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THOMAS CARLYLE

BY

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


1904



PREFATORY NOTE

The following record of the leading events of Carlyle's life and attempt
to estimate his genius rely on frequently renewed study of his work, on
slight personal impressions--"vidi tantum"--and on information supplied
by previous narrators. Of these the great author's chosen literary
legatee is the most eminent and, in the main, the most reliable. Every
critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligations to Mr. Froude as
every critic of Byron to Moore or of Scott to Lockhart. The works of
these masters in biography remain the ample storehouses from which every
student will continue to draw. Each has, in a sense, made his subject his
own, and each has been similarly arraigned.

I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the
persistent, often virulent, attacks directed against a loyal friend,
betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith and the defective reticence that
often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr.
Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on _Sir Walter Scott_
requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with
explicit authority; that the restrictions under which he was at first
entrusted with the MSS. of the _Reminiscences_ and the _Letters and
Memorials_ (annotated by Carlyle himself, as if for publication) were
withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a
practical injunction to communicate the whole. The worst that can be said
is that, in the last years of Carlyle's career, his own judgment as to
what should be made public of the details of his domestic life may have
been somewhat obscured; but, if so, it was a weakness easily hidden from
a devotee.

My acknowledgments are due to several of the Press comments which
appeared shortly after Carlyle's death, more especially that of the _St.
James's Gazette_, giving the most philosophical brief summary of his
religious views which I have seen; and to the kindness of Dr. Eugene
Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in supplying me with valuable
hints on matters relating to German History and Literature. I have also
to thank the Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_ for permitting me to
reproduce the substance of my article in its columns of February 1881.
That article was largely based on a contribution on the same subject, in
1859, to Mackenzie's _Imperial Dictionary of Biography_.

I may add that in the distribution of material over the comparatively
short space at my command, I have endeavoured to give prominence to facts
less generally known, and passed over slightly the details of events
previously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs. Carlyle and the
incidents of her death. To her inner history I have only referred in so
far as it had a direct bearing on her husband's life. As regards the
itinerary of Carlyle's foreign journeys, it has seemed to me that it
might be of interest to those travelling in Germany to have a short
record of the places where the author sought his "studies" for his
greatest work.



CONTENTS

CHAPTER I     INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY

CHAPTER II    1795-1826 ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH

CHAPTER III   1826-1834 CRAIGENPUTTOCK (from Marriage to London)

CHAPTER IV    1834-1842 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Mrs. Welsh)

CHAPTER V     1842-1853 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Carlyle's Mother)

CHAPTER VI    1853-1866 THE MINOTAUR--(To death of Mrs. Carlyle)

CHAPTER VII   1866-1881 DECADENCE

CHAPTER VIII  CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN

CHAPTER IX    CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER X     ETHICS--PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE

APPENDIX      ON CARLYLE'S RELIGION

INDEX




THOMAS CARLYLE




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY

Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all
in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the
spirit of four successive generations. They are leading links in an
intellectual chain.

DAVID HUME (1711-1776) remains the most salient type in our island of the
scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary,
which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some
points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid
temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking
Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau.

ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796), last of great lyrists inspired by a local
genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people,
spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge
between two eras. Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was
also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the
century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master
musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good
and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or
paralysing caution.

WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), broadest and most generous, if not loftiest of
the group--"no sounder piece of British manhood," says Carlyle himself
in his inadequate review, "was put together in that century"--the great
revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with a magic
glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was also, like Burns, the
humorist of contemporary life. Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the
manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours,
the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von
Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from
the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening
to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams,
some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill
twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The
reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are
everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to
extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his
thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range.

Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain
atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant
image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the
relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite
his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle
was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of
the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with
the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could
never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent,
dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer.
He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals,
self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost
mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one
exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with
reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself,
violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation to the great poet,
in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent
inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord
Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other
was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than
Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely
different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge
Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the
other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society.
Both had hot hearts, big brains, and an exhaustless store of winged
and fiery words; both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made
constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of Optimism;
Carlylism is the prose rather than "the male of Byronism." The contrasts
are no less obvious: the author of _Sartor Resartus_, however vaguely,
defended the System of the Universe; the author of _Cain_, with an
audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it.
In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there
is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere,"
in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous
incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering
belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the
citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient
name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and,
only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained it. His
career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth,
from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown.
Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence": at his death, in a
sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deafening was the
Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every original thinker is
accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells as it runs till it ends
in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from
America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching came home to
their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland, where, for good or ill,
passions are in extremes, he was long howled down, lampooned, preached
at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a
sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion; and was, often
by the very men who had tried and condemned him for blasphemy, as
senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the
builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the
pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists
whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism.
In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate
successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers
of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass
by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder
and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village
churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets
his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so honoured.

Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events he celebrates in
his earliest History. In its opening pages, we are made to listen to the
feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace,"
where Louis XV. and the _ancien régime_ lay dying; later to the ticking
of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the
steeples that roused the singers of the _Marseillaise_ to march from
"their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last
bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian
characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a commander."
Already, over little more than the space of the author's life--for he was
a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the death of Burns,
Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four, Byron's by seven
years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse of the
"cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea. Two
whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms.
"Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old policies,
governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been
sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig,
Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was
seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory
and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires,
two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions,
revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During his life our sway in
the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Italian
without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Continent, while another
across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes
alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated
and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of the world's most
restless, if not its wisest, age. In the internal affairs of the leading
nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a
pantomime. The Art and Literature of those eighty-six years--stirred to
new thought and form at their commencement by the so-called Romantic
movement, more recently influenced by the Classic reaction, the
Pre-Raphaelite protest, the Aesthetic _mode,_--followed various, even
contradictory, standards. But, in one line of progress, there was no
shadow of turning. Over the road which Bacon laid roughly down and
Newton made safe for transit, Physical Science, during the whole period,
advanced without let and beyond the cavil of ignorance. If the dreams
of the _New Atlantis_ have not even in our days been wholly realised,
Science has been brought from heaven to earth, and the elements made
ministers of Prospero's wand. This apparent, and partially real, conquest
of matter has doubtless done much to "relieve our estate," to make life
in some directions run more smoothly, and to multiply resources to meet
the demands of rapidly-increasing multitudes: but it is in danger of
becoming a conquest of matter over us; for the agencies we have called
into almost fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's miscreated
goblin, to beat us down to the same level. Sanguine spirits who

  throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring,
  With, at every mile run taster, O the wondrous, wondrous age,

are apt to forget that the electric light can do nothing to dispel the
darkness of the mind; that there are strict limits to the power of
prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a
great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable,
accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He
swallows formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes
analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him
by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed
to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by
syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of
Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will--essential Calvinist
or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist,
practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is
consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of
the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was
among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the
link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an
expert in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously subserves
physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a
physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms
of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or
rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with
unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in
his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern
Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously
of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit
the battle-fields of Friedrich II.--

Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admiring....
The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still
infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged flight through
immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of bright? You unfortunate,
you grin as an ape would at such a question: you do not know that unless
you can reach thither in some effectual most veritable sense, you are
lost, doomed to Hela's death-realm and the abyss where mere brutes are
buried. I do not want cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I want what
Novalis calls "God, Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift railways and
sacrifices to Hudson help me towards that?

The ECONOMIC AND MECHANICAL SPIRIT of the age, faith in mere steel or
stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The others were INSINCERITY in
Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY
without Sense. In our time these two last powers have made such strides
as to threaten the Reign of Law. The Democrat without a ruler, who
protests that one man is by nature as good as another, according to
Carlyle is "shooting Niagara." In deference to the mandate of the
philanthropist the last shred of brutality, with much of decision,
has vanished from our code. Sentiment is in office and Mercy not only
tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When Sir Samuel Romilly began his
beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was at school, talkers of treason were
liable to be disembowelled before execution; now the crime of treason is
practically erased, and the free use of dynamite brings so-called reforms
"within the range of practical politics." Individualism was still a mark
of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi"
survived in Mirabeau's "never name to me that _bête_ of a word
'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador,
"I will break your empire like this vase"; in Nelson turning his blind
eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres
Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found
perhaps its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck.

This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided
sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men
who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to
the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not
inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute
to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents
may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the
_Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :--

"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous
fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated,
formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful
and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy
of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen
Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress,
there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero
that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that
produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble
the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a
fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built _Sartor Resartus_ and the
Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the
earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern
thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally
accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are
denied the faculty of producing nations."

_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary
of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied
assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that
Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted
Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism
extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three
volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of
revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an
assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly,
every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and
one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr.
Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful
and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results,
but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius, who has thrown Hoods of light on
the inter-relations of the organic world. But there are whole troops
of serfs, "addicti jururo in verba magistri," who, accepting, without
attempt or capacity to verify the conclusions of the master mind, think
to solve all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word
"Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's
divining rod, and you answer "Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart
and sick in head, I were referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to
Grimm's Law or to the Magnetic Belt.

Let us grant that Cæsar was evolved from the currents in the air about
the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and
Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William
I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame
from the altar of the mediæval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to
masterdom in German woods, or later--not to heap up figures whose
memories still possess the world--that Columbus was a Genoan breeze,
Bacon a _réchauffé_ of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch
dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or Corsican
Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at all events,
were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied and
dominated.

So much, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistence that great men
are creators as well as creatures of their age. Doubtless, as we advance
in history, direct personal influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In
an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education,
when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised
to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest
civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead
the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be
accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a
mere "matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence of the
matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain
that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become
civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more,"
preludes, though over a long interval, the cynic comment of the second
"Locksley Hall" on the "increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier
date "Luria" had protested against the arrogance of mere majorities.

  A people is but the attempt of many
  To rise to the completer life of one;
  And those who live as models to the mass
  Are singly of more value than they all.

Carlyle set these notes to Tennyson and to Browning in his
_Hero-Worship_--a creed, though in thought, and more in action, older
than Buddha or than Achilles, which he first launched as a dogma on our
times, clenching it with the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau
and Napoleon, mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of
Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made remains marked on the minds of
the men of light who _lead_, and cannot be wholly effaced by the clamour
of the men of words who _orate_. If he leans unduly to the exaltation
of personal power, Carlyle is on the side of those whose defeat can be
beneficent only if it be slow. Further to account for his attitude,
we must refer to his life and to its surroundings, _i.e._ to the
circumstances amid which he was "evolved."




CHAPTER II

ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH

[1795-1826]

In the introduction to one of his essays, Carlyle has warned us against
giving too much weight to genealogy: but all his biographies, from the
sketch of the Riquetti kindred to his full-length _Friedrich_, prefaced
by two volumes of ancestry, recognise, if they do not overrate, inherited
influences; and similarly his fragments of autobiography abound in
suggestive reference. His family portraits are to be accepted with the
deductions due to the family fever that was the earliest form of his
hero-worship. Carlyle, says the _Athenaeum_ critic before quoted, divides
contemporary mankind into the fools and the wise: the wise are the
Carlyles, the Welshes, the Aitkens, and Edward Irving; the fools all the
rest of unfortunate mortals: a Fuseli stroke of the critic rivalling any
of the author criticised; yet the comment has a grain of truth.

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

The Carlyles are said to have come, from the English town somewhat
differently spelt, to Annandale, with David II.; and, according to a
legend which the great author did not disdain to accept, among them was a
certain Lord of Torthorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The
churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the graves of the
family, all with coats of arms--two griffins with adders' stings. More
definitely we find Thomas, the author's grandfather, settled in that
dullest of county villages as a carpenter. In 1745 he saw the rebel
Highlanders on their southward march: he was notable for his study of
_Anson's Voyages_ and of the _Arabian Nights_: "a fiery man, his stroke
as ready as his word; of the toughness and springiness of steel; an
honest but not an industrious man;" subsequently tenant of a small farm,
in which capacity he does not seem to have managed his affairs with
much effect; the family were subjected to severe privations, the mother
having, on occasion, to heat the meal into cakes by straw taken from the
sacks on which the children slept. In such an atmosphere there grew and
throve the five sons known as the five fighting masons--"a curious
sample of folks," said an old apprentice of one of them, "pithy, bitter
speaking bodies, and awfu' fighters." The second of the group, James,
born 1757, married--first, a full cousin, Janet Carlyle (the sole issue
of which marriage was John, who lived at Cockermouth); second, Margaret
Aitken, by whom he had four sons--THOMAS, 1795-1881; Alexander,
1797-1876; John (Dr. Carlyle, translator of Dante), 1801-1879; and James,
1805-1890; also five daughters, one of whom, Jane, became the wife of her
cousin James Aitken of Dumfries, and the mother of Mary, the niece who
tended her famous uncle so faithfully during the last years of his life.
Nowhere is Carlyle's loyalty to his race shown in a fairer light than in
the first of the papers published under the name of _Reminiscences_.
It differs from the others in being of an early date and free from all
offence. From this pathetic sketch, written when on a visit to London in
1832 he had sudden news of his father's death, we may, even in our brief
space, extract a few passages which throw light on the characters, _i.e._
the points of contact and contrast of the writer and his theme:--

In several respects I consider my father as one of the most interesting
men I have known, ... of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of
any it has been my lot to converse with. None of you will ever forget
that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul,
full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all
manner of potent words.... Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to
render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Emphatic I have
heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: his words
were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that
he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet in description, and
for the sake chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man of rigid, even
scrupulous veracity.... He was never visited with doubt. The old Theorem
of the Universe was sufficient for him ... he stood a true man, while
his son stands here on the verge of the new.... A virtue he had which
I should learn to imitate: he never spoke of what was disagreeable and
past. His was a healthy mind. He had the most open contempt for all
"clatter."... He was irascible, choleric, and we all dreaded his wrath,
but passion never mastered him.... Man's face he did not fear: God he
always feared. His reverence was, I think, considerably mixed with
fear--rather awe, as of unutterable depths of silence through which
flickered a trembling hope.... Let me learn of him. Let me write my books
as he built his houses, and walk as blamelessly through this shadow
world.... Though genuine and coherent, living and life-giving, he was
nevertheless but half developed. We had all to complain that we durst not
freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in: he had not the free
means to unbosom himself.... It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear
repelled us from him. To me it was especially so. Till late years I was
ever more or less awed and chilled by him.

James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. The failings of
both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. They were at one in their
integrity, independence, fighting force at stress, and their command of
winged words; but the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a
broader spirit; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he was a
better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a grimmer Calvinist.
"Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, "is doing very well, and has given us no
more paraphrases." He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged, under
the narrowing influences of the Covenanting land; but he remained stable
and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built with his own hands. James
Carlyle hammered on at Ecclefechan, making in his best year £100, till,
after the first decade of the century, the family migrated to Mainhill,
a bleak farm two miles from Lockerbie, where he so throve by work and
thrift that he left on his death in 1832 about £1000. Strong, rough, and
eminently _straight,_ intolerant of contradiction and ready with words
like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the
Brontës on the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle of
Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological theory as strict as
her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her
favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her
heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a
fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late
in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they
talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she
was to the last proud of the genius which grew in large measure under the
unfailing sunshine of her anxious love.

Book II. of _Sartor_ is an acknowledged fragment of autobiography, mainly
a record of the author's inner life, but with numerous references to
his environment. There is not much to identify the foster parents of
Teufelsdröckh, and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the
place of ancestry: Entepfuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, where the ducks
are paddling in the ditch that has to pass muster for a stream, to-day as
a century gone: the severe frugality which (as in the case of Wordsworth
and Carlyle himself) survived the need for it, is clearly recalled; also
the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, "In an orderly house,
where the litter of children's sports is hateful, your training is rather
to bear than to do. I was forbid much, wishes in any measure bold I had
to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of obedience inflexibly held me
down. It was not a joyful life, yet ... a wholesome one." The following
oft-quoted passage is characteristic of his early love of nature and the
humorous touches by which he was wont to relieve his fits of sentiment:--

On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread crumb boiled
in milk) and eat it out of doors. On the coping of the wall, which I
could reach by climbing, my porringer was placed: there many a sunset
have I, looking at the distant mountains, consumed, not without relish,
my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of world's
expectation as day died, were still a Hebrew speech for me: nevertheless
I was looking at the fair illumined letters, and had an eye for the
gilding.

In all that relates to the writer's own education, the Dichtung of
_Sartor_ and the Wahrheit of the _Reminiscences_ are in accord. By
Carlyle's own account, an "insignificant portion" of it "depended on
schools." Like Burns, he was for some years trained in his own parish,
where home influences counted for more than the teaching of not very
competent masters. He soon read eagerly and variously. At the age of
seven he was, by an Inspector of the old order, reported to be "complete
in English." In his tenth year (1805) he was sent to the Grammar School
of Annan, the "Hinterschlag Gymnasium," where his "evil days" began.
Every oversensitive child finds the life of a public school one long
misery. Ordinary boys--those of the Scotch borderland being of the most
savage type--are more brutal than ordinary men; they hate singularity as
the world at first hates originality, and have none of the restraints
which the later semi-civilisation of life imposes. "They obey the impulse
of rude Nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any stricken hart, the
duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all
hands the strong tyrannise over the weak." Young Carlyle was mocked for
his moody ways, laughed at for his love of solitude, and called "Tom the
Tearful" because of his habit of crying. To add much to his discomfort,
he had made a rash promise to his pious mother, who seems, in contrast to
her husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles--a promise
to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well
broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he
refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew
Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty
called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by
appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge
of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began
to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright
prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend.
On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University,
despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, "Educate a
boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." "Thou hast not
done so," said old James in after years, "God be thanked for it;" and the
son pays due tribute to the tolerant patience and substantial generosity
of the father: "With a noble faith he launched me forth into a world
which he himself had never been permitted to visit." Carlyle walked
through Moffat all the way to Edinburgh with a senior student, Tom Smail
(who owes to this fact the preservation of his name), with eyes open
to every shade on the moors, as is attested in two passages of the
_Reminiscences_. The boys, as is the fashion still, clubbed together in
cheap lodgings, and Carlyle attended the curriculum from 1809 to 1814.
Comparatively little is known of his college life, which seems to
have been for the majority of Scotch students much as it is now, a
compulsorily frugal life, with too little variety, relaxation, or society
outside Class rooms; and, within them, a constant tug at Science, mental
or physical, at the gateway to dissecting souls or bodies. We infer, from
hints in later conversations and memorials, that Carlyle lived much with
his own fancies, and owed little to any system. He is clearly thinking
of his own youth in his account of Dr. Francia: "Josè must have been a
loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn reflection, probably
to crying humours, with fits of vehement ill nature--subject to the
terriblest fits of hypochondria." His explosion in _Sartor,_ "It is my
painful duty to say that out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of
all hitherto discovered Universities," is the first of a long series of
libels on things and persons he did not like. The Scotch capital was
still a literary centre of some original brilliancy, in the light of
the circle of Scott, which followed that of Burns, in the early fame of
Cockburn and of Clerk (Lord Eldin), of the _Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh
Reviews,_ and of the elder Alison. The Chairs of the University were
conspicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of ability required
from Professors, some of them--conspicuously Brown (the more original if
less "sound" successor of Dugald Stewart), Playfair, and Leslie--rising
to a higher rank. But great Educational Institutions must adapt
themselves to the training of average minds by requirements and
restrictions against which genius always rebels. Biography more than
History repeats itself, and the murmurs of Carlyle are, like those
of Milton, Gibbon, Locke, and Wordsworth, the protests or growls of
irrepressible individuality kicking against the pricks. He was never in
any sense a classic; read Greek with difficulty--Aeschylus and Sophocles
mainly in translations--and while appreciating Tacitus disparaged Horace.
For Scotch Metaphysics, or any logical system, he never cared, and in his
days there was written over the Academic entrances "No Mysticism." He
distinguished himself in Mathematics, and soon found, by his own vaunt,
the _Principia_ of Newton prostrate at his feet: he was a favourite pupil
of Leslie, who escaped the frequent penalty of befriending him, but he
took no prizes: the noise in the class room hindered his answers, and he
said later to Mr. Froude that thoughts only came to him properly when
alone.

[Footnote: He went so far as to say in 1847 that "the man who had mastered
the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he
had done before."]

The social leader of a select set of young men in his own rank, by choice
and necessity _integer vitae_, he divided his time between the seclusion
of study and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was perhaps
the most prolific writer of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed his course
without taking a degree, did some tutorial work, and, in the same year,
accepted the post of Mathematical Usher at Annan as successor to Irving,
who had been translated to Haddington. Still in formal pursuit of the
ministry, though beginning to fight shy of its fences, he went up twice a
year to deliver addresses at the Divinity Hall, one of which, "on the uses
of affliction," was afterwards by himself condemned as flowery; another
was a Latin thesis on the theme, "num detur religio naturalis." The
posthumous publication of some of his writings, e.g. of the fragment of
the novel _Wotton Reinfred_, reconciles us to the loss of those which have
not been recovered.

