you are sick for a week after. As old Tom White said of whisky,
"Keep it--Deevil a ever I'se better than when there's no a drop on't i'
my weam." So say I of dinner popularity, lords and lionism--Keep it;
give it to those that like it.'
Carlyle was much refreshed at this period by visits from Tennyson. Here
is what he says of the poet: 'A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed,
bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and
easy, who swims outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an
inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke. Great now and
then when he does emerge--a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man.'
In a note to his brother John on September 11, 1840, he says: 'I have
again some notions towards writing a book--let us see what comes of
that. It is the one use of living, for me. Enough to-day.' The book he
had in view was _Cromwell_. Journalising on the day after Christmas he
laments--'Oliver Cromwell will not prosper with me at all. I began
reading about that subject some four months ago. I learn almost nothing
by reading, yet cannot as yet heartily begin to write. Nothing on paper
yet. I know not where to begin.'
At the end of the year Mrs Carlyle wrote: 'Carlyle is reading
voraciously, preparatory to writing a new book. For the rest, he growls
away much in the old style. But one gets to feel a certain indifference
to his growling; if one did not, it would be the worse for one.' A month
or two later, Carlyle writes: 'Think not hardly of me, dear Jeannie. In
the mutual misery we often are in, we do not know how dear we are to one
another. By the help of Heaven, I shall get a little better, and
somewhat of it shall abate. Last night, at dinner, Richard Milnes made
them all laugh with a saying of yours. "When the wife has influenza, it
is _a slight cold_--when the man has it, it is, &c., &c."' Writing to
Sterling he exclaims, 'I shall verily fly to Craigenputtock again before
long. Yet I know what solitude is, and imprisonment among black cattle
and peat bogs. The truth is, we are never right as we are. "Oh, the
devil burn it"! said the Irish drummer flogging his countryman; "there's
no pleasing of you, strike where one will."'
Milnes prevailed on Carlyle, instead of flying to the bleak expanse of
Craigenputtock, to accompany him to his father's house at Fryston, in
Yorkshire, whence he sent a series of affectionate and graphic letters
to Mrs Carlyle. Being so far north, he took a run to Dumfriesshire to
see his mother, who had been slightly ailing. He was back in London,
however, in May, but not improved in mind or body. It was a hot summer,
and the Carlyles went to Scotsbrig, and took a cottage at Newby, close
to Annan. By the end of September, Carlyle was back in Cheyne Row. His
latest hero still troubled him. 'Ought I,' he asks, 'to write now of
Oliver Cromwell?... I cannot yet see clearly.'
Carlyle at one time had a hankering after a Scottish professorship, but
the 'door had been shut in his face,' sometimes contemptuously. He was
now famous, and the young Edinburgh students, having looked into his
lectures on Heroes, began to think that, whatever might be the opinions
of the authorities and patrons, they for their part must consider
lectures such as these a good exchange for what was provided for them. A
'History Chair' was about to be established. A party of them,
represented by a Mr Dunipace, presented a requisition to the Faculty of
Advocates to appoint Carlyle. When asked his consent to be nominated,
Carlyle replied: 'Accept my kind thanks, you and all your associates,
for your zeal to serve me.... Ten years ago such an invitation might
perhaps have been decisive of much for me, but it is too late now; too
late for many reasons, which I need not trouble you with at present.'
A very severe blow now fell upon Mrs Carlyle, who received news from
Templand that her mother had been struck by apoplexy, and was
dangerously ill. Although unfit for travelling, she caught the first
train from Euston Square to Liverpool, but at her uncle's house there
she learnt that all was over. Mrs Carlyle lay ill in Liverpool, unable
to stir. After a while she was able to go back to London, where Carlyle
joined her in the month of May. It was on his return journey that he
paid a visit to Dr Arnold at Rugby, when he had an opportunity, under
his host's genial guidance, to explore the field of Naseby.
His sad occupations in Scotland, and the sad thoughts they suggested,
made Carlyle disinclined for society. He had a room arranged for him at
the top of his house, and there he sate and smoked, and read books on
Cromwell, 'the sight of Naseby having brought the subject back out of
"the abysses."' Meanwhile he had a pleasant trip to Ostend with Mr
Stephen Spring Rice, Commissioner of Customs, of which he wrote vivid
descriptions.
On October 25, 1842, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'For many months
there has been no writing here. Alas! what was there to write? About
myself, nothing; or less, if that was possible. I have not got one word
to stand upon paper in regard to Oliver. The beginnings of work are even
more formidable than the executing of it.' But another subject was to
engross his attention for a little while. The distress of the poor
became intense; less in London, however, than in other large towns. 'I
declare,' he wrote to his mother early in January 1843, 'I declare I
begin to feel as if I should not hold my peace any longer, as if I
should perhaps open my mouth in a way that some of them are not
expecting--we shall see if this book were done.' On the 20th he wrote:
'I hope it will be a rather useful kind of book.' He could not go on
with Cromwell till he had unburdened his soul. 'The look of the world,'
he said, 'is really quite oppressive to me. Eleven thousand souls in
Paisley alone living on threehalfpence a day, and the governors of the
land all busy shooting partridges and passing corn-laws the while! It
is a thing no man with a speaking tongue in his head is entitled to be
silent about.' The outcome of all his soul-burnings and cogitations was
_Past and Present_, which appeared at the beginning of April. The
reviewers set to work, 'wondering, admiring, blaming, chiefly the last.'
Carlyle then undertook several journeys, chiefly in order to visit
Cromwellian battlefields, the sight of which made the Oliver enterprise
no longer impossible. He found a renovated house on his return, and Mrs
Carlyle writing on November 28th, describes him as 'over head and ears
in Cromwell,' and 'lost to humanity for the time being.' Six months
later, he makes this admission in his journal--'My progress in
"Cromwell" is frightful. I am no day absolutely idle, but the confusions
that lie in my way require far more fire of energy than I can muster on
most days, and I sit not so much working as painfully looking on work.'
Four months later, when _Cromwell_ was progressing slowly, Carlyle
suffered a severe personal loss by the death of John Sterling.
'Sterling,' says Froude, 'had been his spiritual pupil, his first, and
also his noblest and best. Consumption had set its fatal mark upon him.'
Carlyle drowned his sorrow in hard work, and in July 1845 the end of
_Cromwell_ was coming definitely in sight. In his journal under date
August 26th, is to be found this entry: 'I have this moment _ended_
Oliver; hang it! He is ended, thrums and all. I have nothing more to
write on the subject, only mountains of wreck to burn. Not (any more) up
to the chin in paper clippings and chaotic litter, hatefuller to me than
most. I _am_ to have a swept floor now again.' And thus the herculean
labours of five years were ended. His desire was to be in Scotland, and
he made his way northwards by the usual sea route to Annan and
Scotsbrig. He did not remain long away, and upon his return _Cromwell_
was just issuing from the press. It was received with great favour, the
sale was rapid, and additional materials came from unexpected quarters.
In February 1846 a new edition was needed in order to insert fresh
letters of Oliver according to date; a process, Carlyle said 'requiring
one's most excellent talent, as of shoe-cobbling, really that kind of
talent carried to a high pitch.' When completed, Carlyle presented a
copy of it to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, a step he never took
before or after with any of his writings,--a compliment which Peel
gracefully acknowledged.
Carlyle's plans for the summer of 1846 were, a visit to his mother and a
run across to Ireland. Charles Gavan Duffy of the _Nation_ newspaper saw
him in London in consequence of what he had written in _Chartism_ about
misgovernment in Ireland. He had promised to go over and see what the
'Young Ireland' movement was doing. On the 31st of August he left
Scotsbrig, and landed in due course at Belfast, where he was to have
been met by John Mitchel and Gavan Duffy and driven to Drogheda. He
missed his two friends through a mistake at the post-office, and hurried
on by railway to Dublin. He met them at Dundrum, and was there
entertained at a large dinner-party. Next day he dined at Mitchel's. His
stay was remarkably short. He took steamer at Kingstown, and in the
early morning of September 10th 'he was sitting smoking a cigar before
the door of his wife's uncle's house in Liverpool till the household
should awake and let him in.'
In June 1847 Carlyle relates that they had a flying visit from Jeffrey.
'A much more interesting visitor than Jeffrey was old Dr Chalmers, who
came down to us also last week, whom I had not seen before for, I think,
five-and-twenty years. It was a pathetic meeting. The good old man is
grown white-headed, but is otherwise wonderfully little altered--grave,
deliberate, very gentle in his deportment, but with plenty too of soft
energy; full of interest still for all serious things, full of real
kindliness, and sensible even to honest mirth in a fair measure. He sate
with us an hour and a half, went away with our blessings and affections.
It is long since I have spoken to so _good_ and really pious-hearted and
beautiful old man.' In a week or two Chalmers was suddenly called away.
'I believe,' wrote Carlyle to his mother, 'there is not in all Scotland,
or all Europe, any such Christian priest left. It will long be memorable
to us, the little visit we had from him.'
Early in 1848, the Jew Bill was before Parliament, and the fate of it
doubtful, narrates Mr Froude. Baron Rothschild wrote to ask Carlyle to
write a pamphlet in its favour, and intimated that he might name any sum
which he liked to ask as payment. Froude enquired how he answered.
'Well,' he said, 'I had to tell him it couldn't be; but I observed, too,
that I could not conceive why he and his friends, who were supposed to
be looking out for the coming of Shiloh, should be seeking seats in a
Gentile legislature.' Froude asked what the Baron said to that. 'Why,'
said Carlyle, 'he seemed to think the coming of Shiloh was a dubious
business, and that meanwhile, etc., etc.'