In the vacations, spent at Mainhill, he began to study German, and
corresponded with his College friends. Many of Carlyle's early letters,
reproduced in the volumes edited by Mr. Charles E. Norton, are written in
that which, according to Voltaire, is the only unpermissible style, "the
tiresome"; and the thought, far from being precocious, is distinctly
commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell on the fall of Napoleon;
or the following to his parents: "There are few things in this world more
valuable than knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it"; or
to James Johnstone the trite quotation, "Truly pale death overturns with
impartial foot the hut of the poor man and the palace of the king."
Several are marred by the egotism which in most Scotch peasants of
aspiring talent takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves
with others; refrains of the ambition against which the writer elsewhere
inveighs as the "kettle tied to the dog's tail." In a note to Thomas
Murray he writes:--

Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known
has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! bestow coronets and crowns and
principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and
noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart unyielding
to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary
fame.

That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is
ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of
Leyden :--

  Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye,
  For that was a day
  When we stood in our array
  Like the lion's might at bay.

"Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell consumes
almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have not, then I
desire you read it (_sic_) and tell me what you think of _him_," etc.
Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the
lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been previously travestied
in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns. "Many of his
opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to refer all the
modifications of national character to the influence of moral causes.
Might it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those which
he denominates moral causes originate from physical circumstances?" The
whole first volume of this somewhat overexpanded collection overflows
with ebullitions of bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of
Byron's early romances seems philanthropy, e.g.--

How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this
world. For what are its inhabitants? Its great men and its little, its
fat ones and its lean ... pitiful automatons, despicable Yahoos, yea,
they are altogether an insufferable thing. "O for a lodge in some vast
wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where the scowl of the
purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of the coxcomb, the bray of the
ninny and the clodpole might never reach me more!"

On the other hand, there are frequent evidences of the imperial
intrepidity, the matchless industry, and the splendid independence of
the writer. In his twenty-first year Carlyle again succeeded his Annan
predecessor (who seems to have given dissatisfaction by some vagaries of
severity) as mathematical teacher in the main school of Kirkcaldy. The
_Reminiscences_ of Irving's generous reception of his protégé present one
of the pleasantest pictures in the records of their friendship. The same
chapter is illustrated by a series of sketches of the scenery of the
east coast rarely rivalled in descriptive literature. It is elsewhere
enlivened, if also defaced, by the earliest examples of the cynical
criticisms of character that make most readers rejoice in having escaped
the author's observation.

During the two years of his residence in Fifeshire, Carlyle encountered
his first romance, in making acquaintance with a well-born young lady,
"by far the brightest and cleverest" of Irving's pupils--Margaret
Gordon--"an acquaintance which might easily have been more" had not
relatives and circumstances intervened. Doubtless Mr. Froude is right in
asserting this lady to have been the original of _Sartor's_ "Blumine";
and in leaving him to marry "Herr Towgood," ultimately governor of Nova
Scotia, she bequeathed, though in antithetical style, advice that attests
her discrimination of character. "Cultivate the milder dispositions of
the heart, subdue the mere extravagant visions of the brain. Genius
will render you great. May virtue render you beloved. Remove the awful
distance between you and other men by kind and gentle manners. Deal
gently with their inferiority, and be convinced that they will respect
you as much and like you more." To this advice, which he never even
tried to take, she adds, happily perhaps for herself, "I give you not my
address, because I dare not promise to see you." In 1818 Carlyle, always
intolerant of work imposed, came to the conclusion that "it were better
to perish than to continue schoolmastering," and left Kirkcaldy, with £90
saved, for Edinburgh, where he lived over three years, taking private
pupils, and trying to enter on his real mission through the gates of
literature--gates constantly barred; for, even in those older days of
laxer competition, obstinate eccentricity unredeemed by any social
advantages led to failure and rebuff. Men with the literary form of
genius highly developed have rarely much endurance of defeat. Carlyle,
even in his best moods, resented real or fancied injuries, and at this
stage of his career complained that he got nothing but vinegar from his
fellows, comparing himself to a worm that trodden on would "turn into a
torpedo." He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, which "gnawed
like a rat" at its life-long tenement, his stomach, and by sleeplessness,
due in part to internal causes, but also to the "Bedlam" noises of men,
machines, and animals, which pestered him in town and country from first
to last. He kept hesitating about his career, tried law, mathematical
teaching, contributions to magazines and dictionaries, everything but
journalism, to which he had a rooted repugnance, and the Church, which he
had definitely abandoned. How far the change in his views may have been
due to his reading of Gibbon, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc., how far to self-
reflection, is uncertain; but he already found himself unable, in any
plain sense, to subscribe to the Westminster Confession or to any
"orthodox" Articles, and equally unable by any philosophical
reconciliation of contraries to write black with white on a ground of
neutral gray.

[Footnote: He refers to Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ as "of all books the
most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind.
His winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing, were
often admirably potent and illustrative to me."]

Mentally and physically adrift he was midway in the valley of the shadow,
which he represents as "The Everlasting No," and beset by "temptations in
the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, "The biographies of men of
letters are the wretchedest chapters in our history, except perhaps the
Newgate Calendar," a remark that recalls the similar cry of Burns, "There
is not among the martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the
poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness
to the absence of a popularity which he yet professes to scorn.--I was
entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles; solitary eating my own heart,
misgivings as to whether there shall be presently anything else to eat,
fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles and miseries ... three
weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free of noise,
... wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual questions unanswered,
etc.

What is this but Byron's cry, "I am not happy," which his afterwards
stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-jack?

Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same dismal mood.
"Mainhill," says his biographer, "was never a less happy home to him than
it was this summer (1819). He could not conceal the condition of his
mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a
matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have
seemed as if possessed."

Returning to Edinburgh in the early winter, he for a time wrote hopefully
about his studies. "The law I find to be a most complicated subject,
yet I like it pretty well. Its great charm in my eyes is that no mean
compliances are requisite for prospering in it." But this strain soon
gave way to a fresh fit of perversity, and we have a record of his
throwing up the cards in one of his most ill-natured notes.

I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and
converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But
it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere
denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as
wages for all that bogpool of disgust.

The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radical rising in
Glasgow against the poverty which was the natural aftermath of the great
war, oppressions, half real, half imaginary, of the military force, and
the yeomanry in particular. Carlyle's contribution to the reminiscences
of the time is doubly interesting because written (in the article on
Irving, 1836) from memory, when he had long ceased to be a Radical. A
few sentences suffice to illustrate this phase or stage of his political
progress:--

A time of great rages and absurd terrors and expectations, a very fierce
Radical and anti-Radical time. Edinburgh, endlessly agitated by it all
around me ... gentry people full of zeal and foolish terror and fury, and
looking _disgustingly busy and important_.... One bleared Sunday morning
I had gone out for my walk. At the Riding-house in Nicolson Street was a
kind of straggly group, with red-coats interspersed. They took their way,
not very dangerous-looking men of war; but there rose from the little
crowd the strangest shout I have heard human throats utter, not very
loud, but it said as plain as words, and with infinitely more emphasis of
sincerity, "May the devil go with you, ye peculiarly contemptible, and
dead to the distresses of your fellow-creatures!" Another morning ... I
met an advocate slightly of my acquaintance hurrying along, musket in
hand, towards the Links, there to be drilled as item of the "gentlemen"
volunteers now afoot. "You should have the like of this," said he,
cheerily patting his musket "Hm, yes; but I haven't yet quite settled on
which side"--which probably he hoped was quiz, though it really expressed
my feeling ... mutiny and revolt being a light matter to the young.

This period is illustrated by numerous letters from Irving, who had
migrated to Glasgow as an assistant to Dr. Chalmers, abounding in sound
counsels to persevere in some profession and make the best of practical
opportunities. Carlyle's answers have in no instance been preserved, but
the sole trace of his having been influenced by his friend's advice is his
contribution (1820-1823) of sixteen articles to the _Edinburgh
Encyclopedia_ under the editorship of Sir David Brewster. The scant
remuneration obtained from these was well timed, but they contain no
original matter, and did nothing for his fame. Meanwhile it appears from
one of Irving's letters that Carlyle's thoughts had been, as later in his
early London life, turning towards emigration. He says, writes his friend,
"I have the ends of my thoughts to bring together ... my views of life to
reform, my health to recover, and then once more I shall venture my bark
on the waters of this wide realm, and if she cannot weather it I shall
steer west and try the waters of another world."

[Footnote: The subjects of these were--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker,
Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire,
Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord Chatham, William Pitt. These articles, on
the whole judiciously omitted from the author's collected works, are
characterised by marks of great industry, commonplace, and general
fairness, with a style singularly formal, like that of the less im
pressive pages of Johnson. The following, among numerous passages, are
curious as illustrating the comparative orthodoxy of the writer's early
judgments: "The brilliant hints which Montesquieu scatters round him with
a liberal hand have excited or assisted the speculations of others in
almost every department of political economy, and he is deservedly
mentioned as a principal founder of that important science." "Mirabeau
confronted him (Necker) like his evil genius; and being totally without
scruple in the employment of any expedient, was but too successful in
overthrowing all reasonable proposals, and conducting the people to that
state of anarchy out of which his own ambition was to be rewarded," etc.
Similarly the verdicts on Pitt, Chatham, Nelson, Park, Lady Montagu, etc.,
are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of conscientious research,
fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as
in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend
itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to
show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be
united with a coarse and ignoble heart."]

The resolves, sometimes the efforts, of celebrated Englishmen,--"nos manet
oceanus,"--as Cromwell, Burns, Coleridge, and Southey (allured, some
critic suggests, by the poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough,
Richard Hengist Horne, and Browning's "Waring," to elude "the fever and
the fret" of an old civilisation, and take refuge in the fancied freedom
of wild lands--when more than dreams--have been failures.

[Footnote: Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his
New York Press and "plant him where the red deer feed, in the green
forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's banished Duke.]

Puritan patriots, it is true, made New England, and the scions of the
Cavaliers Virginia; but no poet or imaginative writer has ever been
successfully transplanted, with the dubious exception of Heinrich Heine.
It is certain that, despite his first warm recognition coming from across
the Atlantic, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ would have found
the "States" more fruitful in food for cursing than either Edinburgh or
London.

The spring of 1820 was marked by a memorable visit to Irving, on
Carlyle's way to spend as was his wont the summer months at home. His
few days in Glasgow are recorded in a graphic sketch of the bald-headed
merchants at the Tontine, and an account of his introduction to Dr.
Chalmers, to whom he refers always with admiration and a respect but
slightly modified. The critic's praise of British contemporaries, other
than relatives, is so rare that the following sentences are worth
transcribing:--

He (Chalmers) was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honesty, and
kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination.... He had a
burst of genuine fun too.... His laugh was ever a hearty, low guffaw,
and his tones in preaching would reach to the piercingly pathetic. No
preacher ever went so into one's heart. He was a man essentially of
little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. Such an intellect,
professing to be educated, and yet ... ignorant in all that lies beyond
the horizon in place or time I have almost nowhere met with--a man
capable of so much soaking indolence, lazy brooding ... as the first
stage of his life well indicated, ... yet capable of impetuous activity
and braying audacity, as his later years showed. I suppose there will
never again be such a preacher in any Christian church. "The truth of
Christianity," he said, "was all written in us already in sympathetic
ink. Bible awakens it, and you can read"--a sympathetic image but of no
great weight as an argument addressed to doubting Thomas. Chalmers, whose
originality lay rather in his quick insight and fire than in his mainly
commonplace thought, had the credit of recognising the religious side of
Carlyle's genius, when to the mass of his countrymen he was a rock of
offence. One of the great preacher's criticisms of the great writer is
notably just: "He is a lover of earnestness more than a lover of truth."

There follows in some of the early pages of the _Reminiscences_ an
account of a long walk with Irving, who had arranged to accompany Carlyle
for the first stage, _i.e._ fifteen miles of the road, of his for the
most part pedestrian march from Glasgow to Ecclefechan, a record among
many of similar excursions over dales and hills, and "by the beached
margent," revived for us in sun and shade by a pen almost as magical as
Turner's brush. We must refer to the pages of Mr. Froude for the
picture of Drumclog moss,--"a good place for Cameronian preaching, and
dangerously difficult for Claverse _(sic)_ and horse soldiery if the
suffering remnant had a few old muskets among them,"--for the graphic
glimpse of Ailsa Craig, and the talk by the dry stone fence, in the
twilight. "It was just here, as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from
me by degrees, in the softest manner, that I did not think as he of the
Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or
should. This, if this was so, he had pre-engaged to take well of me, like
an elder brother, if I would be frank with him. And right loyally he did
so." They parted here: Carlyle trudged on to the then "utterly quiet
little inn" at Muirkirk, left next morning at 4 A.M., and reached
Dumfries, a distance of fifty-four miles, at 8 P.M., "the longest walk I
ever made." He spent the summer at Mainhill, studying modern
languages, "living riotously with Schiller and Goethe." at work on the
_Encyclopedia_ articles, and visiting his friend at Annan, when he was
offered the post of tutor to the son of a Yorkshire farmer, an offer
which Irving urged him to accept, saying, "You live too much in an ideal
world," and wisely adding, "try your hand with the respectable illiterate
men of middle life. You may be taught to forget ... the splendours and
envies ... of men of literature."

This exhortation led to a result recorded with much humour, egotism, and
arrogance in a letter to his intimate friend Dr. John Fergusson, of Kelso
Grammar School, which, despite the mark "private and confidential," was
yet published, several years after the death of the recipient and shortly
after that of the writer, in a gossiping memoir. We are therefore at
liberty to select from the letter the following paragraphs:--

  I delayed sending an answer till I might have it in my power
  to communicate what seemed then likely to produce a
  considerable change in my stile (_sic_) of life, a
  proposal to become a "travelling tutor," as they call it, to
  a young person in the North Riding, for whom that exercise
  was recommended on account of bodily and mental weakness.
  They offered me £150 per annum, and withal invited me to
  come and examine things on the spot before engaging. I went
  accordingly, and happy was it I went; from description I was
  ready to accept the place; from inspection all Earndale
  would not have hired me to accept it. This boy was a dotard,
  a semi-vegetable, the elder brother, head of the family, a
  two-legged animal without feathers, intellect, or virtue,
  and all the connections seemed to have the power of eating
  pudding but no higher power. So I left the barbarous
  people....York is but a heap of bricks. Jonathan Dryasdust
  (see _Ivanhoe_) is justly named. York is the Boetia of
  Britain.... Upon the whole, however, I derived great
  amusement from my journey, ... I conversed with all kinds of
  men, from graziers up to knights of the shire, argued with
  them all, and broke specimens from their souls (if any),
  which I retain within the museum of my cranium. I have no
  prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown
  from another planet on this dark terrestrial ball, an alien,
  a pilgrim ... and life is to me like a pathless, a waste,
  and a howling wilderness. Do not leave your situation if
  you can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a
  fearful thing to be swept in by the roaring surge of life,
  and then to float alone undirected on its restless,
  monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet you may, or if you
  must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the waves without
  a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cock-boats, yet hold
  fast by the Manilla ship, _and do not let go the painter_.

Towards the close of this year Irving, alarmed by his friend's
despondency, sent him a most generous and delicately-worded invitation to
spend some months under his roof; but Carlyle declined, and in a letter
of March 1821 he writes to his brother John: "Edinburgh, with all its
drawbacks, is the only scene for me," on which follows one of his finest
descriptions, that of the view from Arthur Seat.

According to the most probable chronology, for many of Carlyle's dates
are hard to fix, the next important event of his life, his being
introduced, on occasion of a visit to Haddington, to Miss Jane Welsh by
her old tutor, Edward Irving--an event which marks the beginning of a new
era in his career--took place towards the close of May or in the first
week of June. To June is assigned the incident, described in _Sartor_ as
the transition from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea, a sort of
revelation that came upon him as he was in Leith Walk--Rue St. Thomas de
l'Enfer in the Romance--on the way to cool his distempers by a plunge in
the sea. The passage proclaiming this has been everywhere quoted; and it
is only essential to note that it resembled the "illuminations" of St.
Paul and of Constantine merely by its being a sudden spiritual impulse.
It was in no sense a conversion to any belief in person or creed, it was
but the assertion of a strong manhood against an almost suicidal mood
of despair; a condition set forth with superabundant paraphernalia of
eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of Teufelsdröckh had
darkened into disbelief in divine or human justice, freedom, or himself.
If there be a God, He sits on the hills "since the first Sabbath,"
careless of mankind. Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire
and fear"; virtue "some bubble of the blood," absence of vitality
perhaps.

What in these days are terrors of conscience to diseases of the liver?
Not on morality but on cookery let us build our stronghold.... Thus has
the bewildered wanderer to stand, shouting question after question into
the Sibyl cave, and receiving for answer an echo.

From this scepticism, deeper than that of _Queen Mab,_ fiercer than that
of _Candide,_ Carlyle was dramatically rescued by the sense that he was a
servant of God, even when doubting His existence.

  After all the nameless woe that inquiry had wrought me,
  I nevertheless still loved truth, and would hate no jot of my
  allegiance....Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me
  for following her; no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubberland
  were the price of apostacy.

With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough of despond and
asserts himself:

  Denn ich bin ein Mensch gewesen
  Und das heisst ein Kämpfer seyn.

He finds in persistent action, energy, and courage a present strength,
and a lamp of at least such partial victory as he lived to achieve.

  He would not make his judgment blind;
  He faced the spectres of the mind,--

but he never "laid them," or came near the serenity of his master,
Goethe; and his teaching, public and private, remained half a wail. He
threw the gage rather in the attitude of a man turning at bay than that of
one making a leap.

  Death? Well, Death ... let it come then, and I will
  meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream
  of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from
  that time the temper of my misery was changed; not ...
  whining sorrow ... but grim defiance.

Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:--

I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce,
upon myself and all things earthly....The year is closing. This time
eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago....

  Oh! little did my mother think,
  That day she cradled me,
  The lands that I should travel in,
  The death I was to dee.

My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in
a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain.
How have I deserved this? I know not. Then why don't you kill yourself,
sir? Is there not arsenic? Is there not ratsbane of various kinds? And
hemp, and steel? Most true, Sathanas...but it will be time enough to
use them when I have _lost_ the game I am but _losing_, ... and while
my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not
breaking their hearts would still remain....I want health, health,
health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious: my torments are
greater than I am able to bear.

Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is there any excess of
Optimism; but after the Leith Walk inspiration he had resolved on "no
surrender"; and that, henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have
proof in its more regular, if not more rapid progress. His last hack
service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless we add a
translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's Geometry, begun,
according to some reports, in the Kirkcaldy period, finished in 1822,
and published in 1824. For this task, prefixed by an original _Essay on
Proportion_, much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respectable sum
of £50. Two subsequent candidatures for Chairs of Astronomy showed that
Carlyle had not lost his taste for Mathematics; but this work was his
practical farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an
author were those of an interpreter. His complete mastery of German has
been said to have endowed him with "his sword of sharpness and shoes of
swiftness"; it may be added, in some instances also, with the "fog-cap."
But in his earliest substantial volume, the _Life of Schiller_, there is
nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. This work began to
appear in the _London Magazine_ in 1823, was finished in 1824, and in
1825 published in a separate form. Approved during its progress by an
encouraging article in the _Times_, it was, in 1830, translated into
German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced the work by an
important commendatory preface, and so first brought the author's name
conspicuously before a continental public. Carlyle himself, partly
perhaps from the spirit of contradiction, was inclined to speak
slightingly of this high-toned and sympathetic biography: "It is," said
he, "in the wrong vein, laborious, partly affected, meagre, bombastic."
But these are sentences of a morbid time, when, for want of other
victims, he turned and rent himself. _Pari passu_, he was toiling at his
translation of _Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship_. This was published in
Edinburgh in 1824. Heartily commended in _Blackwood_, it was generally
recognised as one of the best English renderings of any foreign author;
and Jeffrey, in his absurd review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks
in high terms of the skill displayed by the translator. The virulent
attack of De Quincey--a writer as unreliable as brilliant--in the _London
Magazine_ does not seem to have carried much weight even then, and has
none now. The _Wanderjahre_, constituting the third volume of the English
edition, first appeared as the last of four on German Romance--a series
of admirably selected and executed translations from Musæus, Fouqué,
Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Goethe, prefaced by short biographical and
critical notices of each--published in Edinburgh in 1827. This date is
also that of the first of the more elaborate and extensive criticisms
which, appearing in the Edinburgh and Foreign reviews, established
Carlyle as the English pioneer of German literature. The result of these
works would have been enough to drive the wolf from the door and to
render their author independent of the oatmeal from home; while another
source of revenue enabled him not only to keep himself, but to settle
his brother Alick in a farm, and to support John through his University
course as a medical student. This and similar services to the family
circle were rendered with gracious disclaimers of obligation. "What any
brethren of our father's house possess, I look on as a common stock from
which all are entitled to draw."