On February 9, 1848, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'Chapman's money
[Chapman & Hall were his publishers] all paid, lodged now in the
Dumfries Bank. New edition of "Sartor" to be wanted soon. My poor books
of late have yielded me a certain fluctuating annual income; at all
events, I am quite at my ease as to money, and that on such low terms. I
often wonder at the luxurious ways of the age. Some £1500, I think, is
what has accumulated in the bank. Of fixed income (from Craigenputtock)
£150 a year. Perhaps as much from my books may lie fixed amid the huge
fluctuation (last year, for instance, it was £800: the year before,
£100; the year before that, about £700; this year, again, it is like to
be £100; the next perhaps nothing--very fluctuating indeed)--some £300
in all, and that amply suffices me. For my wife is the best of
housewives; noble, too, in reference to the property, which is _hers_,
which she has never once in the most distant way seemed to know to be
hers. Be this noted and remembered; my thrifty little lady--every inch a
lady--ah me! In short, I authentically feel indifferent to money; would
not go this way or that to gain more money.'[20]
The Revolution of February 24th at Paris surprised Carlyle less than
most of his contemporaries, as it confirmed what he had been saying for
years. He did not believe, we are told, in immediate convulsion in
England; but he did believe that, unless England took warning and mended
her ways, her turn would come. The excitement in London was intense, and
leading men expressed themselves freely, but Carlyle's general thoughts
were uttered in a lengthy letter to Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, for
whom he entertained a warm regard. On March 14 he met Macaulay at Lord
Mahon's at breakfast; 'Niagara of eloquent commonplace talk,' he says,
'from Macaulay. "Very good-natured man"; man cased in official mail of
proof; stood my impatient fire-explosions with much patience, merely
hissing a little steam up, and continued his Niagara--supply and demand;
power ruinous to powerful himself; _im_possibility of Government doing
more than keep the peace; suicidal distraction of new French Republic,
etc. Essentially irremediable, commonplace nature of the man; all that
was in him now gone to the tongue; a squat, thickset, low-browed, short,
grizzled little man of fifty.'
One of the few men Carlyle was anxious to see was Sir Robert Peel. He
was introduced by the Barings at a dinner at Bath House. Carlyle sat
next to Peel, whom he describes as 'a finely-made man of strong, not
heavy, rather of elegant, stature; stands straight, head slightly thrown
back, and eyelids modestly drooping; every way mild and gentle, yet with
less of that fixed smile than the portraits give him. He is towards
sixty, and, though not broken at all, carries, especially in his
complexion, when you are _near_ him, marks of that age; clear, strong
blue eyes which kindle on occasion, voice extremely good, low-toned,
something of _cooing_ in it, rustic, affectionate, honest, mildly
persuasive. Spoke about French Revolutions new and old; well read in all
that; had seen General Dumouriez; reserved seemingly by nature, obtrudes
nothing of _diplomatic_ reserve. On the contrary, a vein of mild _fun_
in him, real sensibility to the ludicrous, which feature I liked best of
all.... I consider him by far our first public man--which, indeed, is
saying little--and hope that England in these frightful times may still
get some good of him. N.B.--This night with Peel was the night in which
Berlin city executed its last terrible battle, (19th of March to Sunday
morning the 20th, five o'clock.) While we sate there the streets of
Berlin city were all blazing with grape-shot and the war of enraged men.
What is to become of all that? I have a book to write about it. Alas! We
hear of a great Chartist petition to be presented by 200,000 men. People
here keep up their foolish levity in speaking of these things; but
considerate persons find them to be very grave; and indeed all, even the
laughers, are in considerable secret alarm.'[21]
At such a time Carlyle knew that he, the author of _Chartism_, ought to
say something. Foolish people, too, came pressing for his opinions. Not
seeing his way to a book upon 'Democracy,' he wrote a good many
newspaper articles, chiefly in the _Examiner_ and the _Spectator_, to
deliver his soul. Even Fonblanque and Rintoul (the editors), remarks
Froude, friendly though they were to him, could not allow him his full
swing. 'There is no established journal,' complained Carlyle, 'that can
stand my articles, no single one they would not blow the bottom out of.'
On July 12 occurs this entry in his journal: 'Chartist concern, and
Irish Repeal concern, and French Republic concern have all gone a bad
way since the March entry--April 20 (immortal day already dead), day of
Chartist monster petition; 200,000 special constables swore themselves
in, etc., and Chartism came to nothing. Riots since, but the leaders
all lodged in gaol, tried, imprisoned for two years, etc., and so ends
Chartism for the present. Irish Mitchel, poor fellow! is now in Bermuda
as a felon; letter from him, letter to him, letter to and from Lord
Clarendon--was really sorry for poor Mitchel. But what help? French
Republic _cannonaded_ by General Cavaignac; a sad outlook there.'[22]
Carlyle's _Cromwell_ had created a set of enthusiastic admirers who were
bent on having a statue of the great Protector set up. Carlyle was asked
to give his sanction to the proposal. Writing to his mother, he said:
'The people having subscribed £25,000 for a memorial to an ugly bullock
of a Hudson, who did not even pretend to have any merit except that of
being suddenly rich, and who is now discovered to be little other than
at heart a horse-coper and dishonest fellow, I think they ought to leave
Cromwell alone of their memorials, and try to honour him in some more
profitable way--by learning to be honest men like him, for example. But
we shall see what comes of all this Cromwell work--a thing not without
value either.'[23]
'Ireland,' says Froude, 'of all the topics on which Carlyle had
meditated writing, remained painfully fascinating. He had looked at the
beggarly scene, he had seen the blighted fields, the ragged misery of
the wretched race who were suffering for other's sins as well as for
their own. Since that brief visit of his, the famine had been followed
by the famine-fever, and the flight of millions from a land which was
smitten with a curse. Those ardent young men with whom he had dined at
Dundrum were working as felons in the docks at Bermuda. Gavan Duffy,
after a near escape from the same fate, had been a guest in Cheyne Row;
and the story which he had to tell of cabins torn down by crowbars, and
shivering families, turned out of their miserable homes, dying in the
ditches by the roadside, had touched Carlyle to the very heart. He was
furious at the economical commonplaces with which England was consoling
itself. He regarded Ireland as "the breaking-point of the huge
suppuration which all British and all European society then was."'[24]
Carlyle paid a second visit to Ireland. He was anxious to write a book
on the subject. He noted down what he had seen, and 'then dismissed the
unhappy subject from his mind,' giving his manuscript to a friend, which
was published after his death.
The 7th of August found Carlyle among his 'ain folk' at Scotsbrig, and
this was his soliloquy: 'Thank Heaven for the sight of real human
industry, with human fruits from it, once more. The sight of fenced
fields, weeded crops, and human creatures with whole clothes on their
back--it was as if one had got into spring water out of dunghill
puddles.' Mrs Carlyle had also gone to Scotland, and 'wandered like a
returned spirit about the home of her childhood.' Of her numerous lively
letters, room must be found for a characteristic epistle to her
brother-in-law, John Carlyle. His translation of Dante's _Inferno_ was
just out, and her uncle's family at Auchtertool Manse, in Fife, where
she was staying, were busy reading and discussing it. 'We had been
talking about you,' she says, 'and had sunk silent. Suddenly my uncle
turned his head to me and said, shaking it gravely, "He has made an
awesome plooster o' that place." "Who? What place, uncle?" "Whew! the
place ye'll maybe gang to, if ye dinna tak' care." I really believe he
considers all those circles of your invention. Walter [a cousin, just
ordained] performed the marriage service over a couple of colliers the
day after I came. I happened to be in his study when they came in, and
asked leave to remain. The man was a good-looking man enough, dreadfully
agitated, partly with the business he was come on, partly with drink. He
had evidently taken a glass too much to keep his heart up. The girl had
one very large inflamed eye and one little one, which looked perfectly
composed, while the large eye stared wildly, and had a tear in it.
Walter married them very well indeed; and his affecting words, together
with the bridegroom's pale, excited face, and the bride's ugliness, and
the poverty, penury, and want imprinted on the whole business, and above
all fellow-feeling with the poor wretches then rushing on their
fate--all that so overcame me that I fell crying as desperately as if I
had been getting married to the collier myself, and, when the ceremony
was over, extended my hand to the unfortunates, and actually (in such an
enthusiasm of pity did I find myself) I presented the new husband with a
snuff-box which I happened to have in my hand, being just about
presenting it to Walter when the creatures came in. This unexpected
_Himmelsendung_ finished turning the man's head; he wrung my hand over
and over, leaving his mark for some hours after, and ended his grateful
speeches with, "Oh, Miss! Oh, Liddy! may ye hae mair comfort and
pleasure in your life than ever you have had yet!" which might easily
be.'
Carlyle was full of wrath at what he considered the cant about the
condition of the wage-earners in Manchester and elsewhere, and his
indignation found vent in the _Latter-day Pamphlets_. Froude once asked
him if he had ever thought of going into Parliament, for the former knew
that the opportunity must have been offered him. 'Well,' he said, 'I did
think of it at the time of the "Latter-day Pamphlets." I felt that
nothing could prevent me from getting up in the House and saying all
that.' 'He was powerful,' adds Froude, 'but he was not powerful _enough_
to have discharged with his single voice the vast volume of conventional
electricity with which the collective wisdom of the nation was, and
remains charged. It is better that his thoughts should have been
committed to enduring print, where they remain to be reviewed hereafter
by the light of fact.'[25]
The printing of the _Pamphlets_ commenced at the beginning of 1850, and
went on month after month, each separately published, no magazine daring
to become responsible for them. When the _Pamphlets_ appeared, they were
received with 'astonished indignation.' 'Carlyle taken to whisky,' was
the popular impression--or perhaps he had gone mad. '_Punch_,' says
Froude, 'the most friendly to him of all the London periodicals,
protested affectionately. The delinquent was brought up for trial before
him, I think for injuring his reputation. He was admonished, but stood
impenitent, and even "called the worthy magistrate a windbag and a
sham." I suppose it was Thackeray who wrote this; or some other kind
friend, who feared, like Emerson, "that the world would turn its back on
him." He was under no illusion himself as to the effect which he was
producing.'[26]
Amid the general storm, Carlyle was 'agreeably surprised' to receive an
invitation to dine with Peel at Whitehall Gardens, where he met a select
company. 'After all the servants but the butler were gone,' narrates
Carlyle, 'we began to hear a little of Peel's quiet talk across the
table, unimportant, distinguished by its sense of the ludicrous shining
through a strong official _rationality_ and even seriousness of temper.
Distracted _address_ of a letter from somebody to Queen Victoria; "The
most noble George Victoria, Queen of England, Knight and Baronet," or
something like that. A man had once written to Peel himself, while
secretary, "that he was weary of life, that if any gentleman wanted for
his park-woods a hermit, he, etc.", all of which was very pretty and
human as Peel gave it us.'[27] Carlyle was driven home by the Bishop of
Oxford, 'Soapy Sam' Wilberforce, whom he had probably met before at the
Ashburton's. The Bishop once told Froude that he considered Carlyle a
most eminently religious man. 'Ah, Sam,' said Carlyle to Froude one day,
'he is a very clever fellow; I do not hate him near as much as I fear I
ought to do.' Carlyle and Peel met once more, at Bath House, and there,
too, he was first introduced to the Duke of Wellington. Writing at the
time, Carlyle said: 'I had never seen till now how beautiful, and what
an expression of graceful simplicity, veracity, and nobleness there is
about the old hero when you see him close at hand.... Except for Dr
Chalmers, I have not for many years seen so beautiful an old man.'
Carlyle intended, some time or other, writing a 'Life of Sterling,' but
meanwhile he accepted an invitation to visit South Wales. Thence he
made his way to Scotsbrig. On the 27th September 1850, he 'parted
sorrowfully with his mother.' When he reached London, the autumn
quarterlies were reviewing the _Pamphlets_, and the 'shrieking tone was
considerably modified.' 'A review of them,' says Froude, 'by Masson in
the _North British_ distinctly pleased Carlyle. A review in the _Dublin_
he found "excellently serious," and conjectured that it came from some
Anglican pervert or convert. It was written, I believe, by Dr Ward.'
After a few more wanderings, Carlyle set about the _Life of Sterling_,
and on April 5, 1851, he informs his mother: 'I told the Doctor about
"John Sterling's Life," a small, insignificant book or pamphlet I have
been writing. The booksellers got it away from me the other morning, to
see how much there is of it, in the first place. I know not altogether
myself whether it is worth printing or not, but rather think it will be
the end of it whether or not. It has cost little trouble, and need not
do much ill, if it do no great amount of good.' Another visit had to be
paid to Scotsbrig, where he read the "Life of Chalmers." 'An excellent
Christian man,' he said. 'About as great a contrast to himself in all
ways as could be found in these epochs under the same sky.'
When he got back to Cheyne Row, he took to reading the "Seven Years'
War," with a view to another book. He determined to go to Germany, and
on August 30, 1852, Carlyle embarked 'on board the greasy little wretch
of a Leith steamer, laden to the water's edge with pig-iron and
herrings.' The journey over, he set to work on 'Frederick,' but was
driven almost to despair by the cock-crowing in his neighbourhood.
Writing to Mrs Carlyle, he says: 'I foresee in general these cocks will
require to be abolished, entirely silenced, whether we build the new
room or not. I would cheerfully shoot them, and pay the price if
discovered, but I have no gun, should be unsafe for hitting, and indeed
seldom see the wretched animals.'
He took refuge at the Ashburton's house, the Grange, but on the 20th of
December, news came that his mother was seriously ill, and could not
last long. He hurried off to Scotsbrig, and reached there in time to see
her once more alive. In his journal, this passage is to be found under
date January 8, 1854: 'The stroke has fallen. My dear old mother is gone
from me, and in the winter of the year, confusedly under darkness of
weather and of mind, the stern final epoch--_epoch of old age_--is
beginning to unfold itself for me.... It is matter of perennial
thankfulness to me, and beyond my desert in that matter very far, that I
found my dear old mother still alive; able to recognise me with a faint
joy; her former _self_ still strangely visible there in all its
lineaments, though worn to the uttermost thread. The brave old mother
and the good, whom to lose had been my fear ever since intelligence
awoke in me in this world, arrived now at the final bourn.... She was
about 84 years of age, and could not with advantage to any side remain
with us longer. Surely it was a good Power that gave us such a mother;
and good though stern that took her away from amid such grief and labour
by a death beautiful to one's thoughts. "All the days of my appointed
time will I wait till my change come." This they heard her muttering,
and many other less frequent pious texts and passages. Amen, Amen!
Sunday, December 25, 1853--a day henceforth for ever memorable to me....
To live for the shorter or longer remainder of my days with the simple
bravery, veracity, and piety of her that is gone: that would be a right
learning from her death, and a right honouring of her memory. But alas
all is yet _frozen_ within me; even as it is without me at present, and
I have made little or no way. God be helpful to me! I myself am very
weak, confused, fatigued, entangled in poor _worldlinesses_ too.
Newspaper paragraphs, even as this sacred and peculiar thing, are not
indifferent to me. Weak soul! and I am fifty-eight years old, and the
tasks I have on hand, Frederick, &c., are most ungainly, incongruous
with my mood--and the night cometh, for me too is not distant, which for
her is come. I must try, I must try. Poor brother Jack! Will he do his
Dante now? For him also I am sad; and surely he has deserved gratitude
in these last years from us all.'[28]
When he returned to London, Carlyle lived in strict seclusion, making
repeated efforts at work on what he called 'the unexecutable book,'
_Frederick_. In the spring of 1854, tidings reached Carlyle of the death
of Professor Wilson. Between them there had never been any cordial
relation, says Froude. 'They had met in Edinburgh in the old days; on
Carlyle's part there had been no backwardness, and Wilson was not
unconscious of Carlyle's extraordinary powers. But he had been shy of
Carlyle, and Carlyle had resented it, and now this April the news came
that Wilson was gone, and Carlyle had to write his epitaph. 'I knew his
figure well,' wrote Carlyle in his journal on April 29; 'remember well
first seeing him in Princes Street on a bright April afternoon--probably
1814--exactly forty years ago.... A tall ruddy figure, with plenteous
blonde hair, with bright blue eyes, fixed, as if in haste towards some
distant object, strode rapidly along, clearing the press to the left of
us, close by the railings, near where Blackwood's shop now is. Westward
he in haste; we slowly eastward. Campbell whispered me, "That is Wilson
of the _Isle of Palms_," which poem I had not read, being then quite
mathematical, scientific, &c., for extraneous reasons, as I now see them
to have been. The broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man struck me;
his flashing eye, copious, dishevelled head of hair, and rapid,
unconcerned progress, like that of a plough through stubble. I really
liked him, but only from the distance, and thought no more of him. It
must have been fourteen years later before I once saw his figure again,
and began to have some distant straggling acquaintance of a personal
kind with him. Glad could I have been to be better and more familiarly
acquainted; but though I liked much in him, and he somewhat in me, it
would not do. He was always very kind to me, but seemed to have a
feeling I should--could--not become wholly his, in which he was right,
and that on other terms he could not have me; so we let it so remain,
and for many years--indeed, even after quitting Edinburgh--I had no
acquaintance with him; occasionally got symptoms of his ill-humour with
me--ink-spurts in _Blackwood_, read or heard of, which I, in a surly,
silent manner, strove to consider _flattering_ rather.... So far as I
can recollect, he was once in my house (Comely Bank, with a testimonial,
poor fellow!), and I once in his, De Quincey, &c., a little while one
afternoon.'[29]
On September 16, 1854, Carlyle breaks out in his journal: '"The harvest
is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."' What a fearful
word! I cannot find how to take up that miserable "Frederick," or what
on earth to do with it.' He worked hard at it, nevertheless, for
eighteen months, and by the end of May 1858, the first instalment was
all in type. Froude remarks that a fine critic once said to him that
Carlyle's Friedrich Wilhelm was as peculiar and original as Sterne's
Tristram Shandy; certainly as distinct a personality as exists in
English fiction. Carlyle made a second journey to Germany. Shortly after
his return, the already finished volumes of _Frederick_ appeared, and
they met with an immediate welcome. The success was great; 2000 copies
were sold at the first issue, and a second 2000 were disposed of almost
as rapidly, and a third 2000 followed. Mrs Carlyle's health being
unsatisfactory, Carlyle took a house for the summer at Humbie, near
Aberdour in Fife. They returned to Cheyne Row in October, neither of
them benefited by their holiday in the north.
While many of Carlyle's intimate friends were passing away, he formed
Ruskin's acquaintance, which turned out mutually satisfactory. On the
23rd April 1861, Carlyle writes to his brother John: 'Friday last I was
persuaded--in fact had unwarily compelled myself, as it were--to a
lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, Albemarle Street. Lecture on
Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A
crammed house, but tolerable to me even in the gallery. The lecture was
thought to "break down," and indeed it quite did "_as a lecture_"; but
only did from _embarras des richesses_--a rare case. Ruskin did blow
asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which were
manifold, curious, genial; and, in fact, I do not recollect to have
heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic
one.'[30]
_Frederick_ was progressing, though slowly, as he found the ore in the
German material at his disposal "nowhere smelted out of it." The third
volume was finished and published in the summer of 1862; the fourth
volume was getting into type; and the fifth and last was finished in
January 1865. 'It nearly killed me,' Carlyle writes in his journal, 'it,
and my poor Jane's dreadful illness, now happily over. No sympathy could
be found on earth for those horrid struggles of twelve years, nor
happily was any needed. On Sunday evening in the end of January (1865) I
walked out, with the multiplex feeling--joy not very prominent in it,
but a kind of solemn thankfulness traceable, that I had written the last
sentence of that unutterable book, and, contrary to many forebodings in
bad hours, had actually got done with it for ever.'
In England it was at once admitted, says Froude, that a splendid
addition had been made to the national literature. 'The book contained,
if nothing else, a gallery of historical figures executed with a skill
which placed Carlyle at the head of literary portrait painters.... No
critic, after the completion of _Frederick_, challenged Carlyle's right
to a place beside the greatest of English authors, past or present.' The
work was translated instantly into German, calling forth the warmest
appreciation.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 115.
[19] Froude's "Life in London," vol. i. pp. 161-62.
[20] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 420.
[21] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. pp. 433-4.
[22] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 441.
[23] Ibid., vol. i. p. 451.
[24] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 456.
[25] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 26.
[26] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 36.
[27] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 43.
[28] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. pp. 142-45.
[29] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. pp. 156-7.
[30] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 245.
CHAPTER VI
RECTORIAL ADDRESS--DEATH OF MRS CARLYLE
After a round of holiday visits, including one to Annandale, the
Carlyles settled down once more at Cheyne Row in the summer of 1865.
'The great outward event of Carlyle's own life,' observes Froude,
'Scotland's public recognition of him, was now lying close ahead. This
his wife was to live to witness as her final happiness in this world.'