For this good fortune he was again indebted to his friend of friends.
Irving had begun to feel his position at Glasgow unsatisfactory, and
at the close of 1821 he was induced to accept an appointment to the
Caledonian Chapel at Hatton Garden. On migrating to London, to make a
greater, if not a safer, name in the central city, and finally, be lost
in its vortex, he had invited Carlyle to follow him, saying, "Scotland
breeds men, but England rears them." Shortly after, introduced by Mrs.
Strachey, one of his worshipping audience, to her sister Mrs. Buller, he
found the latter in trouble about the education of her sons. Charles, the
elder, was a youth of bright but restive intelligence, and it was desired
to find some transitional training for him on his way from Harrow to
Cambridge. Irving urged his being placed, in the interim, under Carlyle's
charge. The proposal, with an offer of £200 a year, was accepted, and the
brothers were soon duly installed in George Square, while their tutor
remained in Moray Place, Edinburgh. The early stages of this relationship
were eminently satisfactory; Carlyle wrote that the teaching of the
Bullers was a pleasure rather than a task; they seemed to him "quite
another set of boys than I have been used to, and treat me in another
sort of manner than tutors are used. The eldest is one of the cleverest
boys I have ever seen." There was never any jar between the teacher and
the taught. Carlyle speaks with unfailing regard of the favourite pupil,
whose brilliant University and Parliamentary career bore testimony to the
good practical guidance he had received. His premature death at the
entrance on a sphere of wider influence made a serious blank in his old
master's life.

[Footnote: Charles Buller became Carlyle's pupil at the age of fifteen.
He died as Commissioner of the Poor in 1848 (_aet_. forty-two).]

But as regards the relation of the employer and employed, we are wearied
by the constantly recurring record of kindness lavishly bestowed,
ungraciously received, and soon ungratefully forgotten. The elder
Bullers--the mother a former beauty and woman of some brilliancy, the
father a solid and courteous gentleman retired from the Anglo-Indian
service--came to Edinburgh in the spring of the tutorship, and
recognising Carlyle's abilities, welcomed him to the family circle, and
treated him, by his own confession, with a "degree of respect" he "did
not deserve"; adapting their arrangements, as far as possible, to his
hours and habits; consulting his convenience and humouring his whims.
Early in 1823 they went to live together at Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld,
when he continued to write letters to his kin still praising his patrons;
but the first note of discord is soon struck in satirical references to
their aristocratic friends and querulous complaints of the servants.
During the winter, for greater quiet, a room was assigned to him in
another house near Kinnaird; a consideration which met with the award:
"My bower is the most polite of bowers, refusing admittance to no wind
that blows." And about this same time he wrote, growling at his fare: "It
is clear to me that I shall never recover my health under the economy of
Mrs. Buller."

In 1824 the family returned to London, and Carlyle followed in June by
a sailing yacht from Leith. On arrival he sent to Miss Welsh a letter,
sneering at his fellow passengers, but ending with a striking picture of
his first impressions of the capital:--

  We were winding slowly through the forest of masts in the
  Thames up to our station at Tower Wharf. The giant bustle,
  the coal heavers, the bargemen, the black buildings, the ten
  thousand times ten thousand sounds and movements of that
  monstrous harbour formed the grandest object I had ever
  witnessed. One man seems a drop in the ocean; you feel
  annihilated in the immensity of that heart of all the world.

On reaching London he first stayed for two or three weeks under Irving's
roof and was introduced to his friends. Of Mrs. Strachey and her young
cousin Kitty, who seems to have run the risk of admiring him to excess,
he always spoke well: but the Basil Montagues, to whose hospitality and
friendship he was made welcome, he has maligned in such a manner as to
justify the retaliatory pamphlet of the sharp-tongued eldest daughter
of the house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By letter and
"reminiscence" he is equally reckless in invective against almost all the
eminent men of letters with whom he then came in contact, and also,
in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt,
Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in
some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being
addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of
well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain
on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he
writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in
the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature."
And a fortnight later, from Irving's house at Pentonville, he sends to
his mother an account of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him
two alternatives--to go with the family to France or to remain in the
country preparing the eldest boy for Cambridge. He declined both, and
they parted, shaking hands with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a
sentence that recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge,  "that I have done
with them ... I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for £200 a
year."

[Footnote: _Vide_ Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_ (1st ed. 1851), chap. viii.
p. 79.]

There followed eight weeks of residence in or about Birmingham, with a
friend called 'Badams, who undertook to cure dyspepsia by a new method
and failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others,
as the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the toiling
squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from radical democracy to
Platonic autocracy, continued to take a deep interest; on other days
they had pleasant excursions to the green fields and old towers of
Warwickshire. On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De
Quincey's review of _Meister_, and in recounting the event credits
himself with the philosophic thought, "This man is perhaps right on some
points; if so let him be admonitory."

But the description that follows of "the child that has been in hell,"
however just, is less magnanimous. Then came a trip, in company with Mr.
Strachey and Kitty and maid, by Dover and Calais along Sterne's route to
Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis XVIII. was then
lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments are mainly acid remarks on the
Palais Royal, with the refrain, "God bless the narrow seas." But he met
Legendre and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and saw Talma act, and, what
was of more moment, had his first glimpse of the Continent and the city
of one phase of whose history he was to be the most brilliant recorder.
Back in London for the winter, where his time was divided between
Irving's house and his own neighbouring room in Southampton Street,
he was cheered by Goethe's own acknowledgment of the translation of
_Meister_, characteristically and generously cordial.

In March 1825 Carlyle again set his face northward, and travelling by
coach through Birmingham, Manchester, Bolton, and Carlisle, established
himself, in May, at Hoddam Hill; a farm near the Solway, three miles from
Mainhill, which his father had leased for him. His brother Alexander
farmed, while Thomas toiled on at German translations and rode about on
horseback. For a space, one of the few contented periods of his life,
there is a truce to complaining. Here free from the noises which are the
pests of literary life, he was building up his character and forming the
opinions which, with few material changes, he long continued to hold.
Thus he writes from over a distance of forty years :--

  With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam
  Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now
  like a not ignoble russet-coated idyll in my memory; one of
  the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly
  important of my life.... I found that I had conquered all my
  scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with
  the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch,
  and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of
  ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory.... Once
  more, thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and
  still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He,
  in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep road
  before me, the first of the moderns. Bodily health itself
  seemed improving.... Nowhere can I recollect of myself such
  pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact
  and Nature as in these poor Annandale localities. The sound
  of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday mornings from
  Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, was
  strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen
  hundred years.

Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid
storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his
tyrannous love of liberty:--

  It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of
  consciousness--of inward dignity--I have gained since I came
  within the walls of this poor cottage--my own four walls.
  They simply admit that I am _Herr im Hause_, and act on
  this conviction. There is no grumbling about my habitudes
  and whims. If I choose to dine on fire and brimstone, they
  will cook it for me to their best skill, thinking only that
  I am an unintelligible mortal, _fâcheux_ to deal with,
  but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own four walls.

The last words form the refrain of a set of verses, the most
characteristic, as Mr. Froude justly observes, of the writer, the actual
composition of which seems, however, to belong to the next chapter of his
career, beginning--

  Wild through the wind the huntsman calls,
  As fast on willing nag I haste
  Home to my own four walls.

The feeling that inspires them is clenched in the defiance--

  King George has palaces of pride,
  And armed grooms must ward those halls;
  With one stout bolt I safe abide
  Within my own four walls.

  Not all his men may sever this;
  It yields to friends', not monarchs' calls;
  My whinstone house my castle is--
  I have my own four walls.

  When fools or knaves do make a rout,
  With gigmen, dinners, balls, cabals,
  I turn my back and shut them out;
  These are my own four walls.




CHAPTER III

CRAIGENPUTTOCK

[1826-1834]

"Ah, when she was young, she was a fleein', dancin", light-heartit thing,
Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a' at
ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher; and
he cam' aboot her. Then there was Maister ----. Then there was Maister
Carlyle himsel', and _he_ cam' to finish her off like."--HADDINGTON
NURSE.

"My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at a
furlong's distance."--T. CARLYLE, from Craigenputtock, Oct. 1830.

During the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the verge of a crisis
of his career, _i.e._ his making a marriage, for the chequered fortune of
which he was greatly himself to blame.

No biography can ignore the strange conditions of a domestic life,
already made familiar in so many records that they are past evasion.
Various opinions have been held regarding the lady whom he selected to
share his lot. Any adequate estimate of this remarkable woman belongs to
an account of her own career, such as that given by Mrs. Ireland in her
judicious and interesting abridgment of the material amply supplied. Jane
Baillie Welsh (_b.1801, d. 1866_)--descended on the paternal side from
Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of John Knox; on the maternal owning to
an inheritance of gipsy blood--belonged to a family long esteemed
in the borders. Her father, a distinguished Edinburgh student, and
afterwards eminent surgeon at Haddington, noted alike for his humanity
and skill, made a small fortune, and purchased in advance from his father
his inheritance of Craigenputtock, a remnant of the once larger family
estate. He died in 1819, when his daughter was in her eighteenth year. To
her he left the now world-famous farm and the bulk of his property. Jane,
of precocious talents, seems to have been, almost from infancy, the
tyrant of the house at Haddington, where her people took a place of
precedence in the small county town. Her grandfathers, John of
Penfillan and Walter of Templand, also a Welsh, though of another--the
gipsy--stock, vied for her baby favours, while her mother's quick and
shifty tempers seem at that date to have combined in the process of
"spoiling" her. The records of the schooldays of the juvenile Jane all
point to a somewhat masculine strength of character. Through life,
it must be acknowledged, this brilliant creature was essentially "a
mockingbird," and made game of every one till she met her mate. The
little lady was learned, reading Virgil at nine, ambitious enough to
venture a tragedy at fourteen, and cynical; writing to her life-long
friend, Miss Eliza Stodart, of Haddington as a "bottomless pit of
dulness," where "all my little world lay glittering in tinsel at my
feet." She was ruthless to the suitors--as numerous, says Mr. Froude,
"as those of Penelope "--who flocked about the young beauty, wit, and
heiress. Of the discarded rivals there was only one of note--George
Rennie, long afterwards referred to by Carlyle as a "clever, decisive,
very ambitious, but quite unmelodious young fellow whom we knew here (in
Chelsea) as sculptor and M.P." She dismissed him in 1821 for some cause
of displeasure, "due to pride, reserve, and his soured temper about the
world"; but when he came to take leave, she confesses, "I scarcely heard
a word he said, my own heart beat so loud." Years after, in London, she
went by request of his wife to Rennie's death-bed.

Meanwhile she had fallen under the spell of her tutor, Edward Irving,
and, as she, after much _finesse_ and evasion, admitted, came to love him
in earnest. Irving saw her weak points, saying she was apt to turn
her powers to "arts of cruelty which satire and scorn are," and "to
contemplate the inferiority of others rather from the point of view
of ridicule and contempt than of commiseration and relief." Later she
retaliated, "There would have been no 'tongues' had Irving married me."
But he was fettered by a previous engagement, to which, after some
struggle for release, he held, leaving in charge of his pupil, as guide,
philosopher, and friend, his old ally and successor, Thomas Carlyle.
Between this exceptional pair there began in 1821 a relationship of
constant growth in intimacy, marked by frequent visits, conversations,
confidences, and a correspondence, long, full, and varied, starting with
interchange of literary sympathies, and sliding by degrees into the
dangerous friendship called Platonic. At the outset it was plain that
Carlyle was not the St. Preux or Wolmar whose ideas of elegance Jane
Welsh--a hasty student of Rousseau--had set in unhappy contrast to the
honest young swains of Haddington. Uncouth, ungainly in manner and
attire, he first excited her ridicule even more than he attracted her
esteem, and her written descriptions of him recall that of Johnson by
Lord Chesterfield. "He scrapes the fender, ... only his tongue should be
left at liberty, his other members are most fantastically awkward"; but
the poor mocking-bird had met her fate. The correspondence falls under
two sections, the critical and the personal. The critical consists of
remarks, good, bad, and indifferent, on books and their writers. Carlyle
began his siege by talking German to her, now extolling Schiller and
Goethe to the skies, now, with a rare stretch of deference, half
conniving at her sneers. Much also passed between them about English
authors, among them comments on Byron, notably inconsistent. Of him
Carlyle writes (April 15th 1824) as "a pampered lord," who would care
nothing for the £500 a year that would make an honest man happy; but
later, on hearing of the death at Mesolonghi, more in the vein of his
master Goethe, he exclaims:--

  Alas, poor Byron! the news of his death came upon me like
  a mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful
  twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. O
  God! that so many souls of mud and clay should fill up
  their base existence to the utmost bound; and this, the
  noblest spirit in Europe, should sink before half his course
  was run.... Late so full of fire and generous passion and
  proud purposes, and now for ever dumb and cold.... Had he
  been spared to the age of threescore and ten what might he
  not have been! what might he not have been! ... I dreamed of
  seeing him and knowing him; but ... we shall go to him, he
  shall not return to us.

This in answer to her account of the same intelligence: "I was told it
all alone in a room full of people. If they had said the sun or the moon
was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of
a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words 'Byron is
dead.'" Other letters of the same period, from London, are studded or
disfigured by the incisive ill-natured sarcasms above referred to, or
they relate to the work and prospects of the writer. Those that bear
on the progress of his suit mark it as the strangest and, when we look
before and after, one of the saddest courtships in literary history. As
early as 1822 Carlyle entertained the idea of making Jane Welsh his wife;
she had begun to yield to the fascinations of his speech--a fascination
akin to that of Burns--when she wrote, "I will be happier contemplating
my beau-ideal than a real, substantial, eating, drinking, sleeping,
honest husband." In 1823 they were half-declared lovers, but there were
recalcitrant fits on both sides. On occasion of a meeting at Edinburgh
there was a quarrel, followed by a note of repentance, in which she
confessed, "Nothing short of a devil could have tempted me to torment
you and myself as I did on that unblessed day." Somewhat earlier she had
written in answer to his first distinct avowal, "My friend, I love you.
But were you my brother I should love you the same. No. Your friend I
will be ... while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife never,
though you were as rich as Croesus, as honoured and renowned as you yet
shall be." To which Carlyle answered with characteristic pride, "I have
no idea of dying in the Arcadian shepherd's style for the disappointment
of hopes which I never seriously entertained, and had no right to
entertain seriously." There was indeed nothing of Corydon and Phyllis in
this struggle of two strong wills, the weaker giving way to the stronger,
the gradual but inexorable closing of an iron ring. Backed by the natural
repugnance of her mother to the match, Miss Welsh still rebelled, bracing
herself with the reflection, "Men and women may be very charming without
having any genius;" and to his renewed appeal (1825), "It lies with
you whether I shall be a right man or only a hard and bitter Stoic,"
retorting, "I am not in love with you ... my affections are in a state of
perfect tranquillity." But she admitted he was her "only fellowship and
support," and confiding at length the truth about Irving, surrendered in
the words, "Decide, and woe to me if your reason be your judge and not
your love." In this duel of Puck and Theseus, the latter felt he had won
and pressed his advantage, offering to let her free and adding warnings
to the blind, "Without great sacrifices on both sides, the possibility
of our union is an empty dream." At the eleventh hour, when, in her own
words, she was "married past redemption," he wrote, "If you judge fit, I
will take you to my heart this very week. If you judge fit, I will this
very week forswear you for ever;" and replied to her request that her
widowed mother might live under their wedded roof in terms that might
have become Petruchio: "It may be stated in a word. The man should bear
rule in the house, not the woman. This is an eternal axiom, the law of
nature which no mortal departs from unpunished. . . . Will your mother
consent to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to her
daughter's husband!"

  Was ever woman in this humour woo'd,
  Was ever woman in this humour won?

Miss Welsh at length reluctantly agreed to come to start life at
Scotsbrig, where his family had migrated; but Carlyle pushed another
counter: "Your mother must not visit mine: the mere idea of such a visit
argued too plainly that you _knew nothing_ of the family circle in which
for my sake you were willing to take a place." It being agreed that Mrs.
Welsh was to leave Haddington, where the alliance was palpably unpopular,
Carlyle proposed to begin married life in his mother-in-law's vacant
house, saying in effect to his fiancée that as for intrusive visitors he
had "nerve enough" to kick her old friends out of doors. At this point,
however, her complaisance had reached its limit. The bridegroom-elect had
to soothe his sense of partial retreat by a scolding letter. As regards
difficulties of finance he pointed out that he had £200 to start with,
and that a labourer and his wife had been known to live on £14 a year.

On the edge of the great change in her life, Jane Welsh writes, "I am
resolved in spirit, in the face of every horrible fate," and says she has
decided to put off mourning for her father, having found a second father.
Carlyle proposed that after the "dreaded ceremony" he and his bride and
his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach from Dumfries
to Edinburgh. In "the last dying speech and marrying words" she objects
to this arrangement, and after the event (October 17th 1826) they drove
in a post-chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself settled
at Templand, had furnished a house for them. Meanwhile the Carlyle family
migrated to Scotsbrig. There followed eighteen comparatively tranquil
months, an oasis in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in
some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social
gatherings--Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their
brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the
northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster,
John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey,
a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as Irving himself.
Procter had introduced Carlyle to the famous editor, who, as a Scotch
cousin of the Welshes, took from the first a keen interest in the still
struggling author, and opened to him the door of the _Edinburgh Review_.
The appearance, of the article on _Richter_, 1827, and that, in the
course of the same year, on _The State of German Literature,_ marks
the beginning of a long series of splendid historical and critical
essays--closing in 1855 with the _Prinzenraub_--which set Carlyle in the
front of the reviewers of the century. The success in the _Edinburgh_
was an "open sesame;" and the conductors of the _Foreign_ and _Foreign
Quarterly_ Reviews, later, those of _Fraser_ and the _Westminster_, were
ready to receive whatever the new writer might choose to send.

To the _Foreign Review_ he contributed from Comely Bank the _Life and
Writings of Werner_, a paper on _Helena_, the leading episode of the
second part of "Faust," and the first of the two great Essays on
_Goethe_, which fixed his place as the interpreter of Germany to England.
In midsummer 1827 Carlyle received a letter from Goethe cordially
acknowledging the _Life of Schiller_, and enclosing presents of books for
himself and his wife. This, followed by a later inquiry as to the
author of the article on _German Literature_, was the opening of a
correspondence of sage advice on the one side and of lively gratitude
on the other, that lasted till the death of the veteran in 1832. Goethe
assisted, or tried to assist, his admirer by giving him a testimonial in
a candidature for the Chair (vacant by the promotion of Dr. Chalmers) of
Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Jeffrey, a frequent visitor and host
of the Carlyles, still regarded as "a jewel of advocates ... the most
lovable of little men," urged and aided the canvass, but in vain. The
testimonials were too strong to be judicious, and "it was enough that"
the candidate "was described as a man of original and extraordinary gifts
to make college patrons shrink from contact with him." Another failure,
about the same date and with the same backing, was an application for a
Professorship in London University, practically under the patronage of
Brougham; yet another, of a different kind, was Carlyle's attempt
to write a novel, which having been found--better before than after
publication--to be a failure, was for the most part burnt. "He could
not," says Froude, "write a novel any more than he could write poetry. He
had no _invention._"

[Footnote: Carlyle's verses also demonstrate that he had no metrical ear.
The only really good lines he ever wrote, save in translations where the
rhythm was set to him, are those constantly quoted about the dawn of
"another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud Hapsburg," and to
Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of Macaulay's school-boy, "Non di
non homines;" but it took much hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact,
and when persuaded he concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of
cymbals!]

"His genius was for fact; to lay hold on truth, with all his intellect and
all his imagination. He could no more invent than he could lie."

The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are few: a visit from
his mother; a message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter
Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in
Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new
Annual Register, designed to be a literary _résumé_ of the year, make up
the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic
life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox
honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom
saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined together and
read _Don Quixote_ in Spanish. The husband was half forgotten in the
author beginning to prophesy: he wrote alone, walked alone, thought
alone, and for the most part talked alone, _i.e._ in monologue that did
not wait or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, but
there was little companionship. Meanwhile, despite the _Review_ articles,
Carlyle's other works, especially the volumes on German romance, were not
succeeding, and the mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful
whether he could afford to live in Edinburgh; he craved after greater
quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh inheritance, fell
vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His wife yielding, though with a
natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the
Jeffreys kindly assisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of
the Hawks.

Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British
dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy
straths of grass around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid
bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in
front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or
apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. Here Carlyle
allowed his wife to serve him through six years of household drudgery;
an offence for which he was never quite forgiven, and to estimate its
magnitude here seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother,
and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he was as unfit,
and for some of the same reasons, to make "a happy fireside clime" as was
Jonathan Swift; and less even than Byron had he a share of the mutual
forbearance which is essential to the closest of all relations.

"Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked everything and
spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals,
nor himself." With a slight change of phrase the same may be said of
Carlyle's devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain in
his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of literature as
a profession, nor are there wiser words than those in which the veteran
warns the young men, whose questions he answers with touching solicitude,
against its adoption. "It should be," he declares, "the wine not the food
of life, the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread of
action parches up nature and makes strong souls like Byron dangerous,
the weak despicable." But it was nevertheless the profession of his
deliberate choice, and he soon found himself bound to it as Ixion to his
wheel. The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was
great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out
the heart of the mystery, be it of himself, as in _Sartor_; of Germany,
as in his Goethes and Richters; the state of England, as in _Chartism_
and _Past and Present;_ of _Cromwell_ or of _Friedrich,_ he faced all
obstacles and overthrew them. Dauntless and ruthless, he allowed nothing
to divert or to mar his designs, least of all domestic cares or even
duties. "Selfish he was,"--I again quote from his biographer,--"if it
be selfish to be ready to sacrifice every person dependent on him as
completely as he sacrificed himself." What such a man wanted was a
housekeeper and a nurse, not a wife, and when we consider that he had
chosen for the latter companionship a woman almost as ambitious as
himself, whose conversation was only less brilliant than his own, of
delicate health and dainty ways, loyal to death, but, according to Mr.
Froude, in some respects "as hard as flint," with "dangerous sparks of
fire," whose quick temper found vent in sarcasms that blistered and words
like swords, who could declare during the time of the engagement, to
which in spite of warnings manifold she clung, "I will not marry to live
on less than my natural and artificial wants"; who, ridiculing his accent
to his face and before his friends, could write, "apply your talents to
gild over the inequality of our births"; and who found herself obliged
to live sixteen miles from the nearest neighbour, to milk a cow, scour
floors and mend shoes--when we consider all this we are constrained to
admit that the 17th October 1826 was a _dies nefastus,_ nor wonder that
thirty years later Mrs. Carlyle wrote, "I married for ambition, Carlyle
has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him, and I am
miserable,"--and to a young friend, "My dear, whatever you do, never
marry a man of genius."

Carlyle's own references to the life at Craigenputtock are marked by all
his aggravating inconsistency. "How happy we shall be in this Craig o'
Putta," he writes to his wife from Scotsbrig, April 17th 1827; and later
to Goethe:--

  Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of
  Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here
  to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good results.
  But I came here solely with the design to simplify my way of
  life, and to secure the independence through which I could
  be enabled to be true to myself. This bit of earth is our
  own; here we can live, write, and think as best pleases
  ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the
  monarch of literature. From some of our heights I can descry,
  about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola
  and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I
  was born, and there both father and mother still live to
  love me.... The only piece of any importance that I have
  written since I came here is an Essay on Burns.

This Essay,--modified at first, then let alone, by Jeffrey,--appeared in
the _Edinburgh_ in the autumn of 1828. We turn to Carlyle's journal
and find the entry, "Finished a paper on Burns at this Devil's Den,"
elsewhere referred to as a "gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he
confesses, when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I have
really had enough."

  Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Romam.

Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and in the town for
the moor. During the first twenty years of his London life, in what he
called "the Devil's oven," he is constantly clamouring to return to the
den. His wife, more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently
disliked it; little wonder, between sluttish maid-servants and owl-like
solitude: and she expressed her dislike in the pathetic verses, "To a
Swallow Building under our Eaves," sent to Jeffrey in 1832, and ending--

  God speed thee, pretty bird; may thy small nest
  With little ones all in good time be blest;
  I love thee much
  For well thou managest that life of thine,
  While I!  Oh, ask not what I do with mine,
  Would I were such!

  _The Desert._

The monotony of the moorland life was relieved by visits of relations and
others made and repaid, an excursion to Edinburgh, a residence in London,
and the production of work, the best of which has a chance of living with
the language. One of the most interesting of the correspondences of this
period is a series of letters, addressed to an anonymous Edinburgh friend
who seems to have had some idea of abandoning his profession of the Law
for Literature, a course against which Carlyle strenuously protests. From
these letters, which have only appeared in the columns of the _Glasgow
Herald_, we may extract a few sentences:--

  Don't disparage the work that gains your bread. What is all
  work but a drudgery? no labour for the present joyous, but
  grievous. A man who has nothing to admire except himself is
  in the minimum state. The question is, Does a man really
  love Truth, or only the market price of it? Even literary
  men should have something else to do. Katnes was a lawyer,
  Roscoe a merchant, Hans Sachs a cobbler, Burns a gauger,
  etc.

The following singular passage, the style of which suggests an imitation
of Sterne, is the acme of unconscious self-satire:--

  You are infinitely unjust to Blockheads, as they are called.
  Ask yourself seriously within your own heart--what right
  have you to live wisely in God's world, and they not to live
  a little less wisely? Is there a man more to be condoled
  with, nay, I will say to be cherished and tenderly treated,
  than a man that has no brain? My Purse is empty, it can be
  filled again; the Jew Rothschild could fill it; or I can
  even live with it very far from full. But, gracious heavens!
  What is to be done with my _empty Head_?

Three of the visits of this period are memorable. Two from the Jeffreys
(in 1828 and 1830) leave us with the same uncomfortable impression of
kindness ungrudgingly bestowed and grudgingly received. Jeffrey had a
double interest in the household at Craigenputtock--an almost brotherly
regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by the range of a keen
though limited appreciation, in the powers of the husband, to whom he
wrote: "Take care of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so
entirely to you," and with a half truth, "You have no mission upon earth,
whatever you may fancy, half so important as to be innocently happy." And
again: "Bring your blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek
shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the "banner with a
strange device," and was either deaf or indignant. The visits passed,
with satirical references from both host and hostess; for Mrs. Carlyle,
who could herself abundantly scoff and scold, would allow the liberty to
no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary of well-doing. Previous to
his promotion as Lord Advocate and consequent transference to London,
he tried to negotiate for Carlyle's appointment as his successor in the
editorship of the _Review,_ but failed to make him accept the necessary
conditions. The paper entitled _Signs of the Times_ was the last
production that he had to revise for his eccentric friend. Those
following on Taylor's _German Literature_ and the _Characteristics_ were
brought out in 1831 under the auspices of Macvey Napier. The other visit
was from the most illustrious of Carlyle's English-speaking friends,
in many respects a fellow-worker, yet "a spirit of another sort," and
destined, though a transcendental mystic, to be the most practical of his
benefactors. Twenty-four hours of Ralph Waldo Emerson (often referred to
in the course of a long and intimate correspondence) are spoken of by
Mrs. Carlyle as a visit from the clouds, brightening the prevailing gray.
He came to the remote inland home with "the pure intellectual gleam" of
which Hawthorne speaks, and "the quiet night of clear fine talk" remained
one of the memories which led Carlyle afterwards to say, "Perhaps our
happiest days were spent at the Craig." Goethe's letters, especially
that in which he acknowledges a lock of Mrs. Carlyle's hair, "eine
unvergleichliche schwarze Haar locke," were also among the gleams of
1829. The great German died three years later, after receiving the
birthday tribute, in his 82nd year, from English friends; and it is
pleasant to remember that in this instance the disciple was to the end
loyal to his master. To this period belong many other correspondences. "I
am scribble scribbling," he says in a letter of 1832, and mere scribbling
may fill many pages with few headaches; but Carlyle wrestled as he wrote,
and not a page of those marvellous _Miscellanies_ but is red with his
life's blood. Under all his reviewing, he was set on a work whose
fortunes were to be the strangest, whose result was, in some respects,
the widest of his efforts. The plan of _Sartor Resartus_ is far from
original. Swift's _Tale of a Tub_ distinctly anticipates the Clothes
Philosophy; there are besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs,
Jean Paul Richter, and other German authors: but in our days originality
is only possible in the handling; Carlyle has made an imaginary German
professor the mere mouthpiece of his own higher aspirations and those of
the Scotland of his day, and it remains the most popular as surely as
his _Friedrich_ is the greatest of his works. The author was abundantly
conscious of the value of the book, and super-abundantly angry at the
unconsciousness of the literary patrons of the time. In 1831 he resolved
if possible to go up to London to push the prospects of this first-born
male child. The _res angusta_ stood in the way. Jeffrey, after asking his
friend "what situation he could get him that he would detest the least,"
pressed on him "in the coolest, lightest manner the use of his purse."
This Carlyle, to the extent of £50 as a loan (carefully returned), was
induced ultimately to accept. It has been said that "proud men never
wholly forgive those to whom they feel themselves obliged," but their
resenting benefits is the worst feature of their pride. Carlyle made
his second visit to London to seek types for _Sartor_, in vain. Always
preaching reticence with the sound of artillery, he vents in many pages
the rage of his chagrin at the "Arimaspian" publishers, who would not
print his book, and the public which, "dosed with froth," would not
buy it. The following is little softened by the chiaroscuro of
five-and-thirty years:--

  Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and
  August 1830, _Teufelsdröckh_ was ready, and I decided
  to make for London; night before going, how I remember it....
  The beggarly history of poor _Sartor_ among the
  blockheadisms is not worth recording or remembering, least
  of all here! In short, finding that I had got £100 (if
  memory serve) for _Schiller_ six or seven years before,
  and for _Sartor_, at least twice as good, I could not
  only not get £200, but even get no Murray or the like to
  publish it on half profits. Murray, a most stupendous
  object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the evidently
  strong wish to say "Yes" and "No,"--my first signal
  experience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will
  make it "No," then; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for
  some two years from one terrified owl to another; published
  at last experimentally in _Fraser_, and even then
  mostly laughed at, nothing coming of the volume except what
  was sent by Emerson from America.

This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, on Jeffrey's
recommendation, to accept the book; but on finding that Carlyle had
carried the MS. to Longmans and another publisher, in hopes of a better
bargain, and that it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the
matter to his "reader," and the negotiation closed. _Sartor_ struggled
into half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already
contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published
with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a
nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to
justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in
general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense,"
pronounced the _Sun_. "Stop that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of
_Fraser's_ constituents. "When is that stupid series of articles by the
crazy tailor going to end?" cried another. At this time Carlyle used
to say there were only two people who found anything in his book worth
reading--Emerson and a priest in Cork, who said to the editor that he
would take the magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of
_Sartor_. The volume was only published in 1838, by Saunders and Otley,
after the _French Revolution_ had further raised the writer's name, and
then on a guarantee from friends willing to take the risk of loss.
It does not appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some
slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in the
_Reminiscences: "I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends,
from not one of whom did I get the smallest whisper even of receipt--a
thing disappointing more or loss to human nature, and which has silently
and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book to
Edinburgh.... The plebs of literature might be divided in their verdicts
about me; though by count of heads I always suspect the guilty clear had
it; but the conscript fathers declined to vote at all."

[Footnote: _Tempora mutantur_. A few months before Carlyle's death a cheap
edition of _Sartor_ was issued, and 30,000 copies were sold within a few
weeks.]

In America _Sartor_ was pieced together from _Fraser_, published in
a volume introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by Emerson as "A
criticism of the spirit of the age in which we live; exhibiting in the
most just and novel light the present aspect of religion, politics,
literature, and social life." The editors add: "We believe no book has
been published for many years ... which discovers an equal mastery over
all the riches of the language. The author makes ample amends for the
occasional eccentricity of his genius not only by frequent bursts of pure
splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him."

Americans are intolerant of honest criticism on themselves; but they are,
more than any other nation, open to appreciate vigorous expressions
of original views of life and ethics--all that we understand by
philosophy--and equally so to new forms of art. The leading critics of
the New England have often been the first and best testers of the fresh
products of the Old. A land of experiment in all directions, ranging from
Mount Lebanon to Oneida Creek, has been ready to welcome the suggestions,
physical or metaphysical, of startling enterprise. Ideas which filter
slowly through English soil and abide for generations, flash over the
electric atmosphere of the West. Hence Coleridge, Carlyle and Browning
were already accepted as prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen
were still examining their credentials. To this readiness, as of a
photographic plate, to receive, must be added the fact that the message
of _Sartor_ crossed the Atlantic when the hour to receive it had struck.
To its publication has been attributed the origin of a movement that was
almost simultaneously inaugurated by Emerson's _Harvard Discourse_. It
was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in
theory, and precedent in Art that gave birth to the Transcendentalism of
_The Dial_--a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a
place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous,
almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally
obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of
the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory
of his critic--to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable
of slightly erring men--with more than the force of a boomorang. A sheaf
of sharp sayings of the same date owe their sting to their half truth,
_e.g._ to a man who excused himself for profligate journalism on the
old plea, "I must live, sir." "No, sir, you need not live, if your body
cannot be kept together without selling your soul." Similarly he was
abusing the periodicals--"mud," "sand," and "dust magazines"--to which
he had contributed, _inter alia_, the great Essay on _Voltaire_ and the
consummate sketch of _Novalis_; with the second paper on _Richler_ to the
_Foreign Review_, the reviews of _History_ and of _Schiller_ to _Fraser_,
and that on _Goethe's Works_ to the _Foreign Quarterly_. During this
period he was introduced to Molesworth, Austin, and J.S. Mill. On his
summons, October 1st 1832, Mrs. Carlyle came up to Ampton Street, where
he then resided, to see him safe through the rest of his London time.
They lamented over the lapse of Irving, now lost in the delirium of
tongues, and made a league of friendship with Mill, whom he describes as
"a partial disciple of mine," a friendship that stood a hard test, but
was broken when the author of _Liberty_ naturally found it impossible to
remain a disciple of the writer of _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Mill, like
Napier, was at first staggered by the _Characteristics_, though he
afterwards said it was one of Carlyle's greatest works, and was
enthusiastic over the review of Boswell's _Johnson_, published in
_Fraser_ in the course of this year. Meanwhile Margaret, Carlyle's
favourite sister, had died, and his brightest, Jean, "the Craw," had
married her cousin, James Aitken. In memory of the former he wrote as a
master of threnody: to the bridegroom of the latter he addressed a letter
reminding him of the duties of a husband, "to do as he would be done by
to his wife"! In 1832 John, again by Jeffrey's aid, obtained a situation
at £300 a year as travelling physician to Lady Clare, and was enabled,
as he promptly did, to pay back his debts. Alexander seems to have been
still struggling with an imperfectly successful farm. In the same year,
when Carlyle was in London, his father died at Scotsbrig, after a
residence there of six years. His son saw him last in August 1831, when,
referring to his Craigenputtock solitude, he said: "Man, it's surely
a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of
Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak."

The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic services, baking
bread, preserving eggs, and brightening grates till her eyes grew dim; he
to work at his _Diderot_, doing justice to a character more alien to his
own than even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, to
complete the essay; then at _Count Cagliostro_, also for _Fraser_, a link
between his last Craigenputtock and his first London toils. The period
is marked by shoals of letters, a last present from Weimar, a visit to
Edinburgh, and a candidature for a University Chair, which Carlyle
thought Jeffrey could have got for him; but the advocate did not,
probably could not, in this case satisfy his client. In excusing himself
he ventured to lecture the applicant on what he imagined to be the
impracticable temper and perverse eccentricity which had retarded and
might continue to retard his advancement.

[Footnote: The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.]

Carlyle, never tolerant of rebuke however just, was indignant, and though
an open quarrel was avoided by letters, on both sides, of courteous
compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and Jeffrey has a
niche in the _Reminiscences_ as a "little man who meant well but did not
see far or know much." Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the
_Diamond Necklace,_ which is a proem to the _French Revolution,_ but inly
growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any
promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his
own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr übel: all dim, misty, squally,
disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather
than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede.
He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His _Sartor_ is indeed more
contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's
_Confessions,_ or the _Sorrows of Werther,_ or the first two cantos of
_Childe Harold:_ but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay
and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in
the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through
glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At
last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for _me_," and his brave wife
approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his ships and seek his
fortune sink or swim--in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the
initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to
London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in
Chelsea near the Thames.




CHAPTER IV

CHEYNE ROW

[1834-1842]

The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills,
and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds,
as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea,
dotted with brown-sailed ships and holiday boats in place of the
excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle
Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a
stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square." Turning up the row, we find over No.
24, formerly No. 5, the Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house
where the Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men,
lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his headquarters,
but he was a frequent wanderer. About half the time was occupied in trips
almost yearly to Scotland, one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France,
and two to Germany; besides, in the later days, constant visits to
admiring friends, more and more drawn from the higher ranks in English
society, the members of which learnt to appreciate his genius before he
found a hearing among the mass of the people.

The whole period falls readily under four sections, marking as many phases
of the author's outer and inner life, while the same character is
preserved throughout:--

I. 1834-1842--When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the late success of
Carlyle's work relieved him from a long, sometimes severe, struggle with
narrow means. It is the period of the _French Revolution, The Lectures_,
and _Hero-Worship_, and of _Chartism_, the last work with a vestige of
adherence to the Radical creed.

II. 1842-1853--When the death of his mother loosened his ties to the
North. This decade of his literary career is mainly signalised by the
writing and publication of the _Life and Letters of Cromwell_, of
Carlyle's political works, _Past and Present_ and the _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_, and of the _Life of Sterling_, works which mark his now
consummated disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration of
adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed of Christendom."

III. 1853-1866--When the laurels of his triumphant speech as Lord Rector
at Edinburgh were suddenly withered by the death of his wife. This period
is filled with the _History of Friedrick II._, and marked by a yet more
decidedly accentuated trust in autocracy.

IV. 1866-1881.--Fifteen years of the setting of the sun.

The Carlyles, coming to the metropolis in a spirit of rarely realised
audacity on a reserve fund of from £200 to £300 at most, could not
propose to establish themselves in any centre of fashion. In their
circumstances their choice of abode was on the whole a fortunate one.
Chelsea,

  Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
  Beyond it,

was, even in those days of less constant communication, within measurable
distance of the centres of London life: it had then and still preserves a
host of interesting historic and literary traditions. Among the men who in
old times lived or met together in that outlying region of London, we have
memories of Sir Thomas More and of Erasmus, of the Essayists Addison and
Steele, and of Swift. Hard by is the tomb of Bolingbroke and the Square of
Sir Hans Sloane; Smollett lived for a time in Laurence Street; nearer our
own day, Turner resided in Cheyne Walk, later George Eliot, W.B. Scott,
Dante Rossetti, Swinburne for a season, and George Meredith. When Carlyle
came to settle there, Leigh Huntin Upper Cheyne Row, an almost next-door
neighbour, was among the first of a series of visitors; always welcome,
despite his "hugger-mugger" household and his borrowing tendencies, his
"unpractical messages" and "rose-coloured reform processes," as a bright
"singing bird, musical in flowing talk," abounding in often subtle
criticisms and constant good humour. To the Chelsea home, since the Mecca
of many pilgrims, there also flocked other old Ampton Street friends,
drawn thither by genuine regard, Mrs. Carlyle, by the testimony of Miss
Cushman and all competent judges, was a "_raconteur_ unparalleled." To
quote the same authority, "that wonderful woman, able to live in the full
light of Carlyle's genius without being overwhelmed by it," had a peculiar
skill in drawing out the most brilliant conversationalist of the age.
Burns and Wilson were his Scotch predecessors in an art of which the close
of our century--when every fresh thought is treasured to be printed and
paid for--knows little but the shadow. Of Carlyle, as of Johnson, it might
have been said, "There is no use arguing with him, for if his pistol
misses fire he knocks you down with the butt": both men would have
benefited by revolt from their dictation, but the power to contradict
either was overborne by a superior power to assert. Swift's occasional
insolence, in like manner, prevailed by reason of the colossal strength
that made him a Gulliver in Lilliput. Carlyle in earlier, as in later
times, would have been the better of meeting his mate, or of being
overmatched; but there was no Wellington found for this "grand Napoleon of
the realms" of prose. His reverence for men, if not for things, grew
weaker with the strengthening of his sway, a sway due to the fact that men
of extensive learning are rarely men of incisive force, and Carlyle--in
this respect more akin to Johnson than to Swift--had the acquired material
to serve as fuel for the inborn fire. Hence the least satisfactory of his
criticisms are those passed on his peers. Injustices of conversation
should be pardoned to an impulsive nature, even those of correspondence in
the case of a man who had a mania for pouring out his moods to all and
sundry; but where Carlyle has carefully recarved false estimates in cameo,
his memory must abide the consequence. Quite late in life, referring to
the Chelsea days, he says, "The best of those who then flocked about us
was Leigh Hunt," who never seriously said him nay; "and the worst Lamb,"
who was not among the worshippers. No one now doubts that Carlyle's best
adviser and most candid critic might have been John Stuart Mill, for whom
he long felt as much regard as it was possible for him to entertain
towards a proximate equal. The following is characteristic: "He had taken
a great attachment to me (which lasted about ten years and then suddenly
ended, I never knew how), an altogether clear, logical, honest, amicable,
affectionate young man, and respected as such here, though sometimes felt
to be rather colourless, even aqueous, no religion in any form traceable
in him." And similarly of his friend, Mrs. Taylor, "She was a will-o'-the-
wispish iridescence of a creature; meaning nothing bad either"; and again
of Mill himself, "His talk is sawdustish, like ale when there is no wine
to be had." Such criticisms, some ungrateful, others unjust, may be
relieved by reference to the close of two friendships to which (though
even these were clouded by a touch of personal jealousy) he was faithful
in the main; for the references of both husband and wife to Irving's
"delirations" are the tears due to the sufferings of errant minds. Their
last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days was in October 1834, when
he came on horseback to the door of their new home, and left with the
benediction to his lost Jane, "You have made a little Paradise around
you." He died in Glasgow in December of the same year, and his memory is
pathetically embalmed in Carlyle's threnody. The final phases of another
old relationship were in some degree similar. During the first years of
their settlement, Lord Jeffrey frequently called at Cheyne Row, and sent
kind letters to his cousin, received by her husband with the growl, "I am
at work stern and grim, not to be interrupted by Jeffrey's theoretic
flourish of epistolary trumpeting." Carlyle, however, paid more than one
visit to Craigcrook, seeing his host for the last time in the autumn of
1849, "worn in body and thin in mind," "grown lunar now and not solar any
more." Three months later he heard of the death of this benefactor of his
youth, and wrote the memorial which finds its place in the second volume
of the _Reminiscences_.