Here is an eloquent passage from the same pen: 'I had been at
Edinburgh,' writes Froude, 'and had heard Gladstone make his great
oration on Homer there, on retiring from office as Rector. It was a
grand display. I never recognised before what oratory could do; the
audience being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension,
bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said which seemed of
moment when read deliberately afterwards; but the voice was like
enchantment, and the street, when we left the building, was ringing with
a prolongation of cheers. Perhaps in all Britain there was not a man
whose views on all subjects, in heaven and earth, less resembled
Gladstone's than those of the man whom this same applauding multitude
elected to take his place. The students too, perhaps, were ignorant how
wide the contradiction was; but if they had been aware of it they need
not have acted differently. Carlyle had been one of themselves. He had
risen from among them--not by birth or favour, not on the ladder of any
established profession, but only by the internal force that was in
him--to the highest place as a modern man of letters. In _Frederick_ he
had given the finish to his reputation; he stood now at the summit of
his fame; and the Edinburgh students desired to mark their admiration in
some signal way. He had been mentioned before, but he had declined to be
nominated, for a party only were then in his favour. On this occasion,
the students were unanimous, or nearly so. His own consent was all that
was wanting.'[31] This consent was obtained, and Carlyle was chosen
Rector of Edinburgh University. But the Address troubled him. He
resolved, however, as his father used to say, to 'gar himself go through
with the thing,' or at least to try. Froude says he was very miserable,
but that Mrs Carlyle 'kept up his spirits, made fun of his fears,
bantered him, encouraged him, herself at heart as much alarmed as he
was, but conscious, too, of the ridiculous side of it.' She thought of
accompanying him, but her health would not permit of the effort. Both
Huxley and Tyndall were going down, and Tyndall promised Mrs Carlyle to
take care of her husband.
On Monday morning, the 29th of March, 1866, Carlyle and his wife parted.
'The last I saw of her,' he said, 'was as she stood with her back to the
parlour door to bid me good-bye. She kissed me twice, she me once, I her
a second time.' They parted for ever.
Edinburgh was reached in due course, and what happened there had best be
told by an eye-witness, Professor Masson. 'On the night following
Carlyle's arrival in town,' he says, 'after he had settled himself in Mr
Erskine of Linlathen's house, where he was to stay during his visit, he
and his brother John came to my house in Rosebery Crescent, that they
might have a quiet smoke and talk over matters. They sat with me an hour
or more, Carlyle as placid and hearty as could be, talking most
pleasantly, a little dubious, indeed, as to how he might get through his
Address, but for the rest unperturbed. As to the Address itself, when
the old man stood up in the Music Hall before the assembled crowd, and
threw off his Rectorial robes, and proceeded to speak, slowly,
connectedly, and nobly raising his left hand at the end of each section
or paragraph to stroke the back of his head as he cogitated what he was
to say next, the crowd listening as they had never listened to a speaker
before, and reverent even in those parts of the hall where he was least
audible,--who that was present will ever forget that sight? That day,
and on the subsequent days of his stay, there were, of course, dinners
and other gatherings in Carlyle's honour. One such dinner, followed by a
larger evening gathering, was in my house. Then, too, he was in the best
of possible spirits, courteous in manner and in speech to all, and
throwing himself heartily into whatever turned up. At the dinner-table,
I remember, Lord Neaves favoured us with one or two of his humorous
songs or recitatives, including his clever quiz called "Stuart Mill on
Mind and Matter," written to the tune of "Roy's wife of Aldivalloch." No
one enjoyed the thing more than Carlyle; and he surprised me by doing
what I had never heard him do before,--actually joining with his own
voice in the chorus. "Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter, Stuart Mill on
Mind and Matter," he chaunted laughingly along with Lord Neaves every
time the chorus came round, beating time in the air emphatically with
his fist. It was hardly otherwise, or only otherwise inasmuch as the
affair was more ceremonious and stately, at the dinner given to him in
the Douglas Hotel by the Senatus Academicus, and in which his old friend
Sir David Brewster presided. There, too, while dignified and serene,
Carlyle was thoroughly sympathetic and convivial. Especially I remember
how he relished and applauded the songs of our academic laureate and
matchless chief in such things, Professor Douglas Maclagan, and how,
before we broke up, he expressly complimented Professor Maclagan on
having "contributed so greatly to the hilarity of the evening."'[32]
The most graphic account of Carlyle's installation as Lord Rector is
that by Alexander Smith, the author of 'A Life Drama,' 'Summer in Skye,'
&c., &c., whose lamented death took place a few months after that event.
'Curious stories,' he wrote, 'are told of the eagerness on every side
manifested to hear Mr Carlyle. Country clergymen from beyond Aberdeen
came to Edinburgh for the sole purpose of hearing and seeing. Gentlemen
came down from London by train the night before, and returned to London
by train the night after. Nay, it was even said that an enthusiast,
dwelling in the remote west of Ireland, intimated to the officials who
had charge of the distribution, that if a ticket should be reserved for
him, he would gladly come the whole way to Edinburgh. Let us hope a
ticket _was_ reserved. On the day of the address, the doors of the Music
Hall were besieged long before the hour of opening had arrived; and
loitering about there on the outskirts of the crowd, one could not help
glancing curiously down Pitt Street, towards the "lang toun of
Kirkcaldy," dimly seen beyond the Forth; for on the sands there, in the
early years of the century, Edward Irving was accustomed to pace up and
down solitarily, and "as if the sands were his own," people say, who
remember, when they were boys, seeing the tall, ardent, black-haired,
swift-gestured, squinting man, often enough. And to Kirkcaldy, too, ...
came young Carlyle from Edinburgh College, wildly in love with German
and mathematics; and the schoolroom in which these men taught, although
incorporated in Provost Swan's manufactory, is yet kept sacred and
intact, and but little changed these fifty years--an act of hero-worship
for which the present and other generations may be thankful. It seemed
to me that so glancing Fife-wards, and thinking of that noble
friendship--of the David and Jonathan of so many years agone--was the
best preparation for the man I was to see, and the speech I was to hear.
David and Jonathan! Jonathan stumbled and fell on the dark hills, not of
Gilboa, but of Vanity; and David sang his funeral song: "But for him I
had never known what the communion of man with man means. His was the
freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with.
I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough,
found in this world, or now hope to find."
'In a very few minutes after the doors were opened, the large hall was
filled in every part; and when up the central passage the Principal, the
Lord Rector, the Members of the Senate, and other gentlemen advanced
towards the platform, the cheering was vociferous and hearty. The
Principal occupied the chair, of course; the Lord Rector on his right,
the Lord Provost on his left. When the platform gentlemen had taken
their seats, every eye was fixed on the Rector. To all appearance, as he
sat, time and labour had dealt tenderly with him. His face had not yet
lost the country bronze which he brought up with him from Dumfriesshire
as a student, fifty-six years ago. His long residence in London had not
touched his Annandale look, nor had it--as we soon learned--touched his
Annandale accent. His countenance was striking, homely, sincere,
truthful--the countenance of a man on whom "the burden of the
unintelligible world" had weighed more heavily than on most. His hair
was yet almost dark; his moustache and short beard were iron-grey. His
eyes were wide, melancholy, sorrowful; and seemed as if they had been at
times a-weary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect there was something
aboriginal, as of a piece of unhewn granite, which had never been
polished to any approved pattern, whose natural and original vitality
had never been tampered with. In a word, there seemed no passivity about
Mr Carlyle; he was the diamond, and the world was his pane of glass; he
was a graving tool, rather than a thing graven upon--a man to set his
mark on the world--a man on whom the world could not set _its_ mark....
The proceedings began by the conferring of the degree of LL.D. on Mr
Erskine of Linlathen--an old friend of Mr Carlyle's--on Professors
Huxley, Tyndall, and Ramsay, and on Dr Rae, the Arctic explorer. That
done, amid a tempest of cheering and hats enthusiastically waved, Mr
Carlyle, slipping off his Rectorial robe--which must have been a very
shirt of Nessus to him--advanced to the table, and began to speak in
low, wavering, melancholy tones, which were in accordance with the
melancholy eyes, and in the Annandale accent with which his play-fellows
must have been familiar long ago. So self-centred was he, so impregnable
to outward influences, that all his years of Edinburgh and London life
could not impair, even in the slightest degree, _that_. The opening
sentences were lost in the applause, and when it subsided, the low,
plaintive, quavering voice was heard going on: "Your enthusiasm towards
me is very beautiful in itself, however undeserved it may be in regard
to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well
known to myself when in a position analogous to your own." And then came
the Carlylean utterance, with its far-reaching reminiscence and sigh
over old graves--Father's and Mother's, Edward Irving's, John
Sterling's, Charles Buller's, and all the noble known in past time--and
with its flash of melancholy scorn. "There are now fifty-six years gone,
last November, since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite
fourteen--fifty-six years ago--to attend classes here, and gain
knowledge of all kinds, I knew not what--with feelings of wonder and
awe-struck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this is what
we have come to.... There is something touching and tragic, and yet at
the same time beautiful, to see the third generation, as it were, of my
dear old native land, rising up, and saying: Well, you are not
altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard. You have toiled through
a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges." And thereafter,
without aid of notes, or paper preparation of any kind, in the same
wistful, earnest, hesitating voice, and with many a touch of quaint
humour by the way, which came in upon his subject like glimpses of
pleasant sunshine, the old man talked to his vast audience about the
origin and function of Universities, the Old Greeks and Romans, Oliver
Cromwell, John Knox, the excellence of silence as compared with speech,
the value of courage and truthfulness, and the supreme importance of
taking care of one's health. "There is no kind of achievement you could
make in the world that is equal to perfect health. What to it are
nuggets and millions? The French financier said, 'Alas! why is there no
sleep to be sold?' Sleep was not in the market at any quotation." But
what need of quoting a speech which by this time has been read by
everybody? Appraise it as you please, it was a thing _per se_. Just as,
if you wish a purple dye, you must fish up the Murex; if you wish ivory,
you must go to the East; so if you desire an address such as Edinburgh
listened to the other day, you must go to Chelsea for it. It may not be
quite to your taste, but, in any case, there is no other intellectual
warehouse in which that kind of article is kept in stock.'[33]
Another eye-witness, Mr Moncure D. Conway, says: 'When Carlyle sat down
there was an audible sound, as of breath long held, by all present; then
a cry from the students, an exultation; they rose up, all arose, waving
their arms excitedly; some pressed forward, as if wishing to embrace
him, or to clasp his knees; others were weeping; what had been heard
that day was more than could be reported; it was the ineffable spirit
that went forth from the deeps of a great heart and from the ages stored
up in it, and deep answered unto deep.'
Immediately after the delivery of the address, Tyndall telegraphed to
Mrs Carlyle this brief message, 'A perfect triumph.' That evening she
dined at Forster's, where she met Dickens and Wilkie Collins. They drank
Carlyle's health, and to her it was 'a good joy.' It was Carlyle's
intention to have returned at once to London, but he changed his mind,
and went for a few quiet days at Scotsbrig. When Tyndall was back in
London Mrs Carlyle got all the particulars of the rectorial address from
him, and was made perfectly happy about it.
Numberless congratulations poured in upon Mrs Carlyle, and for Saturday,
April 21st, she had arranged a small tea-party. In the morning she wrote
her daily letter to Carlyle, and in the afternoon she went out in her
brougham for a drive, taking her little dog with her. When near Victoria
Gate, Hyde Park, she put the dog out to run. 'A passing carriage,' says
Froude, 'went over its foot.... She sprang out, caught the dog in her
arms, took it with her into the brougham, and was never more seen alive.
The coachman went twice round the drive, by Marble Arch down to Stanhope
Gate, along the Serpentine and round again. Coming a second time near to
the Achilles statue, and surprised to receive no directions, he turned
round, saw indistinctly that something was wrong, and asked a gentleman
near to look into the carriage. The gentleman told him briefly to take
the lady to St. George's Hospital, which was not 200 yards distant. She
was sitting with her hands folded in her lap _dead_.'[34]
At the hour she died Carlyle was enjoying the 'green solitudes and fresh
spring breezes' of Annandale, 'quietly but far from happily.' About nine
o'clock the same night his brother-in-law, Mr Aitken, broke the news to
him. 'I was sitting in sister Jean's at Dumfries,' Carlyle wrote a
fortnight after, 'thinking of my railway journey to Chelsea on Monday,
and perhaps of a sprained ankle I had got at Scotsbrig two weeks or so
before, when the fatal telegrams, two of them in succession, came. It
had a kind of _stunning_ effect upon me. Not for above two days could I
estimate the immeasurable depths of it, or the infinite sorrow which had
peeled my life all bare, and in a moment shattered my poor world to
universal ruin. They took me out next day to wander, as was medically
needful, 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. Will it ever? A stony
"Woe's me, woe's me!" sometimes with infinite tenderness and pity, not
for myself, is my habitual mood hitherto.'[35]
On Monday morning Carlyle and his brother John set off for London. On
the Wednesday he was on his way to Haddington with the remains, his
brother and John Forster accompanying him. At 1 P.M. on Thursday the
funeral took place. 'In the nave of the old Abbey Kirk,' wrote her
disconsolate husband, 'long a ruin, now being saved from further decay,
with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little Jeannie, and
the light of her face will never shine on me more.' When Mr Conway saw
him on his return to Cheyne Row, Carlyle said, 'Whatever triumph there
may have been in that now so darkly overcast day, was indeed _hers_.
Long, long years ago, she took her place by the side of a poor man of
humblest condition, against all other provisions for her, undertook to
share his lot for weal or woe; and in that office what she has been to
him and done for him, how she has placed, as it were, velvet between him
and all the sharp angularities of existence, remains now only in the
knowledge of one man, and will presently be finally hid in his grave.'
As he touchingly expressed it in the beautiful epitaph he wrote, the
'light of his life' had assuredly 'gone out.' Universal sympathy was
felt for the bereaved husband, and he was very much affected by 'a
delicate, graceful, and even affectionate' message from the Queen,
conveyed by Lady Augusta Stanley through his brother John.
One who knew Mrs Carlyle intimately thus speaks of her: 'Her intellect
was as clear and incisive as his, yet altogether womanly in character;
her heart was as truthful, and her courage as unswerving. She was a wife
in the noblest sense of that sacred name. She had a gift of literary
expression as unique as his; as tender a sympathy with human sorrow and
need; as clear an eye for all conventional hypocrisies and folly; as
vivid powers of description and illustration; and also, it must be
confessed, when the spirit of mockery was strong upon her, as keen an
edge to her flashing wit and humour, and as scornful a disregard of the
conventional proprieties. But she was no literary hermaphrodite. She
never intellectually strode forth before the world upon masculine
stilts; nor, in private life, did she frowardly push to the front, in
the vanity of showing she was as clever and considerable as her
husband. She longed, with a true woman's longing heart, to be
appreciated by him, and by those she loved; and, for her, all extraneous
applause might whistle with the wind. But if her husband was a king in
literature, so might she have been a queen. Her influence with him for
good cannot be questioned by any one having eyes to discern. And if she
sacrificed her own vanity for personal distinction, in order to make his
work possible for him, who shall say she did not choose the nobler and
better part?'[36]
On the other hand, Carlyle was too exacting, and when domestic
differences arose he abstained from paying those little attentions which
a delicate and sensitive woman might naturally expect from a husband who
was so lavish of terms of endearment in the letters he wrote to her when
away from her side. 'Even with that mother whom he so dearly loved,'
observes Mrs Ireland, 'the intercourse was mainly composed of a silent
sitting by the fireside of an evening in the old "houseplace," with a
tranquillising pipe of tobacco, or of his returning from his long
rambles to a simple meal, partaken of in comparative silence; and now
and then, at meeting or parting, some pious and earnest words from the
good soul to her son.'[37] And it never occurred to Carlyle to act
differently with his wife, who was pining for his society. In addition
to all that, we have Froude's brief but accurate diagnosis of Carlyle's
character. 'If,' he wrote, 'matters went well with himself, it never
occurred to him that they could be going ill with any one else; and, on
the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required everybody to be
uncomfortable along with him.'
There was a strong element of selfishness in that phase of Carlyle's
nature; and throughout his letters and journal he appears wholly wrapt
up in himself and in his literary projects, without even a passing
allusion to the courageous woman who had shared his lot. Now and again
we alight upon a passage where special mention is made of her efforts,
but these have all a direct or indirect bearing upon _his_ work, _his_
plans, _his_ comforts.[38]
Carlyle never fully realised what his wife had been to him until she was
suddenly snatched from his side. And this was his testimony: 'I say
deliberately, her part in the stern battle, and except myself none
knows how stern, was brighter and braver than my own.' In one of those
terrible moments of self-upbraiding the grief-stricken husband exclaims:
'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 idle
dissonances of the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and
beautiful, _when it is too late_!'
In a pamphlet quoted by Mrs Ireland we have a pathetic picture of
Carlyle in his lonely old age. A Mr Swinton, an American gentleman on a
visit to this country, went to see the grave of Mrs Carlyle.
In conversation the grave-digger said: 'Mr Carlyle comes here from
London now and then to see this grave. He is a gaunt, shaggy, weird kind
of old man, looking very old the last time he was here.' 'He is
eighty-six now,' said I. 'Ay,' he repeated, 'eighty-six, and comes here
to this grave all the way from London.' And I told him that Carlyle was
a great man, the greatest man of the age in books, and that his name was
known all over the world; but he thought there were other great men
lying near at hand, though I told him their fame did not reach beyond
the graveyard, and brought him back to talk of Carlyle. 'Mr Carlyle
himself,' said the gravedigger softly, 'is to be brought here to be
buried with his wife. Ay, he comes here lonesome and alone,' continued
the gravedigger, 'when he visits the wife's grave. His niece keeps him
company to the gate, but he leaves her there, and she stays there for
him. The last time he was here I got a sight of him, and he was bowed
down under his white hairs, and he took his way up by that ruined wall
of the old cathedral, and round there and in here by the gateway, and he
tottered up here to this spot.' Softly spake the gravedigger, and
paused. Softer still, in the broad dialect of the Lothians, he
proceeded:--"And he stood here awhile in the grass, and then he kneeled
down and stayed on his knees at the grave; then he bent over and I saw
him kiss the ground--ay, he kissed it again and again, and he kept
kneeling, and it was a long time before he rose and tottered out of the
cathedral, and wandered through the graveyard to the gate, where his
niece was waiting for him." This is the epitaph composed by Carlyle, and
engraved on the tombstone of Dr John Welsh in the chancel of Haddington
Church:--
'HERE LIKEWISE NOW RESTS JANE WELSH CARLYLE, SPOUSE OF THOMAS
CARLYLE, CHELSEA, LONDON. SHE WAS BORN AT HADDINGTON, 14TH JULY
1801, ONLY DAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE JOHN WELSH, AND OF GRACE
WELSH, CAPELGILL, DUMFRIESSHIRE, HIS WIFE. IN HER BRIGHT
EXISTENCE SHE HAD MORE SORROWS THAN ARE COMMON; BUT ALSO A SOFT
INVINCIBILITY, A CLEARNESS OF DISCERNMENT, AND A NOBLE LOYALTY
OF HEART WHICH ARE RARE. FOR FORTY YEARS SHE WAS THE TRUE AND
EVER-LOVING HELPMATE 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 AWAY FROM HIM, AND THE LIGHT OF HIS LIFE AS
IF GONE OUT.'
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 295.
[32] Masson's 'Carlyle Personally and in his Writings,' pp. 27-9.
[33] Alexander Smith's 'Sketches and Criticisms,' pp. 101-8.
[34] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 312.
[35] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 314.
[36] Larkin's 'Carlyle and the Open Secret of his Life,' pp. 334-5.
[37] 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle,' pp. 191-2.
[38] After reading the above estimate in the proof sheets, Professor
Masson writes to me as follows:--
'May I hint that, in the passage about his character and
domestic relations, you seem hardly to do justice to the depths
of real kindness and tenderness in him, and the actual
_couthiness_ of his manner and fireside conversation in his
most genial hours? He was delightful and loveable at such
hours, with a fund of the raciest Scottish humour.'
This is a side of Carlyle's nature which would naturally be hidden from
the general reader, and from Mr Froude. It is easy to imagine how
Carlyle's genial humour, frozen at its source in the company of the
solemnly pessimistic Froude, should be thawed by the presence of 'a
brither Scot.'
CHAPTER VII
LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF CARLYLE
In presence of the pathetically tragic spectacle of Carlyle in his old
age, who can have the heart to enter into his domestic life and weigh
with pedantic scales the old man's blameworthiness? Carlyle survived his
wife fifteen years. His brother John, himself a widower, was anxious
that they should live together, but it was otherwise arranged. John
returned to Scotland, and Carlyle remained alone in Cheyne Row. He was
prevailed on to visit Ripple Court, near Walmer, and on his return to
London he wrote, 'My home is very gaunt and lonesome; but such is my
allotment henceforth in this world. I have taken loyally to my vacant
circumstances, and will try to do my best with them.'
Carlyle's first public appearance after his sore bereavement was as
chairman of the Eyre Committee as a protest against Governor Eyre's
recall. 'Poor Eyre!' he wrote to a correspondent, 'I am heartily sorry
for him, and for the English nation, which makes such a dismal fool of
itself. Eyre, it seems, has fallen suddenly from £6000 a year into
almost zero, and has a large family and needy kindred dependent on him.
Such his reward for saving the West Indies, and hanging one incendiary
mulatto, well worth the gallows, if I can judge.'