[Footnote: Cf. Byron's account of the same household at Pisa. Carlyle
deals very leniently with the malignant volume on Byron which amply
justified the epigram of Moore. But he afterwards spoke more slightly of
his little satellite, attributing the faint praise, in the _Examiner_, of
the second course of lectures to Hunt's jealousy of a friend now
"beginning to be somebody."]

The work "stern and grim" was the _French Revolution_, the production
of which is the dominant theme of the first chapter of Carlyle's London
life. Mr. Froude, in the course of an estimate of this work which leaves
little room for other criticism, dwells on the fact that it was written
for a purpose, _i.e._ to show that rulers, like those of the French
in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the pleasures and
oblivious of the duties of life, must end by being "burnt up." This,
doubtless, is one of the morals of the _French Revolution_--the other
being that anarchy ends in despotism--and unquestionably a writer who
never ceased to be a preacher must have had it in his mind. But Carlyle's
peculiarity is that he combined the functions of a prophet and of an
artist, and that while now the one, now the other, was foremost, he never
wholly forgot the one in the other. In this instance he found a theme
well fit for both, and threw his heart into it, though under much
discouragement. Despite the Essays, into each of which he had put work
enough for a volume, the Reviews were shy of him; while his _Sartor_ had,
on this side of the Atlantic, been received mainly with jeers. Carlyle,
never unconscious of his prerogative and apostolic primogeniture, felt
like an aspirant who had performed his vigils, and finding himself still
ignored, became a knight of the rueful countenance. Thoroughly equipped,
adept enough in ancient tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German
and a fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from
Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "tragically hard,"
exclaiming, "I could learn to do all things I have seen done, and am
forbidden to try any of them." The efforts to keep the wolf from his own
doors were harder than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed in
London with his £200 reserve, he could easily have made way in the
usual ruts; but he would have none of them, and refused to accept the
employment which is the most open, as it is the most lucrative, to
literary aspirants. To nine out of ten the "profession of literature"
means Journalism; while Journalism often means dishonesty, always
conformity. Carlyle was, in a sense deeper than that of the sects,
essentially a nonconformist; he not only disdained to write a word he
did not believe, he would not suppress a word he did believe--a rule
of action fatal to swift success. During these years there began an
acquaintance, soon ripening into intimacy, the memories of which are
enshrined in one of the most beautiful of biographies. Carlyle's relation
to John Sterling drew out the sort of affection which best suited
him--the love of a master for a pupil, of superior for inferior, of the
benefactor for the benefited; and consequently there is no line in the
record of it that jars. Sterling once tried to benefit his friend, and
perhaps fortunately failed. He introduced Carlyle to his father, then the
chief writer in the _Times_, and the Editor invited the struggling author
to contribute to its columns, but, according to Mr. Froude, "on the
implied conditions ... when a man enlists in the army, his soul as well
as his body belong to his commanding officer." Carlyle talked, all his
life, about what his greatest disciple calls "The Lamp of Obedience"; but
he himself would obey no one, and found it hard to be civil to those who
did not see with his eyes. Ho rejected--we trust in polite terms--the
offer of "the Thunderer." "In other respects also," says our main
authority, "he was impracticable, unmalleable, and as independent and
wilful as if he were the heir to a peerage. He had created no 'public' of
his own; the public which existed could not understand his writings
and would not buy them; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more
neglected than he had been in Scotland." Welcome to a limited range of
literary society, he astonished and amused by his vehement eloquence,
but when crossed he was not only "sarcastic" but rude, and speaking of
people, as he wrote of them, with various shades of contempt, naturally
gave frequent offence. Those whose toes are trodden on, not by accident,
justifiably retaliate. "Are you looking for your t-t-turban?" Charles
Lamb is reported to have said in some entertainer's lobby after listening
for an evening to Carlyle's invectives, and the phrase may have rankled
in his mind. Living in a glass case, while throwing stones about,
super-sensitive to criticism though professing to despise critics, he
made at least as many enemies as friends, and by his own confession
became an Ishmaelite. In view of the reception of _Sartor_, we do not
wonder to find him writing in 1833--

  It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the
  craft of literature, and yet I know no fault I have
  committed.... I am tempted to go to America.... I shall quit
  literature, it does not invite me. Providence warns me to
  have done with it. I have failed in the Divine Infernal
  Universe;

or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world
like Teufelsdröckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet
all the time, with incomparable naiveté, he was asserting:--

  The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my
  feeling of natural superiority to them.... The literary
  world here is a thing which I have no other course left me
  but to defy.... I can reverence no existing man. With health
  and peace for one year, I could write a better book than
  there has been in this country for generations.

All through his journal and his correspondence there is a perpetual
alternation of despair and confidence, always closing with the refrain,
"Working, trying is the only remover of doubt," and wise counsels often
echoed from Goethe, "Accomplish as well as you can the task on hand, and
the next step will become clear;" on the other hand--A man must not only
be able to work but to give over working.... If a man wait till he has
entirely brushed off his imperfections, he will spin for ever on his
axis, advancing no whither.... The _French Revolution_ stands pretty
fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to
splash down what I know in large masses of colours, that it may look like
a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance.

The progress of this work was retarded by the calamity familiar to every
reader, but it must be referred to as throwing one of the finest lights
on Carlyle's character. His closest intellectual link with J.S. Mill was
their common interest in French politics and literature; the latter,
himself meditating a history of the Revolution, not only surrendered in
favour of the man whose superior pictorial genius he recognised, but
supplied him freely with the books he had accumulated for the enterprise.
His interest in the work was unfortunately so great as to induce him to
borrow the MS. of the first volume, completed in the early spring of
1835, and his business habits so defective as to permit him to lend it
without authority; so that, as appears, it was left lying about by Mrs.
Taylor and mistaken by her servant for waste paper: certainly it was
destroyed; and Mill came to Cheyne Row to announce the fact in such a
desperate state of mind that Carlyle's first anxiety seems to have been
to console his friend. According to Mrs. Carlyle, as reported by Froude,
"the first words her husband uttered as the door closed were, 'Well,
Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him
how very serious this business is to us.'" This trait of magnanimity under
the first blow of a disaster which seemed to cancel the work of years
should be set against his nearly contemporaneous criticisms of Coleridge,
Lamb, Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Macaulay, etc.

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

Mill sent a cheque of £200 as "the slightest external compensation" for
the loss, and only, by urgent entreaty, procured the acceptance of half
the sum. Carlyle here, as in every real emergency, bracing his resolve
by courageous words, as "never tine heart or get provoked heart," set
himself to re-write the volume with an energy that recalls that of Scott
rebuilding his ruined estate; but the work was at first so "wretched"
that it had to be laid aside for a season, during which the author
wisely took a restorative bath of comparatively commonplace novels. The
re-writing of the first volume was completed in September 1835; the whole
book in January 1837. The mood in which it was written throws a light on
the excellences as on the defects of the history. The _Reminiscences_
again record the gloom and defiance of "Thomas the Doubter" walking
through the London streets "with a feeling similar to Satan's stepping
the burning marl," and scowling at the equipages about Hyde Park Corner,
sternly thinking, "Yes, and perhaps none of you could do what I am at. I
shall finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and
withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." In an adjacent page he reports
himself as having said to his wife--

  What they will do with this book none knows, my lass; but
  they have not had for two hundred years any book that came
  more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample
  it under foot and hoof as they see best.... "They cannot
  trample that," she would cheerily answer.

This passage points at once to the secret of the writer's spell and to
the limits of his lasting power. His works were written seldom with
perfect fairness, never with the dry light required for a clear
presentation of the truth; they have all "an infusion from the will and
the affections"; but they were all written with a whole sincerity and
utter fervour; they rose from his hot heart, and rushed through the air
"like rockets druv' by their own burnin'." Consequently his readers
confess that he has never forgot the Horatian maxim--

  Si vis me flere, dolendum est
  Primum ipsi tibi.

About this time Carlyle writes, "My friends think I have found the art of
living upon nothing," and there must, despite Mill's contribution, have
been "bitter thrift" in Cheyne REow during the years 1835-1837. He
struggled through the unremunerative interval of waiting for the sale
of a great work by help of fees derived from his essay on the _Diamond
Necklace_ (which, after being refused by the _Foreign Quarterly,_
appeared in _Fraser,_ 1837), that on _Mirabeau_ in the _Westminster,_
and in the following year, for the same periodical, the article on _Sir
Walter Scott._ To the last work, undertaken against the grain, he refers
in one of the renewed wails of the year: "O that literature had never
been devised. I am scourged back to it by the whip of necessity." The
circumstance may account for some of the manifest defects of one of the
least satisfactory of Carlyle's longer' reviews. Frequent references in
previous letters show that he never appreciated Scott, to whom he refers
as a mere Restaurateur.

Meanwhile the appearance of the _French Revolution_ had brought the
name of its author, then in his forty-third year, for the first time
prominently before the public. It attracted the attention of Thackeray,
who wrote a generous review in the _Times,_ of Southey, Jeffrey,
Macaulay, Hallam, and Brougham, who recognised the advent of an equal, if
sometimes an adverse power in the world of letters. But, though the book
established his reputation, the sale was slow, and for some years the
only substantial profits, amounting to about £400, came from America,
through the indefatigable activity and good management of Emerson. It
is pleasant to note a passage in the interesting volumes of their
_Correspondence_ which shows that in this instance the benefited
understood his financial relation to the benefactor: "A reflection I
cannot but make is that, at bottom, this money was all yours; not a penny
of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful friend-ship.... I
could not examine it (the account) without a kind of crime." Others
who, at this period, made efforts to assist "the polar Bear" were less
fortunate. In several instances good intentions paved the palace of
Momus, and in one led a well-meaning man into a notoriously false
position. Mr. Basil Montagu being in want of a private secretary offered
the post to his former guest, as a temporary makeshift, at a salary of
£200, and so brought upon his memory a torrent of contempt. Undeterred by
this and similar warnings, the indefatigable philanthropist, Miss Harriet
Martineau, who at first conciliated the Carlyles by her affection for
"this side of the street," and was afterwards an object of their joint
ridicule, conceived the idea of organising a course of lectures to an
audience collected by canvass to hoar the strange being from the moors
talk for an hour on end about literature, morals, and history. He was
then an object of curiosity to those who knew anything about him at all,
and lecturing was at that time a lucrative and an honourable employment.
The "good Harriet," so called by Cheyne Row in its condescending mood,
aided by other kind friends of the Sterling and Mill circles--the former
including Frederick Denison Maurice--made so great a success of the
enterprise that it was thrice repeated. The _first_ course of six
lectures on "German Literature," May 1837, delivered in Willis's Rooms,
realised £135; the _second_ of twelve, on the "History of European
Literature," at 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, had a net result of
£300; the _third,_ in the same rooms, on "Revolutions," brought £200; the
_fourth,_ on "Heroes," the same. In closing this course Carlyle appeared
for the last time on a public platform until 1866, when he delivered
his Inaugural Address as Lord Rector to the students of Edinburgh. The
impression he produced on his unusually select audiences was that of a
man of genius, but roughly clad. The more superficial auditors had a
new sensation, those who came to stare remained to wonder; the more
reflective felt that they had learnt something of value. Carlyle had
no inconsiderable share of the oratorical power which he latterly so
derided; he was able to speak from a few notes; but there were comments
more or less severe on his manner and style. J. Grant, in his _Portraits
of Public Characters,_ says: "At times he distorts his features as if
suddenly seized by some paroxysm of pain ... he makes mouths; he has a
harsh accent and graceless gesticulation." Leigh Hunt, in the _Examiner,_
remarks on the lecturer's power of extemporising; but adds that he often
touches only the mountain-tops of the subject, and that the impression
left was as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalised by
German philosophy. Bunsen, present at one of the lectures, speaks of
the striking and rugged thoughts thrown at people's heads; and Margaret
Fuller, afterwards Countess Ossoli, referred to his arrogance redeemed
by "the grandeur of a Siegfried melting down masses of iron into sunset
red." Carlyle's own comments are for the most part slighting. He refers
to his lectures as a mixture of prophecy and play-acting, and says that
when about to open his course on "Heroes" he felt like a man going to be
hanged. To Emerson, April 17th 1839, he writes :--

  My lectures come on this day two weeks. O heaven! I cannot
  "speak"; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a
  spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by
  want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then--!
  Shall it be Switzerland? shall it be Scotland? nay, shall it
  be America and Concord?

Emerson had written about a Boston publication of the _Miscellanies_
(first there collected), and was continually urging his friend to
emigrate and speak to more appreciative audiences in the States; but
the London lectures, which had, with the remittances from over sea,
practically saved Carlyle from ruin or from exile, had made him decide
"to turn his back to the treacherous Syren"--the temptation to sink into
oratory. Mr. Froude's explanation and defence of this decision may be
clenched by a reference to the warning his master had received. He had
announced himself as a preacher and a prophet, and been taken at his
word; but similarly had Edward Irving, who for a season of sun or glamour
gathered around him the same crowd and glitter: the end came; twilight
and clouds of night. Fashion had flocked to the sermons of the elder
Annandale youth--as to the recitatives of the younger--to see a wild man
of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on"
to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with
"unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed
his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause,
madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with
the fixed resolve, "De me fabula non narrabitur," he shut the book on
this phase of his life.

The lectures on "Hero-Worship" (a phrase taken from Hume) were published
in 1841, and met with considerable success, the name of the writer having
then begun to run "like wildfire through London." At the close of the
previous year he had published his long pamphlet on _Chartism_, it having
proved unsuitable for its original destination as an article in the
_Quarterly_. Here first he clearly enunciates, "Might is right"--one
of the few strings on which, with all the variations of a political
Paganini, he played through life. This tract is on the border line
between the old modified Radicalism of _Sartor_ and the less modified
Conservatism of his later years. In 1840 Carlyle still speaks of himself
as a man foiled; but at the close of that year all fear of penury was
over, and in the following he was able to refuse a Chair of History at
Edinburgh, as later another at St. Andrews. Meanwhile his practical
power and genuine zeal for the diffusion of knowledge appeared in his
foundation of the London Library, which brought him into more or less
close contact with Tennyson, Milman, Forster, Helps, Spedding, Gladstone,
and other leaders of the thought and action of the time.

There is little in Carlyle's life at any time that can be called
eventful. From first to last it was that of a retired scholar, a thinker
demanding sympathy while craving after solitude, and the frequent
inconsistency of the two requirements was the source of much of his
unhappiness. Our authorities for all that we do not see in his
published works are found in his voluminous correspondence, copious
autobiographical jottings, and the three volumes of his wife's letters
and journal dating from the commencement of the struggle for recognition
in London, and extending to the year of her death. Criticism of these
remarkable documents, the theme of so much controversy, belongs rather
to a life of Mrs. Carlyle; but a few salient facts may here be noted. It
appears on the surface that husband and wife had in common several
marked peculiarities; on the intellectual side they had not only an
extraordinary amount but the same kind of ability, superhumanly keen
insight, and wonderful power of expression, both with tongue and pen; the
same intensity of feeling, thoroughness, and courage to look the ugliest
truths full in the face; in both, these high qualities were marred by a
tendency to attribute the worst motives to almost every one. Their joint
contempt for all whom they called "fools," _i.e._ the immense majority of
mankind, was a serious drawback to the pleasure of their company. It is
indeed obvious that, whether or not it be correct to say that "his nature
was the soft one, her's the hard," Mrs. Carlyle was the severer cynic of
the two. Much of her writing confirms the impression of those who have
heard her talk that no one, not even her husband, was safe from the
shafts of her ridicule. Her pride in his genius knew no bounds, and it is
improbable that she would have tolerated from any outsider a breath of
adverse criticism; but she herself claimed many liberties she would not
grant. She was clannish as Carlyle himself, yet even her relations
are occasionally made to appear ridiculous. There was nothing in her
affections, save her memory of her own father, corresponding to his
devotion to his whole family. With equal penetration and greater scorn,
she had no share of his underlying reverence. Such limited union as was
granted to her married life had only soured the mocking-bird spirit
of the child that derided her grandfather's accent on occasion of his
bringing her back from a drive by another route to "varry the shane."

Carlyle's constant wailings take from him any claim to such powers of
endurance as might justify his later attacks on Byron. But neither
had his wife any real reticence. Whenever there were domestic
troubles--flitting, repairing, building, etc., on every occasion of
clamour or worry, he, with scarce pardonable oblivion of physical
delicacy greater than his own, went off, generally to visit distinguished
friends, and left behind him the burden and the heat of the day. She
performed her unpleasant work and all associated duties with a practical
genius that he complimented as "triumphant." She performed them,
ungrudgingly perhaps, but never without complaint; her invariable
practice was to endure and tell. "Quelle vie," she writes in 1837 to John
Sterling, whom she seems to have really liked, "let no woman who values
peace of soul ever marry an author"; and again to the same in 1839,
"Carlyle had to sit on a jury two days, to the ruin of his whole being,
physical, moral, and intellectual," but "one gets to feel a sort of
indifference to his growling." Conspicuous exceptions, as in the case of
the Shelleys, the Dobells, and the Brownings, have been seen, within
or almost within our memories, but as a rule it is a risk for two
supersensitive and nervous people to live together: when they are
sensitive in opposite ways the alliance is fatal; fortunately the
Carlyles were, in this respect, in the main sympathetic. With most of the
household troubles which occupy so exaggerated a space in the letters and
journals of both--papering, plastering, painting, deceitful or disorderly
domestics--general readers have so little concern that they have reason
to resent the number of pages wasted in printing them; but there was one
common grievance of wider and more urgent interest, to which we must here
again finally refer, premising that it affected not one period but the
whole of their lives, _i.e._ their constant, only half-effectual struggle
with the modern Hydra-headed Monster, the reckless and needless Noises
produced or permitted, sometimes increased rather than suppressed, by
modern civilisation. Mrs. Carlyle suffered almost as much as her husband
from these murderers of sleep and assassins of repose; on her mainly fell
the task of contending with the cochin-chinas, whose senseless shrieks
went "through her like a sword," of abating a "Der Freischütz of cats,"
or a pandemonium of barrel organs, of suppressing macaws for which
Carryle "could neither think nor live"; now mitigating the scales on a
piano, now conjuring away, by threat or bribe, from their neighbours
a shoal of "demon fowls"; lastly of superintending the troops of
bricklayers, joiners, iron-hammerers employed with partial success to
convert the top story of 5 Cheyne Row into a sound-proof room. Her
hard-won victories in this field must have agreeably added to the sense
of personality to which she resolutely clung. Her assertion, "Instead
of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle
round every individuality," is the essence of much of her mate's
philosophy; but, in the following to Sterling, she somewhat bitterly
protests against her own absorption: "In spite of the honestest efforts
to annihilate my I---ity or merge it in what the world doubtless
considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting, and,
alas, self-seeking me."