Carlyle accepted a pressing invitation to stay with the Ashburtons at
Mentone, and on the 22nd of December he started thither with Professor
Tyndall. He was greatly benefited in health, and at intervals made some
progress with his _Reminiscences_. He returned to London in March, and
on the 4th of April 1867 he writes in his journal: 'Idle! Idle! My
employments mere trifles of business, and that of dwelling on the days
that culminated on the 21st of last year.' About this time his thoughts
were directed to the estate of Craigenputtock, of which he became
absolute owner at his wife's death. All her relations on the father's
side were dead, and as Carlyle thought that it ought not to lapse to his
own family, he determined to leave it to the University of Edinburgh,
'the rents of it to be laid out in supporting poor and meritorious
students there, under the title of "the John Welsh Bursaries." Her name
he could not give, because she had taken his own. Therefore he gave her
father's.'
On June 22nd, he writes in his journal: 'Finished off on Thursday last,
at three p.m. 20th of June, my poor _bequest_ of Craigenputtock to
Edinburgh University for bursaries. All quite ready there, Forster and
Froude as witnesses; the good Professor Masson, who had taken endless
pains, alike friendly and wise, being at the very last objected to in
the character of "witness," as "a party interested," said the Edinburgh
lawyer. I a little regretted this circumstance; so I think did Masson
secretly. He read us the deed with sonorous emphasis, bringing every
word and note of it home to us. Then I signed; then they two--Masson
witnessing only with his eyes and mind. I was deeply moved, as I well
might be, but held my peace and shed no tears. _Tears_ I think I have
done with; never, except for moments together, have I wept for that
catastrophe of April 21, to which whole days of weeping would have been
in other times a blessed relief.... This is my poor "Sweetheart Abbey,"
"Cor Dulce," or New Abbey, a sacred casket and _tomb_ for the sweetest
"heart" which, in this bad, bitter world, was all my own. Darling,
darling! and in a little while we shall _both_ be at rest, and the Great
God will have done with us what was His will.'[39]
When the Tories were preparing to 'dish the Whigs' over the Reform Bill,
Carlyle felt impelled to write a pamphlet, which he called _Shooting
Niagara, and After_. It was his final utterance on British politics.
Proof sheets and revisions for new editions of his works engrossed his
attention for some time. He went annually to Scotland, and devoted a
great deal of time on his return to Chelsea to the sorting and
annotating of his wife's letters.
Early in 1869 the Queen expressed a wish, through Dean Stanley, to
become personally acquainted with Carlyle. The meeting took place at
Westminster Deanery: 'The Queen,' Carlyle said, 'was really very
gracious and pretty in her demeanour throughout; rose greatly in my
esteem by everything that happened; did not fall in any point. The
interview was quietly very mournful to me; the one point of real
interest, a sombre thought: "Alas! how would it have cheered her, bright
soul, for my sake, had she been there!"'
When Carlyle was in constant expectation of his end, he--in June
1871--brought to Mr Froude's house a large parcel of papers. 'He put it
in my hands,' says Froude. 'He told me to take it simply and absolutely
as my own, without reference to any other person or persons, and to do
with it as I pleased after he was gone. He explained, when he saw me
surprised, that it was an account of his wife's history, that it was
incomplete, that he could himself form no opinion whether it ought to be
published or not, that he could do no more to it, and must pass it over
to me. He wished never to hear of it again. I must judge. I must publish
it, the whole, or part--or else destroy it all, if I thought that this
would be the wiser thing to do.'[40]
Three years later Carlyle sent to Froude his own and his wife's private
papers, journals, correspondence, reminiscences, and other documents.
'Take them,' he said to Froude, 'and do what you can with them. All I
can say to you is, Burn freely. If you have any affection for me, the
more you burn the better.' Mr Froude burnt nothing, and it was well, he
says, that he did not, for a year before his death he desired him, when
he had done with the MSS., to give them to his niece. 'The new task
which had been laid upon me,' writes Froude in his biography of Carlyle,
'complicated the problem of the "Letters and Memorials." My first hope
was, that, in the absence of further definite instructions from himself,
I might interweave parts of Mrs Carlyle's letters with his own
correspondence in an ordinary narrative, passing lightly over the rest,
and touching the dangerous places only so far as was unavoidable. In
this view I wrote at leisure the greatest part of "the first forty
years" of his life. The evasion of the difficulty was perhaps cowardly,
but it was not unnatural. I was forced back, however, into the
straighter and better course.' The outcome of it all is too well-known
to call for recapitulation here.
In February 1874, the Emperor of Germany conferred upon Carlyle the
Order of Merit which the great Frederick had himself founded. He could
not refuse it, but he remarked, 'Were it ever so well meant, it can be
of no value to me whatever. Do thee neither ill na gude.' Ten months
later, Mr Disraeli, then Premier, offered him the Grand Cross of the
Bath along with a pension. Carlyle gracefully declined both.
Upon his 80th birthday, Carlyle was presented with a gold medal from
Scottish friends and admirers, and with a letter from Prince Bismarck,
both of which he valued highly. His last public act was to write a
letter of three or four lines to the _Times_, which he explains to his
brother in this fashion: 'After much urgency and with a dead-lift
effort, I have this day [5th May 1877] got issued through the _Times_ a
small indispensable deliverance on the Turk and Dizzy question. Dizzy,
it appears, to the horror of those who have any interest in him and his
proceedings, has decided to have a new war for the Turk against all
mankind; and this letter hopes to drive a nail through his mad and
maddest speculations on that side.'
Froude tells us that Carlyle continued to read the Bible, 'the
significance of which' he found 'deep and wonderful almost as much as it
ever used to be.' The Bible and Shakespeare remained 'the best books' to
him that were ever written.
The death of his brother John was a severe shock to Carlyle, for they
were deeply attached to each other. When he bequeathed Craigenputtock to
the University of Edinburgh, John Carlyle settled a handsome sum for
medical bursaries there, to encourage poor students. 'These two
brothers,' Froude remarks, 'born in a peasant's home in Annandale,
owing little themselves to an Alma Mater which had missed discovering
their merits, were doing for Scotland's chief University what Scotland's
peers and merchants, with their palaces and deer forests and social
splendour, had, for some cause, too imperfectly supplied.'
In the autumn of 1880, Carlyle became very infirm; in January he was
visibly sinking; and on the 5th of February 1881, he passed away in his
eighty-fifth year. In accordance with his expressed wishes, they buried
him in the old kirkyard of Ecclefechan with his own people.
At his death Carlyle's fame was at its zenith. A revulsion of feeling
was caused by the publication of Froude's _Life of Carlyle_ and the
_Reminiscences_. In regard to the former, great dissatisfaction was
created by the somewhat unflattering portrait painted by Froude. Was
Froude justified in presenting to the public Carlyle in all grim
realism? The answer to this depends upon one's notions of literary
ethics. The view of the average biographer is that he must suppress
faults and give prominence to virtues. The result is that the majority
of biographies are simply expanded funeral sermons; instead of a
life-like portrait we have a glorified mummy. Boswell's _Johnson_ stands
at the head of biographies; but, if Boswell had followed the
conventional method, his book would long since have passed into
obscurity. It is open to dispute whether Froude has not overdone the
sombre elements in Carlyle's life. Readers of Professor Masson's little
book, which shows Carlyle in a more genially human mood, have good
reason to suspect that Froude has given too much emphasis to the
Rembrandtesque element in Carlyle's life. In the main, however, Froude's
conception of biography was more correct than that of his critics. In
dealing with the reputation of a great man it is not enough to consider
the feelings of contemporaries; regard should be had to the rights of
posterity. In his usual forcible manner Johnson goes to the heart of
this question when he says in the _Rambler_:--'If the biographer writes
from personal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the public
curiosity, there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude,
or his tenderness overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if
not to invent. There are many who think it an act of piety to hide the
faults or failings of their friends, even when they can no longer suffer
by their detection; we therefore see whole ranks of characters adorned
with uniform panegyric and not to be known from one another, but by
extrinsic and casual circumstances. If we have regard to the memory of
the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue,
and to truth.' When Johnson's own biography came to be written, Boswell,
in spite of the expostulation of friends, resolved to be guided closely
by the literary ethics of his great hero. In reply to Hannah More who
begged that he would mitigate some of the asperities of Johnson, Boswell
said, 'he would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat, to please
anybody.'
Some critics have insinuated that Froude took a curious kind of pleasure
in smirching the idol. The insinuation is as unworthy as it is false.
Froude had resolved to paint Carlyle as he was, warts and all, and all
that can be said is that in his anxiety to avoid the charge of idealism
he has given the warts undue prominence.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 346.
[40] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. pp. 408-9.
CHAPTER VIII
CARLYLE AS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKER
In his essay on Carlyle, Mr John Morley utters a protest against the
habit of labelling great men with names. After making every allowance
for the waywardness of the men of intuitive and poetic insight, it
remains true that between the speculative and the practical sides of a
great thinker's mind there is a potent, though subtle, connection. For
those who take the trouble of searching, there is discoverable such a
connection between the speculative ideas of Carlyle and his practical
outlook upon civilisation. Given a thinker who lays stress upon the
emotional side of progress, and we have a thinker who will take for
heroes men of mystical tendencies, of strong dominating passions, a
thinker who will value progress not by the increase of worldly comfort,
but by the increase in the number of magnetic, epoch-making
personalities. Naturally, we hear Carlyle remark that the history of the
world is at bottom the history of its great men.
Carlyle's fanatical adoption of intuitionalism has told banefully upon
his work in sociology. Trusting to his inner light, to what we might
call Mystical Quakerism, Carlyle has dispensed with a rational theory of
progress. Before a sociological problem, his attitude is not that of the
patient thinker, but of the hysterical prophet, whose emotions find
outlet in declamatory denunciation. Like the prophets of old, Carlyle
tends towards Pessimism. His golden age is in the past. When _Past and
Present_ appeared, many earnest-minded men, captivated by the style and
spirit of the book, hailed Carlyle as a social reformer. As an attempt
to solve the social problem, _Past and Present_ is not a success.
Carlyle could do no more than tell the modern to return to the spirit of
the feudal period, when the people were led by the aristocracy. It
showed considerable audacity on Carlyle's part to come to the
interpretation of history with no theory of progress, no message to the
world beyond the vaguely declamatory one that those nations will be
turned into hell which forget God. Of what value is such writing as
this, taken from the introduction to his _Cromwell_?:--'Here of our own
land and lineage in English shape were heroes on the earth once more,
who knew in every fibre and with heroic daring laid to heart that an
Almighty Justice does verily rule this world, that it is good to fight
on God's side, and bad to fight on the Devil's side! The essence of all
heroism and veracities that have been or will be.' This is simply a
reproduction of Jewish theocratic ideas; indeed, except for the details,
Carlyle might as readily have written a life of Moses as of Cromwell.
In the eyes of Carlyle, human life was what it was to Bunyan, a kind of
pilgrim's progress; only in the Carlylean creed it is all battle and no
victory, all Valley of Humiliation and no Delectable Mountain.
Naturally, where no stress is laid upon collective action, where
individual reason is depreciated, progress is associated with the rise
of abnormal individualities, men of strong wills like Cromwell and
Frederick. With Rousseau, Carlyle appears to look upon civilisation as a
disease. In one of his essays, _Characteristics_, he goes near the
Roussean idea when he declaims against self-consciousness, and
deliberately gives a preference to instinct. The uses of great men are
to lead humanity away from introspection back to energetic, rude,
instinctive action. When humanity will not listen to the voice of the
prophets, it must be treated to whip and scorpion. It never dawned upon
Carlyle that the highest life, individual and collective, has roots in
physical laws, that politico-economic forces must be reckoned with
before social harmony can be reached.
Just as Carlyle's Idealism drove him into opposition to the utilitarian
theory of morals, so it drove him into opposition to the utilitarian
theory of society. Out of his idealistic way of looking upon life there
flowed a curious result. As early as _Sartor Resartus_ we find Carlyle
anticipating the evolutionary conception of society. Spencer has
familiarised us with the idea that society is an organism. The idea
which he received from the Germans that Nature is not a mere mechanical
collection of atoms, but the materialised expression of a spiritual
unity--that idea Carlyle extended to society. As he puts it in _Sartor
Resartus_: 'Yes, truly, if Nature is one, and a living indivisible
whole, much more is Mankind, the Image that reflects and creates Nature,
without which Nature were not.... Noteworthy also, and serviceable for
the progress of this same individual, wilt thou find his subdivisions
into Generations. Generations are as the Days of toilsome Mankind; Death
and Birth are the vesper and the matin bells, that summon Mankind to
sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the Father has
made, the Son can make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed
him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards.... Find mankind where thou
wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower;
the Phoenix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling Earth
with her music; or as now, she sinks, and with spheral swan-song
immolates herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the
clearer.'
Philosophies of civilisation have a tendency to beget Fatalism. Bent
upon watching the resistless play of general laws, philosophers, in
their admiration of the products, are apt to ignore the frightful
suffering and waste involved in the process. Society being an organism,
a thing of development, the duty of thinkers is to demonstrate the
nature of sociological laws, and allow them free scope for operation. To
this is due much of the apparent hardness of Eighteenth Century
political speculation, which, beginning with the French Physiocratic
School, culminated in the works of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, and the
two Mills. With those thinkers, the one palpable lesson of the past was
the duty of abstaining from interference with the general process of
social development. Give man liberty, said the Utilitarian Radicals, and
he will work out his own salvation: from the play of individual
self-interest, social harmony will result.
Carlyle is frequently thought of as a Conservative force in politics. In
some respects he was more Radical than the Benthams and the Mills. His
deeper ideal conception of society intensified his dissatisfaction with
society as it existed. In fact, to Carlyle's attack upon those
institutions, beliefs and ceremonies which had no better basis than mere
unreasoning authority, most of the Radicalism of the early 'forties' was
due. Conceive what effect language like this must have had upon
thoughtful, high-souled young men: 'Call ye that a Society, where there
is no longer any Social Idea extant; not so much as the Idea of a common
Home, but only of a common overcrowded Lodging-house? Where each,
isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his neighbour,
clutches what he can get, and cries "Mine!" and calls it Peace because,
in the cut-purse and cut-throat Scramble, no steel knives, but only a
far cunninger sort, can be employed? Where Friendship, Communion, has
become an incredible tradition; and your holiest Sacramental Supper is a
smoking Tavern Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist? Where your Priest has
no tongue but for plate-licking; and your high Guides and Governors
cannot guide; but on all hands hear it passionately proclaimed: _Laissez
faire_; leave us alone of your guidance, such light is darker than
darkness; eat your wages and sleep. Thus, too, must an observant eye
discern everywhere that saddest spectacle: the Poor perishing, like
neglected, foundered Draught-Cattle, of Hunger and Overwork; the Rich,
still more wretchedly, of Idleness, Satiety, and Overgrowth. The Highest
in rank, at length, without honour from the Lowest; scarcely, with a
little mouth-honour, as from tavern-waiters who expect to put it in the
bill. Once sacred Symbols fluttering as empty Pageants, whereof men
grudge even the expense; a World becoming dismantled: in one word, the
CHURCH fallen speechless, from obesity and apoplexy; the STATE shrunken
into a Police-Office, straitened to get its pay!'
It was when suggesting a remedy that Carlyle's Idealistic Radicalism
parted company with Utilitarian Radicalism. Failing to see that society
was in a transition period, a period so well described by Herbert
Spencer as the movement from Militarism to Industrialism, in which there
was a severe conflict of ideals, opinions, and interests, Carlyle sought
for the remedy in a return to a form of society which had been outgrown.
There was surely something pathetically absurd in the spectacle of a
great teacher endeavouring to cure social and political diseases by
preaching the resuscitation of Puritanism at a time when the intellect
of the day was parting company with theocratic conceptions. Equally
absurd was it to offer as a remedy for social anarchy the despotism of
ambitious rulers at a time when society was suffering from the effects
of previous despotism. Equally irrelevant was the attempt in _Past and
Present_ to get reformers to model modern institutions on those of the
Middle Ages. Carlyle's remedy for the evils of liberty was a return to
the apron-strings of despotism. Carlyle, in fact, forgot his conception
of society as a developing organism; he endeavoured to arrest progress
at the autocratic stage, because of his ignorance of the laws of
progress and his lack of sympathy with democratic ideas. Still, the
value of Carlyle's political writings should not be overlooked. The
Utilitarian Radicals laid themselves open to the charge of intellectual
superstition. They worshipped human nature as a fetish. Lacking clear
views of social evolution, they overlooked the relativity of political
terms. Ignorant of the conception of human nature to which Spencer has
accustomed us, the old Radicals treated it as a constant quantity which
only needed liberty for its proper development. In their eagerness to
discard theology, they discarded the truth of man's depravity which
finds expression in the creed of the Churches. We have changed all that.
We now realise the fact that political institutions are good or bad, not
as they stand or fall when tested by the first principles of a
rationalistic philosophy, but as they harmonise or conflict with
existing phases of human nature.
If in the sphere of industrialism Carlyle as a guide is untrustworthy,
great is his merit as an inspirer. His influence was needed to
counteract the cold prosaic narrowness of the Utilitarian teaching. He
called attention to an aspect of the economic question which the
Utilitarian Radicals ignored, namely, the inadequacy of self-interest as
a social bond. To Carlyle is largely due the higher ethical conceptions
and quickened sympathies which now exist in the spheres of social and
industrial relationships. Unhappily his implicit faith in intuitionalism
led him to deride political economy and everything pertaining to man's
material life. Much there was in the writings of the economists to call
for severe criticism, and if Carlyle had treated the subject with
discrimination he would have been a power for good; but he chose to pour
the vials of his contempt upon political economy as a science, and upon
modern industrial arrangements, with the result that many of the most
intelligent students of sociology have been repelled from his writings.
In this respect he contrasts very unfavourably with Mill, who,
notwithstanding the temptations to intellectual arrogance from his
one-sided training, with quite a chivalrous regard for truth, was ever
ready to accept light and leading from thinkers who differed from him in
temperament and methods. There may be conflicting opinions as to which
of the two men was intellectually the greater, but there can be no doubt
that Mill dwelt in an atmosphere of intellectual serenity and nobility
far removed from the foggy turbulence in which Carlyle lived, moved, and
had his being. Between the saintly apostle of Progress and the barbaric
representative of Reaction there was a great gulf fixed.
As was natural, the _Latter-day Pamphlets_ were treated as a series of
political ravings. For that estimate Carlyle himself was largely
responsible. He deprived himself of the sympathy of intelligent readers
by the violence of his invective and the lack of discrimination in his
abuse. Much of what Carlyle said is to be found in Mill's
_Representative Government_, said, too, in a quiet, rational style,
which commands attention and respect. Mill, no more than Carlyle, was a
believer in mob rule. He did not think that the highest wisdom was to
be had by the counting of heads. Thinkers like Mill and Spencer did not
deem it necessary to pour contempt on modern tendencies. They suggested
remedies on the lines of these tendencies. They did not try to put back
the hands on the clock of time; they sought to remove perturbing
influences. Much of the evil has arisen from men trying to do by
political methods what should not be done by these methods. Carlyle's
idea that Government should do this, that, and the other thing has
wrought mischief, inasmuch as it has led to an undue belief in the
virtues of Government interference. His writings are largely responsible
for the evils he predicted.
It is curious to notice how, with all his belief in individualism,
Carlyle, in political matters, was unconsciously driven in the direction
of socialism. Get your great man, worship him, and render him
obedience--such was the Carlylean recipe for modern diseases. Suppose
the great man found, how is he to proceed? In these democratic days, he
can only proceed by ruling despotically with the popular consent; in
other words, there will follow a regime of paternalism and fraternalism,
the practical outcome of which would be Socialism. Carlyle himself never
suspected how childish was his conception of national life. He wrote of
his Great Man theory as if it was a discovery, whereas the most advanced
races had long since passed through it, and those which were not
advanced were precisely those which had not been able to shake
themselves free of paternal despotism. On this point the criticism of
the late Professor Minto goes to the heart of the matter: 'Carlyle's
doctrines are the first suggestions of an earnest man, adhered to with
unreasoning tenacity. As a rule, with no exception, that is worth
naming, they take account mainly of one side of a case. He was too
impatient of difficulties, and had too little respect for the wisdom and
experience of others to submit to be corrected: opposition rather
confirmed him in his own opinion. Most of his practical suggestions had
already been made before, and judged impracticable upon grounds which he
could not, or would not, understand. His modes of dealing with pauperism
and crime were in full operation under the despotism of Henry VII. and
Henry VIII. His theory of a hero-king, which means in practice an
accidentally good and able man in a series of indifferent or bad
despots, had been more frequently tried than any other political system;
Asia at this moment contains no government that is not despotic. His
views in other departments of knowledge are also chiefly determined by
the strength of his unreasoning impulses.'