The ever-restive consciousness of being submerged is one of the dominant
notes of her journal, the other is the sense of being even within the
circle unrecognised. "C. is a domestic wandering Jew.... When he is at
work I hardly ever see his face from breakfast to dinner."... "Poor
little wretch that I am, ... I feel as if I were already half-buried ...
in some intermediate state between the living and the dead.... Oh, so
lonely." These are among the _suspiria de profundis_ of a life which her
husband compared to "a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother,
whom he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming:--"Solitude,
indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad like Bedlam; absence
of delirium is possible only for me in solitude"; a sentiment almost
literally acted on. In his offering of penitential cypress, referring to
his wife's delight in the ultimate success of his work, he says, "She
flickered round me like a perpetual radiance." But during their joint
lives their numerous visits and journeys were made at separate times or
apart. They crossed continually on the roads up and down, but when
absent wrote to one another often the most affectionate letters. Their
attraction increased, contrary to Newton's law, in the _direct_ ratio of
the square of the distance, and when it was stretched beyond the stars
the long-latent love of the survivor became a worship.

Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his
bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration
for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him
unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic
differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have
practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in
comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond
was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first
great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many
callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne
Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid,
in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant
friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein)
had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with
so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in
her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was
accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to
having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed
on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to
interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her
mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too
characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs.
Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger
than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of
candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with
an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother
resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which
prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will
that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round
which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has
recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many
graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane
down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They
parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion,
perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but
bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet
waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842
news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried
north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool;
when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her
mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle
came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that
the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as
executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will,
devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of
pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in
the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading
them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of
the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse,
with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again
revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said
of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the
Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place
opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness
of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion.
Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath
that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry
scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies
completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the
Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world.

The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife
more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once
Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been
glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the
restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was
constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land
to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed
better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdröckh wanderings
abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A
letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:--

Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his
bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration
for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him
unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic
differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have
practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in
comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond
was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first
great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many
callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne
Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid,
in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant
friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein)
had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with
so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in
her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was
accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to
having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed
on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to
interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her
mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too
characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs.
Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger
than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of
candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with
an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother
resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which
prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will
that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round
which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has
recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many
graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane
down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They
parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion,
perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but
bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet
waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842
news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried
north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool;
when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her
mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle
came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that
the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as
executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will,
devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of
pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in
the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading
them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of
the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse,
with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again
revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said
of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the
Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place
opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness
of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion.
Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath
that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry
scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies
completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the
Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world.

The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife
more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once
Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been
glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the
restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was
constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land
to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed
better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdröckh wanderings
abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A
letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:--

  This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont: and as for
  my particular case uses me not worse but better than of old.
  Nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for
  me.... The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge
  roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of
  nerves as mine.

  The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the
  streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to
  be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressingly
  as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be _buried_ at
  least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub ...
  if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I
  will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge.

The competence had come, the death of Mrs. Welsh leaving to his wife and
himself practically from £200 to £300 a year: why not finally return to
the home of their early restful secluded life, "in reductâ, valle," with
no noise around it but the trickle of rills and the nibbling of sheep?
Craigenputtock was now their own, and within its "four walls" they would
begin a calmer life. Fortunately Mrs. Carlyle, whose shrewd practical
instinct was never at fault, saw through the fallacy, and set herself
resolutely against the scheme. Scotland had lost much of its charm for
her--a year later she refused an invitation from Mrs. Aitken, saying, "I
could do nothing at Scotsbrig or Dumfries but cry from morning to night."
She herself had enough of the Hill of the Hawks, and she know that within
a year Carlyle would again be calling it the Devil's Den and lamenting
Cheyne Row. He gave way with the protest, "I cannot deliberately mean
anything that is harmful to you," and certainly it was well for him.

There is no record of an original writer or artist coming from the
north of our island to make his mark in the south, succeeding, and then
retracing his steps. Had Carlyle done so, he would probably have passed
from the growing recognition of a society he was beginning to find on the
whole congenial, to the solitude of intellectual ostracism. Scotland may
be breezy, but it is not conspicuously free. Erratic opinions when duly
veiled are generally allowed; but this concession is of little worth. On
the tolerance of those who have no strong belief in anything, Carlyle,
thinking possibly of rose-water Hunt and the litterateurs of his tribe,
expressed himself with incisive and memorable truth: "It is but doubt
and indifference. _Touch the thing they do believe and value, their own
self-conceit: they are rattlesnakes then_."

[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.]

Tolerance for the frank expression of views which clash with the sincere
or professed faith of the majority is rare everywhere; in Scotland
rarest. English Churchmen, high and broad, were content to condone the
grim Calvinism still infiltrating Carlyle's thoughts, and to smile, at
worst, at his idolatry of the iconoclast who said, "the idolater shall
die the death." But the reproach of "Pantheism" was for long fatal to his
reception across the Tweed.

Towards the close of this period he acknowledged that London was "among
improper places" the best for "writing books," after all the one use of
living "for him;" its inhabitants "greatly the best" he "had ever walked
with," and its aristocracy--the Marshalls, Stanleys, Hollands, Russells,
Ashburtons, Lansdownes, who held by him through life--its "choicest
specimens." Other friendships equally valued he made among the leading
authors of the age. Tennyson sought his company, and Connop Thirlwall.
Arnold of Rugby wrote in commendation of the _French Revolution_ and
hailed _Chartism._ Thackeray admired him and reviewed him well. In
Macaulay, condemned to limbo under the suspicion of having reviewed him
ill, he found, when the suspicion was proved unjust, a promise of
better things. As early as 1839 Sterling had written an article in the
_Westminster,_ which gave him intense pleasure; for while contemning
praise in almost the same words as Byron did, he loved it equally well.
In 1840 he had crossed the Rubicon that lies between aspiration and
attainment. The populace might be blind or dumb, the "rattlesnakes"--the
"irresponsible indolent reviewers," who from behind a hedge pelt every
wrestler till they found societies for the victor--might still obscurely
hiss; but Carlyle was at length safe by the verdict of the "Conscript
Fathers."

[Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.]




CHAPTER V

CHEYNE ROW

[1842-1853]

The bold venture of coming to London with a lean purse, few friends,
and little fame had succeeded: but it had been a terrible risk, and the
struggle had left scars behind it. To this period of his life we may
apply Carlyle's words,--made use of by himself at a later date,--"The
battle was over and we were sore wounded." It is as a maimed knight
of modern chivalry, who sounded the _réveil_ for an onslaught on the
citadels of sham, rather than as a prophet of the future that his name is
likely to endure in the history of English thought. He has also a place
with Scott amongst the recreators of bygone ages, but he regarded their
annals less as pictures than as lesson-books. His aim was that expressed
by Tennyson to "steal fire from fountains of the past," but his design
was to admonish rather than "to glorify the present." This is the avowed
object of the second of his distinctly political works, which following
on the track of the first, _Charlism_, and written in a similar spirit,
takes higher artistic rank. _Past and Present_, suggested by a visit to
the poorhouse of St. Ives and by reading the chronicle of _Jocelin de
Brakelond_, was undertaken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a
greater work,--the duty he felt laid upon him to say some thing that
should bear directly on the welfare of the people, especially of the poor
around him. It was an impulse similar to that which inspired _Oliver
Twist_, but Carlyle's remedies were widely different from those of
Dickens. Not merely more kindness and sympathy, but paternal government,
supplying work to the idle inmates of the workhouse, and insisting, by
force if need be, on it being done, was his panacea. It had been Abbot
Samson's way in his strong government of the Monastery of St. Edmunds,
and he resolved, half in parable, half in plain sermon, to recommend it
to the Ministers Peel and Russell.

In this mood, the book was written off in the first seven weeks of
1843, a _tour de force_ comparable to Johnson's writing of _Rasselas_.
Published in April, it at once made a mark by the opposition as well as
by the approval it excited. Criticism of the work--of its excellences,
which are acknowledged, and its defects as manifold--belongs to a review
of the author's political philosophy: it is enough here to note that it
was remarkable in three ways. _First_, the object of its main attack,
_laissez faire_, being a definite one, it was capable of having and had
some practical effect. Mr. Froude exaggerates when he says that Carlyle
killed the pseudo-science of orthodox political economy; for the
fundamental truths in the works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, and Mill
cannot be killed: but he pointed out that, like Aristotle's leaden rule,
the laws of supply and demand must be made to bend; as Mathematics made
mechanical must allow for friction, so must Economics leave us a little
room for charity. There is ground to believe that the famous Factory Acts
owed some of their suggestions to _Past and Present_. Carlyle always
speaks respectfully of the future Lord Shaftesbury. "I heard Milnes
saying," notes the Lady Sneerwell of real life, "at the Shuttleworths
that Lord Ashley was the greatest man alive: he was the only man that
Carlyle praised in his book. I daresay he knew I was overhearing him."
But, while supplying arguments and a stimulus to philanthropists, his
protests against philanthropy as an adequate solution of the problem of
human misery became more pronounced. About the date of the conception of
this book we find in the Journal:--

  Again and again of late I ask myself in whispers, is it the
  duty of a citizen to paint mere heroisms? ... Live to make
  others happy! Yes, surely, at all times, so far as you can.
  But at bottom that is not the aim of my life ... it is mere
  hypocrisy to call it such, as is continually done
  nowadays.... Avoid cant. Do not think that your life means
  a mere searching in gutters for fallen figures to wipe and
  set up.

_Past and Present_, in the _second_ place, is notable as the only
considerable consecutive book--unless we also except the _Life of
Sterling_,--which the author wrote without the accompaniment of
wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts. _Thirdly_, though marking a stage
in his mental progress, the fusion of the refrains of _Chartism_ and
_Hero-Worship_, and his first clear breach with Mazzini and with Mill,
the book was written as an interlude, when he was in severe travail with
his greatest contribution to English history. The last rebuff which
Carlyle encountered came, by curious accident, from the _Westminster_, to
which Mill had engaged him to contribute an article on "Oliver Cromwell."
While this was in preparation, Mill had to leave the country on account
of his health, and gave the review in charge to an Aberdonian called
Robertson, who wrote to stop the progress of the essay with the message
that _he_ had decided to undertake the subject himself. Carlyle was
angry; but, instead of sullenly throwing the MS. aside, he set about
constructing on its basis a History of the Civil War.

Numerous visits and tours during the following three years, though
bringing him into contact with new and interesting personalities, were
mainly determined by the resolve to make himself acquainted with the
localities of the war; and his knowledge of them has contributed to give
colour and reality to the finest battle-pieces in modern English prose.
In 1842 with Dr. Arnold he drove from Rugby fifteen miles to Naseby, and
the same year, after a brief yachting trip to Belgium--in the notes on
which the old Flemish towns stand out as clearly as in Longfellow's
verse--he made his pilgrimage to St. Ives and Ely Cathedral, where Oliver
two centuries before had called out to the recalcitrant Anglican in the
pulpit, "Cease your fooling and come down." In July 1843 Carlyle made a
trip to South Wales; to visit first a worthy devotee called Redwood, and
then Bishop Thirlwall near Carmarthen. "A right solid simple-hearted
robust man, very strangely swathed," is the visitor's meagre estimate of
one of our most classic historians.

On his way back he carefully reconnoitred the field of Worcester. Passing
his wife at Liverpool, where she was a guest of her uncle, and leaving
her to return to London and brush up Cheyne Row, he walked over Snowdon
from Llanheris to Beddgelert with his brother John. He next proceeded
to Scotsbrig, then north to Edinburgh, and then to Dunbar, which he
contrived to visit on the 3rd of September, an anniversary revived in his
pictured page with a glow and force to match which we have to revert
to Bacon's account of the sea-fight of the _Revenge_. From Dunbar he
returned to Edinburgh, spent some time with his always admired and
admiring friend Erskine of Linlathen, a Scotch broad churchman of the
type of F.D. Maurice and Macleod Campbell, and then went home to set in
earnest to the actual writing of his work. He had decided to abandon
the design of a History, and to make his book a Biography of Cromwell,
interlacing with it the main features and events of the Commonwealth. The
difficulties even of this reduced plan were still immense, and his groans
at every stage in its progress were "louder and more loud," _e.g._ "My
progress in _Cromwell_ is frightful." "A thousand times I regretted that
this task was ever taken up." "The most impossible book of all I ever
before tried," and at the close, "_Cromwell_ I must have written in 1844,
but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to
me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling,
and misery I used to count it had cost me." The book issued in 1845 soon
went through three editions, and brought the author to the front as the
most original historian of his time. Macaulay was his rival, but in
different paths of the same field. About this time Mr. Froude became his
pupil, and has left an interesting account (iii. 290-300) of his master's
influence over the Oxford of those days, which would be only spoilt
by selections. Oxford, like Athens, ever longing after something new,
patronised the Chelsea prophet, and then calmed down to her wonted
cynicism. But Froude and Ruskin were, as far as compatible with the
strong personality of each, always loyal; and the capacity inborn in
both, the power to breathe life into dry records and dead stones, had at
least an added impulse from their master.

The year 1844 is marked by the publication in the _Foreign Quarterly_ of
the essay on _Dr. Francia,_ and by the death of John Sterling,--loved
with the love of David for Jonathan--outside his own family losses, the
greatest wrench in Carlyle's life. Sterling's published writings are as
inadequate to his reputation as the fragmentary remains of Arthur Hallam;
but in friendships, especially unequal friendships, personal fascination
counts for more than half, and all are agreed as to the charm in both
instances of the inspiring companionships. Archdeacon Hare having given a
somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergyman, Carlyle three
years later, in 1851, published his own impressions of his friend as
a thinker, sane philanthropist, and devotee of truth, in a work that,
written in a three months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though
faltering, as prose after verse, with _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, and
Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_.

These years are marked by a series of acts of unobtrusive benevolence,
the memory of which has been in some cases accidentally rescued from the
oblivion to which the benefactor was willing to have them consigned.
Carlyle never boasted of doing a kindness. He was, like Wordsworth,
frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as generous in giving as he
was ungenerous in judging. His assistance to Thomas Cooper, author of the
_Purgatory of Suicides_, his time spent in answering letters of "anxious
enquirers,"--letters that nine out of ten busy men would have flung into
the waste-paper basket,--his interest in such works as Samuel Bamford's
_Life of a Radical_, and admirable advice to the writer; his instructions
to a young student on the choice of books, and well-timed warning to
another against the profession of literature, are sun-rifts in the storm,
that show "a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The same
epoch, however,--that of the start of the great writer's almost
uninterrupted triumph--brings us in face of an episode singularly delicate
and difficult to deal with, but impossible to evade.

[Footnote: These letters to Bamford, showing a keen interest in the
working men of whom his correspondent had written, point to the ideal of a
sort of Tory Democracy. Carlyle writes: "We want more knowledge about the
Lancashire operatives; their miseries and gains, virtues and vices. Winnow
what you have to say, and give us wheat free from chaff. Then the rich
captains of workers will he willing to listen to you. Brevity and
sincerity will succeed. Be brief and select, omit much, give each subject
its proper proportionate space; and be exact without caring to round off
the edges of what you have to say." Later, he declines Bamford's offer of
verses, saying "verse is a bugbear to booksellers at present. These are
prosaic, earnest, practical, not singing times."]

Carlyle, now generally recognised in London as having one of the most
powerful intellects and by far the greatest command of language among his
contemporaries, was beginning to suffer some of the penalties of renown
in being beset by bores and travestied by imitators; but he was also
enjoying its rewards. Eminent men of all shades of opinion made his
acquaintance; he was a frequent guest of the genial Maecenas, an admirer
of genius though no mere worshipper of success, R. Monckton Milnes;
meeting Hallam, Bunsen, Pusey, etc., at his house in London, and
afterwards visiting him at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. The future Lord
Houghton was, among distinguished men of letters and society, the one of
whom he spoke with the most unvarying regard. Carlyle corresponded with
Peel, whom he set almost on a par with Wellington as worthy of
perfect trust, and talked familiarly with Bishop Wilberforce, whom he
miraculously credits with holding at heart views much like his own. At
a somewhat later date, in the circle of his friends, bound to him by
various degrees of intimacy, History was represented by Thirlwall, Grote,
and Froude; Poetry by Browning, Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Clough;
Social Romance by Kingsley; Biography by James Spedding and John Forster;
and Criticism by John Ruskin. His link to the last named was, however,
their common distrust of political economy, as shown in _Unto This Last_,
rather than any deep artistic sympathy. In Macaulay, a conversationalist
more rapid than himself, Carlyle found a rival rather than a companion;
but his prejudiced view of physical science was forgotten in his personal
affection for Tyndall and in their congenial politics. His society was
from the publication of _Cromwell_ till near his death increasingly
sought after by the aristocracy, several members of which invited him to
their country seats, and bestowed on him all acceptable favours. In this
class he came to find other qualities than those referred to in the
_Sartor_ inscription, and other aims than that of "preserving their
game,"--the ambition to hold the helm of the State in stormy weather, and
to play their part among the captains of industry. In the _Reminiscences_
the aristocracy are deliberately voted to be "for continual grace of
bearing and of acting, steadfast honour, light address, and cheery
stoicism, actually yet the best of English classes." There can be no
doubt that his intercourse with this class, as with men of affairs and
letters, some of whom were his proximate equals, was a fortunate sequel
to the duck-pond of Ecclefechan and the lonely rambles on the Border
moors.

  Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
  Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.

The life of a great capital may be the crown of education, but there is
a danger in homage that comes late and then without reserve. Give me
neither poverty nor riches, applies to praise as well as to wealth; and
the sudden transition from comparative neglect to

  honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

is a moral trial passing the strength of all but a few of the "irritable
race" of writers. The deference paid to Carlyle made him yet more
intolerant of contradiction, and fostered his selfishness, in one
instance with the disastrous result of clouding a whole decade of his
domestic life. In February 1839 he speaks of dining--"an eight-o'clock
dinner which ruined me for a week"--with "a certain Baring," at whose
table in Bath House he again met Bunsen, and was introduced to Lord
Mahon. This was the beginning of what, after the death of Sterling,
grew into the most intimate friendship of his life. Baring, son of Lord
Ashburton of the American treaty so named, and successor to the title on
his father's death in 1848, was a man of sterling worth and sound sense,
who entered into many of the views of his guest. His wife was by general
consent the most brilliant woman of rank in London, whose grace, wit,
refinement, and decision of character had made her the acknowledged
leader of society. Lady Harriet, by the exercise of some overpowering
though purely intellectual spell, made the proudest of men, the modern
Diogenes, our later Swift, so much her slave that for twelve years,
whenever he could steal a day from his work, he ran at her beck from town
to country, from castle to cot; from Addiscombe, her husband's villa in
Surrey, to the Grange, her father-in-law's seat in Hampshire; from Loch
Luichart and Glen Finnan, where they had Highland shootings, to the
Palais Eoyal. Mr. Froude's comment in his introduction to the Journal
is substantially as follows: Lady Harriet Baring or Ashburton was the
centre of a planetary system in which every distinguished public man of
genuine worth then revolved. Carlyle was naturally the chief among them,
and he was perhaps at one time ambitious of himself taking some part in
public affairs, and saw the advantage of this stepping-stone to enable
him to do something more for the world, as Byron said, than write books
for it. But the idea of entering Parliament, which seems to have once
suggested itself to him in 1849, was too vague and transient to have ever
influenced his conduct. It is more correct to say that he was flattered
by a sympathy not too thorough to be tame, pleased by adulation never
gross, charmed by the same graces that charmed the rest, and finally
fascinated by a sort of hypnotism. The irritation which this strange
alliance produced in the mind of the mistress of Cheyne Row is no matter
of surprise. Pride and affection together had made her bear with all her
husband's humours, and share with him all the toils of the struggle
from obscurity. He had emerged, and she was still half content to be
systematically set aside for his books, the inanimate rivals on which he
was building a fame she had some claim to share. But her fiery spirit was
not yet tamed into submitting to be sacrificed to an animate rival, or
passively permitting the usurpation of companionship grudged to herself
by another woman, whom she could not enjoy the luxury of despising. Lady
Harriet's superiority in _finesse_ and geniality, as well as advantages
of station, only aggravated the injury; and this with a singular want of
tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting
the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain,
were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between
the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently
unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental
neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's
"Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen goddess," while Mrs.
Carlyle, with reference to her favourite dog "Nero," was in her turn
nicknamed "Agrippina."

In midsummer of 1846, after an enforced sojourn at Addiscombe in worse
than her usual health, she returned to Chelsea with "her mind all churned
to froth," and opened it to her husband with such plainness that "there
was a violent scene": she left the house in a mood like that of the first
Mrs. Milton, and took refuge with her friends the Paulets at Seaforth
near Liverpool, uncertain whether or not she would return. There were
only two persons from whom it seemed natural for her at such a crisis
to ask advice; one was Geraldine Jewsbury, a young Manchester lady,
authoress of a well-known novel, _The Half-Sisters_, from the beginning
of their acquaintance in 1841 till the close in 1866 her most intimate
associate and chosen confidant, who, we are told, "knew all" her secrets.