In his interesting _Recollections_ Mr Espinasse states that during the
time that Carlyle was writing on the labour question, not a single
blue-book was visible on his table! To Carlyle's influence must be
traced much of the sentimental treatment of social and industrial
questions which has followed the unpopularity of political economy. It
is only fair to Carlyle to note, that at times he had qualms as to the
superiority of his paternal theory of government over Laissez Faire. In
one place he admits that even Frederick could not have superintended the
great emigration movement to such good effect as was done by the
spontaneous efforts of nature. In the social sphere Carlyle was false to
his doctrine of spontaneity. In his early essays he was perpetually
condemning mechanical interference with society, and contending that
free play should be given to the dynamic agencies. Untrue to himself and
his creed, Carlyle in his later books was constantly denouncing
Government for neglecting to apply mechanical remedies for social
diseases. In his view, the duty of a ruler was not to work in harmony
with social impulses, but to cut and carve institutions in harmony with
the ideas of great men. Puritanism under Cromwell failed because it was
forgotten that society is an organism, not a piece of clay, to be
moulded according to the notions of heroic potters. Strictly speaking,
_Frederick_ and _Cromwell_ should be classed with the _Latter Day
Pamphlets_. In the _Pamphlets_ Carlyle declaims against democratic
methods, and in _Frederick_ and _Cromwell_ we are presented with
incarnations of autocratic methods.
Of all the critics of Carlyle, no one has surpassed Mr Morley in
indicating the mischievous effects which flow from the elevation of
mere will power and emotional force into guides in social and political
questions. As Mr Morley says: 'The dictates of a kind heart are of
superior force to the maxims of political economy; swift and peremptory
resolution is a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will works
easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude of the moving impulse.
All this is no caricature of a system which sets sentiment, sometimes
hard sentiment, above reason and method. In other words, the writer who
in these days has done more than anybody else to fire men's hearts with
a feeling for right, and an eager desire for social activity, has, with
deliberate contempt, thrust away from him the only instruments by which
we can make sure what right is, and that our social action is effective.
A born poet, only wanting perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more
delicate spiritual self-possession to have added another name to the
illustrious band of English singers, he has been driven by the
impetuosity of his sympathies to attack the scientific side of social
questions in an imaginative and highly emotional manner.'
Had Carlyle confined himself to description of social, industrial, and
political diseases, he would have had an unsullied reputation in the
sphere of spiritual dynamics, but flaws immediately appeared when he
endeavoured to prescribe remedies. Many of his remedies were too vague
to be of use; where they were specific, they were so Quixotic as to be
useless. His proposals for dealing with labour and pauperism never
imposed on any sensible man on this side of cloud-land.
CHAPTER IX
CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE
It is the misfortune of the critic, the historian, and the sociologist
to be superseded. In the march of events the specialist is fated to be
left behind. The influence of the inspirationalist is ever-enduring. As
the present writer has elsewhere said:--Carlyle has been called a
prophet. The word in these days has only a vague meaning. Probably
Carlyle earned the name in consequence of the oracular and denunciatory
elements in his later writings. Then, again, the word prophet has come
to be associated with the thought of a foreteller of future events. A
prophet in the true sense of the word is not one who foretells the
future, but one who revives and keeps alive in the minds of his
contemporaries a vivid sense of the great elemental facts of life. Why
is it that the Bible attracts to its pages men of all kinds of
temperament and all degrees of culture? Because in it, especially in the
Psalms, Job, and the writings of Isaiah and his brother prophets,
serious people are brought face to face with the great mysteries, God,
Nature, Man, Death, etc.--mysteries, however, which only rush in upon
the soul of man in full force on special occasions, in hours of lonely
meditation, or by the side of an open grave. In the hurly-burly of life
the sense of what Carlyle calls the Immensities, Eternities, and
Silences, become so weak that even good men have sorrowfully to admit
that they live lives of practical materialism. As Arnold puts it:
"Each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-choked souls to fill,
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will."
The mission of the Hebrew prophet was by passionate utterance to keep
alive in the minds of his countrymen a deep, abiding sense of life's
mystery, sacredness, and solemnity. What Isaiah did for his day, Carlyle
did for the moderns. In the whole range of modern literature, it is
impossible to match Carlyle's magnificent passages in _Sartor Resartus_,
in which, under a biographical guise, he deals with the great primal
emotions, wonder, awe, admiration, love, which form the warp and woof of
human life.
Nothing can be finer than the following rebuke to those mechanical
scientists who imagine that Nature can be measured by tape-lines, and
duly labelled in museums:--
'System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature
remains of quite _infinite_ depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all
Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and
measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, on this our little
fraction of a Planet, is partially known to us; but who knows what
deeper courses these depend on; what infinitely larger Cycle (of causes)
our little Epicycle revolves on? To the Minnow every cranny and pebble,
and quality and accident, of its little native Creek may have become
familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic
Currents, the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon's eclipses; by all
which the condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time
(_un_miraculously enough), be quite overset and reversed? Such a minnow
is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable All; his
Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence
through Æons of Æons. We speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a
Volume it is,--whose Author and Writer is God.'
Agree or disagree with Carlyle's views of the Ultimate Reality as we
may, there can be nothing but harmony with the spirit which breathes in
the following:--
'Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou the "Living
Garment of God"? O Heavens, is it in very deed, He, then, that ever
speaks through thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves
in me?
'Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of that Truth, and
Beginning of Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter than
Dayspring to the Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; ah! like the mother's voice
to her little child that strays bewildered, weeping in unknown tumults;
like soft streamings of celestial music to my too-exasperated heart,
came that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a
charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, and my Father's!'
The mystery and fleetingness of life with its awful counterpart death,
are the commonplaces of every hour, but who but Carlyle has rendered
them with such inspirational power?
'Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a Body; and
forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What
Force and Fire 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 to 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 Inane; haste stormfully
across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's
mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage; can the
Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality
and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped
in; the last Rear of the host will 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.
'We _are such stuff_
As Dreams are made of, and our little Life
Is rounded with a sleep?'
A fervid perception of the evanescence and sorrows of life is the root
of Carlyle's pathos, which is unsurpassed in literature. It leads him to
some beautiful contrasts between childhood and manhood, positively
idyllic in their charm.
'Happy season of Childhood!' exclaims Teufelsdröckh: 'Kind Nature, that
art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut with
auroral radiance; and for thy Nurseling hast provided a soft swathing of
Love and infinite Hope, wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced-round
(_umgäukelt_) by sweetest Dreams! If the paternal Cottage still shuts us
in, its roof still screens us; with a Father we have as yet a prophet,
priest and king, and an Obedience that makes us Free. The young spirit
has awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time; as yet
Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful sunlit ocean; years to
the child are as ages; ah! the secret of Vicissitude, of that slower or
quicker decay and ceaseless down-rushing of the universal World-fabric,
from the granite mountain to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in
a motionless Universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling
Universe is forever denied us, the balm of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair
Child, for thy long rough journey is at hand! A little while, and thou
too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles;
thou too, with old Arnauld, must say in stern patience: "Rest? Rest?
Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?" Celestial Nepenthe! though a
Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds thee
not; and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the
eyelids, on the heart of every mother's child. For, as yet, sleep and
waking are one: the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around, and
everywhere is dewy fragrance, and the budding of Hope; which budding, if
in youth, too frostnipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no
fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rinded stone fruit, of which the fewest can
find the kernel.'
Carlyle's pathos touches its most sombre mood when he is dwelling upon
the common incidents of daily life as painted on the background of
Eternity. In his '_Cromwell_,' he breaks forth in a beautiful meditation
while dealing with a commonplace reference in one of the letters of
Cromwell:--'Mrs St John came down to breakfast every morning in that
summer visit of the year 1638, and Sir William said grave grace, and
they spake polite devout things to one another, and they are vanished,
they and their things and speeches,--all silent like the echoes of the
old nightingales that sang that season, like the blossoms of the old
roses. O Death! O Time!'
Severe comment has been made upon Carlyle's attitude towards science.
There was this excuse for his contemptuous attitude--science in its
early days fell into the hands of Dryasdusts. So absorbed were these men
in analysing Nature, that they missed the sense of mystery and beauty
which is the essence of all poetry and all religion. In the hands of the
Dryasdusts, Nature was converted into a museum in which everything was
duly labelled. During the mania for analysis, it was forgotten that
there is a great difference between the description and the explanation
of phenomena. In _Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle rescues science from the grip
of the pedant and restores it to the poet. 'Wonder, is the basis of
Worship; the reign of wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man; only
at certain stages (as the present), it is, for some short season, a
reign _in partibus infidelium_.' That progress of Science, which is to
destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration,
finds small favour with Teufelsdröckh, much as he otherwise venerates
these two latter processes.
'Shall your Science,' exclaims he, 'proceed in the small chink-lighted,
or even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; and man's mind
become an Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere
Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, and Treatises of what you
call Political Economy, are the Meal? And what is that Science, which
the scientific head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the Doctor's
in the Arabian Tale) set in a basin to keep it alive, could prosecute
without shadow of a heart,--but one other of the mechanical and menial
handicrafts, for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it) is too
noble an organ? I mean that Thought without Reverence is barren, perhaps
poisonous; at best, dies like Cookery with the day that called it forth;
does not live, like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading
harvests, bringing food and plenteous increase to all Time.'
* * * * *
'The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and
worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried
the whole _Mécanique Céleste_ and _Hegel's Philosophy_, and the epitome
of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single
head,--is but a pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let
those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful.'
In the sphere of ethics, Carlyle's influence has been inspirational in
the highest sense. To a generation which had to choose between the
ethics of a conventional theology and the ethics of a cold, prosaic
utilitarianism, Carlyle's treatment of the whole subject of duty came as
a revelation. If in the sphere of social relationships he did not
contribute to the settlement of the theoretic side of complex problems,
he did what was equally important--he roused earnest minds to a sense of
the urgency and magnitude of the problem, awakened the feeling of
individual responsibility, and quickened the sense of social duty which
had grown weak during the reign of _laissez faire_. If Carlyle had no
final message for mankind, if he brought no gospel of glad tidings, he
nevertheless did a work which was as important as it was pressing. In
the form of a modern John the Baptist, the Chelsea Prophet with not a
little of the wilderness atmosphere about him, preached in grimly
defiant mood to a pleasure-loving generation the great doctrines which
lie at the root of all religions--the doctrines of Repentance,
Righteousness, and Retribution.
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