[Footnote: Carlyle often speaks, sometimes slightingly, of Miss Jewsbury,
as a sensational novelist and admirer of George Sand, but he appreciated
her genuine worth.]

The other was the inspired Italian, pure patriot and Stoic moralist Joseph
Mazzini. To him she wrote twice--once apparently before leaving London,
and again from Seaforth. His letters in reply, tenderly sympathetic and
yet rigidly insistent on the duty of forbearance and endurance, availed to
avert the threatened catastrophe; but there are sentences which show how
bitter the complaints must have been.

  It is only you who can teach yourself that, whatever the
  _present_ may be, you must front it with dignity.... I
  could only point out to you the fulfilment of duties which
  can make life--not happy--what can? but earnest, sacred, and
  resigned.... I am carrying a burden even heavier than you,
  and have undergone even bitterer deceptions. Your life
  proves an empty thing, you say. Empty! Do not blaspheme.
  Have you never done good? Have you never loved? ... Pain and
  joy, deception and fulfilled hopes are just the rain and the
  sunshine that must meet the traveller on his way. Bless the
  Almighty if He has thought proper to send the latter to
  you.... Wrap your cloak round you against the first, but do
  not think a single moment that the one or the other have
  anything to do with the _end_ of the journey.

Carlyle's first letter after the rupture is a mixture of reproach
and affection. "We never parted before in such a manner; and all for
literally nothing.... Adieu, dearest, for that is, and, if madness
prevail not, may for ever be your authentic title." Another, enclosing
the birthday present which he had never omitted since her mother's death,
softened his wife's resentment, and the storm blew over for a time.
But while the cause remained there was in the house at best a surface
tranquillity, at worst an under tone of misery which (October 1855 to May
1856) finds voice in the famous Diary, not merely covered with "black
spider webs," but steeped in gall, the publication of which has made so
much debate. It is like a page from _Othello_ reversed. A few sentences
condense the refrain of the lament. "Charles Buller said of the Duchess
de Praslin, 'What could a poor fellow do with a wife that kept a journal
but murder her?'" "That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand
miles Mr. C. has walked between here and there?" "Being an only child, I
never wished to sew men's trousers--no, never!"

  I gin to think I've sold myself
  For very little cas."

"To-day I called on my lady: she was perfectly civil, for a wonder."

"Edward Irving! The past is past and gone is gone--

  O waly, waly, love is bonnie,
  A little while when it is new;"

quotations which, laid alongside the records of the writer's visit to the
people at Haddington, "who seem all to grow so good and kind as they grow
old," and to the graves in the churchyard there, are infinitely pathetic.
The letters that follow are in the same strain, _e.g._ to Carlyle when
visiting his sister at the Gill, "I never forget kindness, nor, alas,
unkindness either": to Luichart, "I don't believe thee, wishing yourself
at home.... You don't, as weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself
for the pleasure of others"; to Mrs. Russell at Thornhill, "My London
doctor's prescription is that I should be kept always happy and
tranquil(!!!)."

In the summer of 1856 Lady Ashburton gave a real ground for offence in
allowing both the Carlyles, on their way north with her, to take a seat
in an ordinary railway carriage, beside her maid, while she herself
travelled in a special saloon. Partly, perhaps in consequence, Mrs.
Carlyle soon went to visit her cousins in Fifeshire, and afterwards
refused to accompany her ladyship on the way back. This resulted in
another quarrel with her husband, who had issued the command from
Luichart--but it was their last on the subject, for Gloriana died on the
4th of the following May, 1857, at Paris: "The most queen-like woman I
had ever known or seen, by nature and by culture _facile princeps_ she, I
think, of all great ladies I have ever seen." This brought to a close an
episode in which there were faults on both sides, gravely punished: the
incidents of its course and the manner in which they were received show,
among other things, that railing at the name of "Happiness" does little
or nothing to reconcile people to the want of the reality. In 1858 Lord
Ashburton married again--a Miss Stuart Mackenzie, who became the attached
friend of the Carlyles, and remained on terms of unruffled intimacy with
both till the end: she survived her husband, who died in 1864, leaving a
legacy of £2000 to the household at Cheyne Row. _Sic transiit._

From this date we must turn back over nearly twenty years to retrace the
main steps of the great author's career. Much of the interval was devoted
to innumerable visits, in acceptance of endless hospitalities, or in
paying his annual devotions to Annandale,--calls on his time which kept
him rushing from place to place like a comet. Two facts are notable about
those expeditions: they rarely seemed to give him much pleasure, even at
Scotsbrig he complained of sleepless nights and farm noises; and he was
hardly ever accompanied by his wife. She too was constantly running north
to her own kindred in Liverpool or Scotland, but their paths did not run
parallel, they almost always intersected, so that when the one was on the
way north the other was homeward bound, to look out alone on "a horizon
of zero." Only a few of these visits are worth recording as of general
interest. Most of them were paid, a few received. In the autumn of 1846,
Margaret Fuller, sent from Emerson, called at Cheyne Row, and recorded
her impression of the master as "in a very sweet humour, full of wit and
pathos, without being overbearing," adding that she was "carried away by
the rich flow of his discourse"; and that "the hearty noble earnestness
of his personal bearing brought back the charm of his writing before she
wearied of it." A later visitor, Miss Martineau, his old helper in days
of struggle, was now thus esteemed: "Broken into utter wearisomeness,
a mind reduced to these three elements--imbecility, dogmatism, and
unlimited hope. I never in my life was more heartily bored with any
creature!" In 1847 there followed the last English glimpse of Jeffrey and
the last of Dr. Chalmers, who was full of enthusiasm about _Cromwell_;
then a visit to the Brights, John and Jacob, at Rochdale: with the former
he had "a paltry speaking match" on topics described as "shallow, totally
worthless to me," the latter he liked, recognising in him a culture and
delicacy rare with so much strength of will and independence of thought.
Later came a second visit from Emerson, then on a lecturing tour to
England, gathering impressions revived in his _English Traits_. "His
doctrines are too airy and thin," wrote Carlyle, "for the solid practical
heads of the Lancashire region. We had immense talkings with him here,
but found that he did not give us much to chew the cud upon. He is a
pure-minded man, but I think his talent is not quite so high as I had
anticipated." They had an interesting walk to Stonehenge together,
and Carlyle attended one of his friend's lectures, but with modified
approval, finding this serene "spiritual son" of his own rather "gone
into philanthropy and moonshine." Emerson's notes of this date, on the
other hand, mark his emancipation from mere discipleship. "Carlyle had
all the kleinstãdtlicher traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and
reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a
vast continent.... In him, as in Byron, one is more struck with the
rhetoric than with the matter.... There is more character than intellect
in every sentence, therein strangely resembling Samuel Johnson." The same
year Carlyle perpetrated one of his worst criticisms, that on Keats:--

  The kind of man he was gets ever more horrible to me. Force
  of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other
  force.... Such a structure of soul, it would once have been
  very evident, was a chosen "Vessel of Hell";

and in the next an ungenerously contemptuous reference to Macaulay's
_History_:--

  The most popular ever written. Fourth edition already,
  within perhaps four months. Book to which four hundred
  editions could not add any value, there being no depth of
  sense in it at all, and a very great quantity of rhetorical
  wind.

Landor, on the other hand, whom he visited later at Bath, he appreciated,
being "much taken with the gigantesque, explosive but essentially
chivalrous and almost heroic old man." He was now at ease about the sale
of his books, having, _inter alia_, received £600 for a new edition of
the _French Revolution_ and the _Miscellanies_. His journal is full of
plans for a new work on Democracy, Organisation of Labour, and Education,
and his letters of the period to Thomas Erskine and others are largely
devoted to politics.

[Footnote: This is one of the few instances in which further knowledge led
to a change for the better in Carlyle's judgment. In a letter to Emerson,
1840, he speaks disparagingly of Landor as "a wild man, whom no extent of
culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be
weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about
anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind
shows him this side or the other of the object: and _sides_ of an object
are all that he sees." _De te faliula._ Emerson answers defending Landor,
and indicating points of likeness between him and Carlyle.]

In 1846 he spent the first week of September in Ireland, crossing from
Ardrossan to Belfast, and then driving to Drogheda, and by rail to
Dublin, where in Conciliation Hall he saw O'Connell for the first time
since a casual glimpse at a radical meeting arranged by Charles Buller--a
meeting to which he had gone out of curiosity in 1834. O'Connell was
always an object of Carlyle's detestation, and on this occasion he does
not mince his words.

  Chief quack of the then world ... first time I had ever
  heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney
  ... the big beggar-man who had £15,000 a year, and, _proh
  pudor!_ the favour of English ministers instead of the
  pillory.

At Dundrum he met by invitation Carleton the novelist, with Mitchell and
Gavan Duffy,  the Young Ireland leaders whom he seems personally to have
liked, but he told Mitchell that he would probably be hanged, and said
during a drive about some flourishing and fertile fields of the Pale, "Ah!
Duffy, there you see the hoof of the bloody Saxon."

[Footnote: Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the "Conversations and Correspondence,"
now being published in the _Contemporary Review_, naturally emphasises
Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several expressions of
sympathy with the "Tenant Agitations"; but his demur to the _Reminiscences
of My Irish Journey_ being accepted as an accurate account of the writer's
real sentiments is of little avail in face of the letters to Emerson, more
strongly accentuating the same views, _e.g._ "Bothered almost to madness
with Irish balderdash.... '_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars,' I
sometimes advised, 'and sell them in Brazil as niggers!'--perhaps
Parliament on sweet constraint will allow you to advance them to be
niggers!"]

He returned from Kingston to Liverpool on the 10th, and so closed his
short and unsatisfactory trip. Three years later, July to August 6th,
1849, he paid a longer and final visit to the "ragged commonweal" or
"common woe," as Raleigh called it, landing at Dublin, and after some days
there passing on to Kildare, Kilkenny, Lismore, Waterford, beautiful
Killarney and its beggar hordes, and then to Limerick, Clare, Castlebar,
where he met W.E. Forster, whose acquaintance he had made two years
earlier at Matlock. At Gweedore in Donegal he stayed with Lord George
Hill, whom he respected, though persuaded that he was on the wrong road to
Reform by Philanthropy in a country where it had never worked; and then on
to half Scotch Derry. There, August 6th, he made an emphatic after-
breakfast speech to a half-sympathetic audience; the gist of it being that
the remedy for Ireland was not "emancipation" or "liberty," but to "cease
following the devil, as it had been doing for two centuries." The same
afternoon he escaped on board a Glasgow steamer, and landed safe at 2 A.M.
on the morning of the 7th. The notes of the tour, set down on his return
to Chelsea and republished in 1882, have only the literary merit of the
vigorous descriptive touches inseparable from the author's lightest
writing; otherwise they are mere rough-and-tumble jottings, with no
consecutive meaning, of a rapid hawk's-eye view of the four provinces.

But Carlyle never ceased to maintain the thesis they set forth, that
Ireland is, for the most part, a country of semi-savages, whose
staple trade is begging, whose practice is to lie, unfit not only
for self-government but for what is commonly called constitutional
government, whose ragged people must be coerced, by the methods of
Raleigh, of Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and
respect for law. At Westport, where "human swinery has reached its acme,"
he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred
hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel,
while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be
a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of
the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his
neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers
generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country
when he formulated his idea of the Home Rule that seemed to him most for
their good.

  Kildare Railway: big blockhead sitting with his dirty feet
  on seat opposite, not stirring them for one who wanted to
  sit there. "One thing we're all agreed on," said he; "we're
  very ill governed: Whig, Tory, Radical, Repealer, all all
  admit we're very ill-governed!" I thought to myself, "Yes,
  indeed; you govern yourself! He that would govern you well
  would probably surprise you much, my friend--laying a hearty
  horse-whip over that back of yours."

And a little later at Castlebar he declares, "Society here would have to
eat itself and end by cannibalism in a week, if it were not held up by
the rest of our Empire standing afoot." These passages are written in
the spirit which inspired his paper on "The Nigger Question" and the
aggressive series of assaults to which it belongs, on what he regarded as
the most prominent quackeries, shams, and pretence philanthropies of the
day. His own account of the reception of this work is characteristic:--

  In 1849, after an interval of deep gloom and bottomless
  dubitation, came _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, which
  unpleasantly astonished everybody, set the world upon the
  strangest suppositions--"Carlyle got deep into whisky," said
  some,--ruined my reputation according to the friendliest
  voices, and in effect divided me altogether from the mob of
  "Progress-of-the-species" and other vulgar; but were a great
  relief to my own conscience as a faithful citizen, and have
  been ever since.

These pamphlets alienated Mazzini and Mill, and provoked the assault
of the newspapers; which, by the author's confession, did something to
arrest and restrict the sale.

Nor was this indignation wholly unnatural. Once in his life, on occasion
of his being called to serve at a jury trial, Carlyle, with remarkable
adroitness, coaxed a recalcitrant juryman into acquiescence with the
majority; but coaxing as a rule was not his way. When he found himself in
front of what he deemed to be a falsehood his wont was to fly in its face
and tear it to pieces. His satire was not like that of Horace, who taught
his readers _ridendo dicere verum_, it was rather that of the elder
Lucilius or the later Juvenal; not that of Chaucer, who wrote--

  That patience is a virtue high is plain,
  Because it conquers, as the clerks explain,
  Things that rude valour never could attain,

but that of _The Lye_, attributed to Raleigh, or Swift's _Gulliver_ or
the letters of Junius. The method of direct denunciation has advantages:
it cannot be mistaken, nor, if strong enough, ignored; but it must lay
its account with consequences, and Carlyle in this instance found them
so serious that he was threatened at the height of his fame with
dethronement. Men said he had lost his head, gone back to the everlasting
"No," and mistaken swearing all round for political philosophy. The
ultimate value attached to the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ must depend to a
large extent on the view of the critic. It is now, however, generally
admitted on the one hand that they served in some degree to counteract
the rashness of Philanthropy; on the other, that their effect was marred
by more than the writer's usual faults of exaggeration. It is needless to
refer the temper they display to the troubles then gathering about his
domestic life. A better explanation is to be found in the public events
of the time.

The two years previous to their appearance were the Revolution years,
during which the European world seemed to be turned upside down. The
French had thrown out their _bourgeois_ king, Louis Philippe--"the
old scoundrel," as Carlyle called him,--and established their second
Republic. Italy, Hungary, and half Germany were in revolt against the old
authorities; the Irish joined in the chorus, and the Chartist monster
petition was being carted to Parliament. Upheaval was the order of the
day, kings became exiles and exiles kings, dynasties and creeds were
being subverted, and empires seemed rocking as on the surface of an
earthquake. They were years of great aspirations, with beliefs in all
manner of swift regeneration--

  Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo,

all varieties of doctrinaire idealisms. Mazzini failed at Rome, Kossuth
at Pesth; the riots of Berlin resulted in the restoration of the old
dull bureaucratic regime; Smith O'Brien's bluster exploded in a cabbage
garden; the Railway Bubble burst in the fall of the bloated king Hudson,
and the Chartism of the time evaporated in smoke. The old sham gods, with
Buonaparte of the stuffed eagle in front, came back; because, concluded
Carlyle, there was no man in the front of the new movement strong enough
to guide it; because its figure-heads were futile sentimentalists,
insurgents who could not win. The reaction produced by their failure had
somewhat the same effect on his mind that the older French Revolution had
on that of Burke: he was driven back to a greater degree than Mr. Froude
allows on practical conservatism and on the negations of which
the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ are the expression. To this series of
_pronunciamentos_ of political scepticism he meant to add another, of
which he often talks under the name of "Exodus from Houndsditch," boldly
stating and setting forth the grounds of his now complete divergence from
all forms of what either in England or Europe generally could be called
the Orthodox faith in Religion. He was, we are told, withheld from this
by the feeling that the teaching even of the priests he saw and derided
in Belgium or in Galway was better than the atheistic materialism which
he associated with the dominion of mere physical science. He may have
felt he had nothing definite enough to be understood by the people to
substitute for what he proposed to destroy; and he may have had a thought
of the reception of such a work at Scotsbrig. Much of the _Life of
Sterling_, however, is somewhat less directly occupied with the same
question, and though gentler in tone it excited almost as much clamour as
the _Pamphlets_, especially in the north. The book, says Carlyle himself,
was "utterly revolting to the religious people in particular (to my
surprise rather than otherwise). 'Doesn't believe in us either!' Not he
for certain; can't, if you will know." During the same year his almost
morbid dislike of materialism found vent in denunciations of the "Crystal
Palace" Exhibition of Industry; though for its main promoter, Prince
Albert, he subsequently entertained and expressed a sincere respect.

In the summer of 1851 the Carlyles went together to Malvern, where they
met Tennyson (whose good nature had been proof against some slighting
remarks on his verses), Sydney Dobell, then in the fame of his
"Roman," and other celebrities. They tried the "Water Cure," under the
superintendence of Dr. Gully, who received and treated them as guests;
but they derived little good from the process. "I found," says Carlyle,
"water taken as medicine to be the most destructive drug I had ever
tried." Proceeding northward, he spent three weeks with his mother, then
in her eighty-fourth year and at last growing feeble; a quiet time only
disturbed by indignation at "one ass whom I heard the bray of in some
Glasgow newspaper," comparing "our grand hater of shams" to Father
Gavazzi. His stay was shortened by a summons to spend a few days with the
Ashburtons at Paris on their return from Switzerland. Though bound by
a promise to respond to the call, Carlyle did not much relish it.
Travelling abroad was always a burden to him, and it was aggravated in
this case by his very limited command of the language for conversational
purposes. Fortunately, on reaching London he found that the poet Browning,
whose acquaintance he had made ten years before, was, with his wife, about
to start for the same destination, and he prevailed upon them, though
somewhat reluctant, to take charge of him.

[Footnote: Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life of Robert Browning_.]

The companionship was therefore not accidental, and it was of great
service. "Carlyle," according to Mrs. Browning's biographer, "would have
been miserable without Browning," who made all the arrangements for the
party, passed luggage through the customs, saw to passports, fought the
battles of all the stations, and afterwards acted as guide through the
streets of the great city. By a curious irony, two verse-makers and
admirers of George Sand made it possible for the would-be man of action to
find his way. The poetess, recalling the trip afterwards, wrote that she
liked the prophet more than she expected, finding his "bitterness only
melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." Browning himself continued through
life to regard Carlyle with "affectionate reverence." "He never ceased,"
says Mrs. Orr, "to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his
wife, or to believe that, in the matter of their domestic unhappiness, she
was the more responsible of the two.... He always thought her a hard
unlovable woman, and I believe little liking was lost between them ... Yet
Carlyle never rendered him that service--easy as it appears--which one man
of letters most justly values from another, that of proclaiming the
admiration which he privately professed for his work." The party started,
September 24th, and reached Dieppe by Newhaven, after a rough passage, the
effects of which on some fellow-travellers more unfortunate than himself
Carlyle describes in a series of recently-discovered jottings [Footnote:
Partially reproduced, _Pall Mall Gazette,_ April 9th 1890, with
illustrative connecting comments.] made on his return, October 2nd, to
Chelsea. On September 25th they reached Paris. Carlyle joined the
Ashburtons at Meurice's Hotel; there dined, went in the evening to the
Théâtre Français, cursed the play, and commented unpleasantly on General
Changarnier sitting in the stalls.

During the next few days he met many of the celebrities of the time, and
caricatured, after his fashion, their personal appearance, talk, and
manner. These criticisms are for the most part of little value. The
writer had in some of his essays shown almost as much capacity of
understanding the great Frenchmen of the last century as was compatible
with his Puritan vein; but as regards French literature since the
Revolution he was either ignorant or alien. What light could be thrown on
that interesting era by a man who could only say of the authors of _La
Comédie Humaine_ and _Consuelo_ that they were ministers in a Phallus
worship? Carlyle seems to have seen most of Thiers, whom he treats with
good-natured condescension, but little insight: "round fat body, tapering
like a ninepin into small fat feet, placidly sharp fat face, puckered
eyeward ... a frank, sociable kind of creature, who has absolutely
no malignity towards any one, and is not the least troubled with
self-seekings." Thiers talked with contempt of Michelet; and Carlyle,
unconscious of the numerous affinities between that historian of genius
and himself, half assented. Prosper Mérimée, on the other hand,
incensed him by some freaks of criticism, whether in badinage or in
earnest--probably the former. "Jean Paul," he said, getting on the theme
of German literature, "was a hollow fool of the first magnitude," and
Goethe was "insignificant, unintelligible, a paltry kind of Scribe
manqué." "I could stand no more of it, but lighted a cigar, and adjourned
to the street. 'You impertinent blasphemous blockhead!' this was sticking
in my throat: better to retire without bringing it out."

[Footnote: The two men were mutually antagonistic; Mérimée tried to read
the _French Revolution_, but flung the book aside in weariness or in
disdain.]

Of Guizot he writes, "Tartuffe, gaunt, hollow, resting on the everlasting
'No' with a haggard consciousness that it ought to be the everlasting
'Yea.'" "To me an extremely detestable kind of man." Carlyle missed
General Cavaignac, "of all Frenchmen the one" he "cared to see." In the
streets of Paris he found no one who could properly be called a gentleman.
"The truly ingenious and strong men of France are here (_i.e_. among the
industrial classes) making money, while the politician, literary, etc.
etc. class is mere play-actorism." His summary before leaving at the close
of a week, rather misspent, is: "Articulate-speaking France was altogether
without beauty or meaning to me in my then diseased mood; but I saw traces
of the inarticulate ... much worthier."

Back in London, he sent Mrs. Carlyle to the Grange (distinguishing
himself, in an interval of study at home, by washing the back area flags
with his own hands), and there joined her till the close of the year.
During the early part of the next he was absorbed in reading and planning
work. Then came an unusually tranquil visit to Thomas Erskine of
Linlathen, during which he had only to complain that the servants were
often obliged to run out of the room to hide their laughter at his
humorous bursts. At the close of August 1852 he embarked on board a Leith
steamer bound for Rotterdam, on his first trip to Germany. Home once
more, in October, he found chaos come, and seas of paint overwhelming
everything; "went to the Grange, and back in time to witness from Bath
House the funeral, November 18th, of the great Duke," remarking, "The
one true man of official men in England, or that I know of in Europe,
concludes his long course.... Tennyson's verses are naught. Silence alone
is respectable on such an occasion." In March, again at the Grange, he
met the Italian minister Azeglio, and when this statesman disparaged
Mazzini--a thing only permitted by Carlyle to himself--he retorted with
the remark, "Monsieur, vous ne le connaissez pas du tout, du tout." At
Chelsea, on his return, the fowl tragic-comedy reached a crisis, "the
unprotected male" declaring that he would shoot them or poison them. "A
man is not a Chatham nor a Wallenstein; but a man has work too, which the
Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two and sixpence
worth of bantams.... They must either withdraw or die." Ultimately his
mother-wife came to the rescue of her "babe of genius"; the cocks
were bought off, and in the long-talked-of sound-proof room the last
considerable work of his life, though painfully, proceeded. Meanwhile
"brother John" had married, and Mrs. Carlyle went to visit the couple at
Moffat. While there bad tidings came from Scotsbrig, and she dutifully
hurried off to nurse her mother-in-law through an attack from which the
strong old woman temporarily rallied. But the final stroke could not be
long delayed. When Carlyle was paying his winter visit to the Grange in
December news came that his mother was worse, and her recovery
despaired of; and, by consent of his hostess, he hurried off to
Scotsbrig,--"mournful leave given me by the Lady A., mournful
encouragement to be speedy, not dilatory,"--and arrived in time to hear
her last words. "Here is Tom come to bid you good-night, mother," said
John. "As I turned to go, she said, 'I'm muckle obleeged to you.'" She
spoke no more, but passed from sleep after sleep of coma to that of
death, on Sunday, Christmas Day, 1853. "We can only have one mother,"
exclaimed Byron on a like event--the solemn close of many storms. But
between Margaret Carlyle and the son of whom she was so proud there had
never been a shadow. "If," writes Mr. Froude, "she gloried in his fame
and greatness, he gloried more in being her son, and while she lived she,
and she only, stood between him and the loneliness of which he so often
and so passionately complained."

Of all Carlyle's letters none are more tenderly beautiful than those
which he sent to Scotsbrig. The last, written on his fifty-eighth
birthday, December 4th, which she probably never read, is one of the
finest. The close of their wayfaring together left him solitary; his
"soul all hung with black," and, for months to come, everything around
was overshadowed by the thought of his bereavement. In his journal of
February 28th 1854, he tells us that he had on the Sunday before seen a
vision of Mainhill in old days, with mother, father, and the rest getting
dressed for the meeting-house. "They are gone now, vanished all; their
poor bits of thrifty clothes, ... their pious struggling efforts; their
little life, it is all away. It has all melted into the still sea, it
was rounded with a sloop." The entry ends, as fitting, with a prayer: "O
pious mother! kind, good, brave, and truthful soul as I have ever found,
and more than I have elsewhere found in this world. Your poor Tom, long
out of his schooldays now, has fallen very lonely, very lame and broken
in this pilgrimage of his; and you cannot help him or cheer him ... any
more. From your grave in Ecclefechan kirkyard yonder you bid him trust in
God; and that also he will try if he can understand and do."




CHAPTER VI

THE MINOTAUR

[1853-1866]

Carlyle was now engaged on a work which required, received, and well nigh
exhausted all his strength, resulting in the greatest though the least
generally read of all his books. _Cromwell_ achieved, he had thrown
himself for a season into contemporary politics, condescending even,
contrary to his rule, to make casual contributions to the Press; but his
temper was too hot for success in that arena, and his letters of the time
are full of the feeling that the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ had set the world
against him. Among his generous replies to young men asking advice, none
is more suggestive than that in which he writes from Chelsea (March 9th
1850):--

  If my books teach you anything, don't mind in the least
  whether other people believe it or not; but lay it to
  heart ... as a real message left with you, which you must
  set about fulfilling, whatever others do.... And be not
  surprised that "people have no sympathy with you." That is
  an accompaniment that will attend you all your days if you
  mean to live an earnest life.

But he himself, though "ever a fighter," felt that, even for him, it was
not good to be alone. He decided there "was no use railing in vain like
Timon"; he would go back again from the present to the past, from the
latter days of discord to seek countenance in some great figure of
history, under whose ægis he might shelter the advocacy of his views.
Looking about for a theme, several crossed his mind. He thought of
Ireland, but that was too burning a subject; of William the Conqueror, of
Simon de Montfort, the Norsemen, the Cid; but these may have seemed to
him too remote. Why, ask patriotic Scotsmen, did he not take up his and
their favourite Knox? But Knox's life had been fairly handled by M'Crie,
and Carlyle would have found it hard to adjust his treatment of that
essentially national "hero" to the "Exodus from Houndsditch." "Luther"
might have been an apter theme; but there too it would have been a strain
to steer clear of theological controversy, of which he had had enough.
Napoleon was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste. Looking over
Europe in more recent times, he concluded that the Prussian monarchy had
been the main centre of modern stability, and that it had been made so by
its virtual creator, Friedrich II., called the Great. Once entertained,
the subject seized him as with the eye of Coleridge's mariner, and, in
spite of manifold efforts to get free, compelled him, so that he could
"not choose but" write on it. Again and again, as the magnitude of the
task became manifest, we find him doubting, hesitating, recalcitrating,
and yet captive. He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own Memoirs
and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains through which he had to dig.
"Prussian Friedrich and the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust
lay crushing me with the continual question, Dare I try it? Dare I not?"
At length, gathering himself together for the effort, he resolved, as
before in the case of Cromwell, to visit the scenes of which he was to
write. Hence the excursion to Germany of 1852, during which, with the
kindly-offered guidance of Mr. Neuberg, an accomplished German admirer of
some fortune resident in London, he made his first direct acquaintance
with the country of whose literature he had long been himself the English
interpreter. The outlines of the trip may be shortly condensed from the
letters written during its progress to his wife and mother. He reached
Rotterdam on September 1st; then after a night made sleepless by "noisy
nocturnal travellers and the most industrious cocks and clamorous bells"
he had ever heard, he sailed up the river to Bonn, where he consulted
books, saw "Father Arndt," and encountered some types of the German
professoriate, "miserable creatures lost in statistics." There he met
Neuberg, and they went together to Rolandseck, to the village of Hunef
among the Sieben-Gebirge, and then on to Coblenz. After a detour to Ems,
which Carlyle, comminating the gaming-tables, compared to Matlock, and
making a pilgrimage to Nassau as the birthplace of William the Silent,
they rejoined the Rhine and sailed admiringly up the finest reach of the
river. From Mainz the philosopher and his guide went on to Frankfort,
paid their respects to Goethe's statue and the garret where _Werther_ was
written, the Judengasse, "grimmest section of the Middle Ages," and the
Römer--election hall of the old Kaisers; then to Homburg, where they saw
an old Russian countess playing "gowpanfuls of gold pieces every
stake," and left after no long stay, Carlyle, in a letter to Scotsbrig,
pronouncing the fashionable Badeort to be the "rallying-place of such a
set of empty blackguards as are not to be found elsewhere in the world."
We find him next at Marburg, where he visited the castle of Philip of
Hesse. Passing through Cassel, he went to Eisenach, and visited the
neighbouring Wartburg, where he kissed the old oaken table, on which the
Bible was made an open book for the German race, and noted the hole in
the plaster where the inkstand had been thrown at the devil and his
noises; an incident to which eloquent reference is made in the lectures
on "Heroes." Hence they drove to Gotha, and lodged in Napoleon's room
after Leipzig. Then by Erfurt, with more Luther memories, they took rail
to Weimar, explored the houses of Goethe and of Schiller, and dined by
invitation with the Augustenburgs; the Grand Duchess, with sons and
daughters, conversing in a Babylonish dialect, a melange of French,
English, and German. The next stage seems to have been Leipzig, then in
a bustle with the Fair. "However," says Carlyle, "we got a book or two,
drank a glass of wine in Auerbach's keller, and at last got off safe to
the comparative quiet of Dresden." He ignores the picture galleries; and
makes a bare reference to the palaces from which they steamed up the Elbe
to the heart of Saxon Switzerland. There he surveyed Lobositz, first
battle-field of the Seven Years' War, and rested at the romantic mountain
watering-place of Töplitz. "He seems," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, "to be getting
very successfully through his travels, thanks to the patience and
helpfulness of Neuberg. He makes in every letter frightful _misereres_
over his sleeping accommodations; but he cannot conceal that he is really
pretty well." The writer's own _misereres_ are as doleful and nearly
as frequent; but she was really in much worse health. From Töplitz the
companions proceeded in weary stellwagens to Zittau in Lusatia, and so on
to

  Herrnhut, the primitive city of the Moravian brethren: a
  place not bigger than Annan, but beautiful, pure, and quiet
  beyond any town on the earth, I daresay; and, indeed, more
  like a saintly dream of ideal Calvinism made real than a town
  of stone and lime.

Onward by "dreary moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred
"the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his
worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of
the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we have, October
1st:--

  I am dead stupid; my heart nearly choked out of me, and my
  head churned to pieces.... Berlin is loud almost as London,
  but in no other way great ... about the size of Liverpool,
  and more like Glasgow.

They spent a week there (sight-seeing being made easier by an
introduction from Lady Ashburton to the Ambassador), discovering at
length an excellent portrait of Fritz, meeting Tieck, Cornelius, Rauch,
Preuss, etc., and then got quickly back to London by way of Hanover,
Cologne, and Ostend. Carlyle's travels are always interesting, and would
be more so without the tiresome, because ever the same, complaints. Six
years later (1858) he made his second expedition to Germany, in the
company of two friends, a Mr. Foxton--who is made a butt--and the
faithful Neuberg. Of this journey, undertaken with a more exclusively
business purpose, and accomplished with greater dispatch, there are fewer
notes, the substance of which may be here anticipated. He sailed (August
21st) from Leith to Hamburg, admiring the lower Elbe, and then went out
of his way to accept a pressing invitation from the Baron Usedom and his
wife to the Isle of Rügen, sometimes called the German Isle of Wight. He
went there by Stralsund, liked his hosts and their pleasant place, where
for cocks crowing he had doves cooing; but in Putbus, the Richmond of the
island, he had to encounter brood sows as well as cochin-chinas. From
Rügen he went quickly south by Stettin to Berlin, then to Cüstrin to
survey the field of Zorndorf, with what memorable result readers of
_Friedrich_ know. His next halt was at Liegnitz, headquarters for
exploring the grounds of "Leuthen, the grandest of all the battles,"
and Molwitz--first of Fritz's fights--of which we hear so much in the
_Reminiscences_. His course lay on to Breslau, "a queer old city as ever
you heard of, high as Edinburgh or more so," and, by Landshut, through
the picturesque villages of the Riesen-Gebirge into Bohemia. There he
first put up at Pardubitz in a vile, big inn, for bed a "trough eighteen
inches too short, a mattress forced into it which cocked up at both
ends"--such as most travellers in remoter Germany at that period have
experienced. Carlyle was unfavourably impressed by the Bohemians; and
"not one in a hundred of them could understand a word of German. They
are liars, thieves, slatterns, a kind of miserable, subter-Irish
people,--Irish with the addition of ill-nature." He and his friends
visited the fields of Chotusitz and Kolin, where they found the "Golden
Sun," from which "the last of the Kings" had surveyed the ground, "sunk
to be the dirtiest house probably in Europe." Thence he made for Prague,
whose picturesque grandeur he could not help extolling. "Here," he
writes, enclosing the flower to his wife, "is an authentic wild pink
plucked from the battle-field. Give it to some young lady who practises
'the Battle of Prague' on her piano to your satisfaction." On September
15th he dates from Dresden, whence he spent a laborious day over Torgau.
Thereafter they sped on, with the usual tribulations, by Hochkirk,
Leipzig, Weissenfels, and Rossbach. Hurrying homeward, they were obliged
to decline another invitation from the Duchess at Weimar; and, making
for Guntershausen, performed the fatiguing journey from there to
Aix-la-Chapelle in one day, _i.e._ travelling often in slow trains from 4
A.M. to 7 P.M., a foolish feat even for the eupeptic. Carlyle visited the
cathedral, but has left a very poor account of the impression produced
on him by the simple slab sufficiently inscribed, "Carolo Magno." "Next
morning stand upon the lid of Charlemagne, abominable monks roaring
out their idolatrous grand music within sight." By Ostend and Dover he
reached home on the 22nd. A Yankee scamper trip, one might say, but for
the result testifying to the enormous energy of the traveller. "He speaks
lightly," says Mr. Froude, "of having seen Kolin, Torgau, etc. etc. No
one would guess from reading these short notices that he had mastered the
details of every field he visited; not a turn of the ground, not a brook,
not a wood ... had escaped him.... There are no mistakes. Military
students in Germany are set to learn Frederick's battles in Carlyle's
account of them."

During the interval between those tours there are few events of interest
in Carlyle's outer, or phases of his inner life which have not been
already noted. The year 1854 found the country ablaze with the excitement
of the Crimean War, with which he had as little sympathy as had Cobden
or Bright or the members of Sturge's deputation. He had no share in the
popular enthusiasm for what he regarded as a mere newspaper folly. All
his political leaning was on the side of Russia, which, from a safe
distance, having no direct acquaintance with the country, he always
admired as a seat of strong government, the representative of wise
control over barbarous races. Among the worst of these he reckoned the
Turk, "a lazy, ugly, sensual, dark fanatic, whom we have now had for 400
years. I would not buy the continuance of him in Europe at the rate of
sixpence a century." Carlyle had no more faith in the "Balance of power"
than had Byron, who scoffed at it from another, the Republican, side as
"balancing straws on kings' noses instead of wringing them off," _e.g._--

  As to Russian increase of strength, he writes, I would wait
  till Russia meddled with me before I drew sword to stop his
  increase of strength. It is the idle population of editors,
  etc., that has done all this in England. One perceives
  clearly that ministers go forward in it against their will.

Even our heroisms at Alma--"a terrible, almost horrible,
operation"--Balaclava, and Inkermann, failed to raise a glow in his mind,
though he admitted the force of Tennyson's ringing lines. The alliance
with the "scandalous copper captain," elected by the French, as the Jews
chose Barabbas,--an alliance at which many patriots winced--was to him
only an added disgrace. Carlyle's comment on the subsequent visit to
Osborne of Victor Hugo's "brigand," and his reception within the pale of
legitimate sovereignty was, "Louis Bonaparte has not been shot hitherto.
That is the best that can be said." Sedan brought most men round to his
mind about Napoleon III.: but his approval of the policy of the Czars
remains open to the criticism of M. Lanin. In reference to the next great
struggle of the age, Carlyle was in full sympathy with the mass of his
countrymen. He was as much enraged by the Sepoy rebellion as were those
who blew the ringleaders from the muzzles of guns. "Tongue cannot speak,"
he exclaims, in the spirit of Noel Paton's picture, before it was amended
or spoilt, "the horrors that were done on the English by these mutinous
hyaenas. Allow hyaenas to mutiny and strange things will follow." He
never seems to have revolved the question as to the share of his admired
Muscovy in instigating the revolt. For the barbarism of the north he had
ready apologies, for the savagery of the south mere execration; and he
writes of the Hindoos as he did, both before and afterwards, of the
negroes in Jamaica.

Three sympathetic obituary notices of the period expressed his softer
side. In April 1854, John Wilson and Lord Cockburn died at Edinburgh. His
estimate of the former is notable as that generally entertained, now that
the race of those who came under the personal spell of Christopher North
has passed:--

  We lived apart as in different centuries; though to say the
  truth I always loved Wilson, he had much nobleness of heart,
  and many traits of noble genius, but the central tie-beam
  seemed always wanting; very long ago I perceived in him the
  most irreconcilable contradictions--Toryism with
  Sansculottism, Methodism of a sort with total incredulity,
  etc.... Wilson seemed to me always by far the most gifted
  of our literary men, either then or still: and yet
  intrinsically he has written nothing that can endure.

Cockburn is referred to in contrast as "perhaps the last genuinely
national type of rustic Scotch sense, sincerity, and humour--a wholesome
product of Scotch dialect, with plenty of good logic in it." Later,
Douglas Jerrold is described as "last of the London wits, I hope the
last." Carlyle's letters during this period are of minor interest: many
refer to visits paid to distinguished friends and humble relatives, with
the usual complaints about health, servants, and noises. At Farlingay,
where he spent some time with Edward FitzGerald, translator of _Omar
Khayyam_, the lowing of cows took the place of cocks crowing. Here and
there occurs a, criticism or a speculation. That on his dreams is, in the
days of "insomnia," perhaps worth noting (F. iv. 154, 155); _inter alia_
he says:--"I have an impression that one always dreams, but that only in
cases where the nerves are disturbed by bad health, which produces light
imperfect sleep, do they start into such relief as to force themselves on
our waking consciousness." Among posthumously printed documents of Cheyne
Row, to this date belongs the humorous appeal of Mrs. Carlyle for a
larger allowance of house money, entitled "Budget of a Femme Incomprise."
The arguments and statement of accounts, worthy of a bank auditor, were
so irresistible that Carlyle had no resource but to grant the request,
_i.e._ practically to raise the amount to £230, instead of £200 per
annum. It has been calculated that his reliable income even at this time
did not exceed £400, but the rent of the house was kept very low, £30:
he and his wife lived frugally, so that despite the expenses of the
noise-proof room and his German tour he could afford in 1857 to put a
stop to her travelling in second-class railway carriages; in 1860, when
the success of the first instalment of his great work made an end of
financial fears, to keep two servants; and in 1863 to give Mrs. Carlyle
a brougham. Few men have left on the whole so unimpeachable a record in
money matters.

In November 1854 there occurred an incident hitherto unrecorded in any
biography. The Lord Rectorship of the University of Glasgow having fallen
vacant, the "Conservative Club" of the year had put forward Mr. Disraeli
as successor to the honorary office. A small body of Mr. Carlyle's
admirers among the senior students on the other side nominated him,
partly as a tribute of respect and gratitude, partly in opposition to
a statesman whom they then distrusted. The nomination was, after much
debate, adopted by the so-called "Liberal Association" of that day;
and, with a curious irony, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ and
_Friedrich II._ was pitted, as a Radical, against the future promoter of
the Franchise of 1867 as a Tory. It soon appeared that his supporters
had underestimated the extent to which Mr. Carlyle had offended Scotch
theological prejudice and outraged the current Philanthropy. His name
received some sixty adherents, and had ultimately to be withdrawn. The
nomination was received by the Press, and other exponents of popular
opinion, with denunciations that came loudest and longest from the
leaders of orthodox Dissent, then arrogating to themselves the profession
of Liberalism and the initiation of Reform. Among the current expressions
in reference to his social and religious creeds were the following:--

  Carlyle's philanthropy is not that of Howard, his cure for
  national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving
  wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be
  described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong."
  He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down
  into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is
  a sham.... Elect him and you bid God-speed to Pantheism and
  spiritualism.

  [Footnote: Mr. Wylie states that "twice before his election by his
  own University he (Carlyle) had been invited to allow himself to
  be nominated for the office of Lord Rector, once by students in
  the University of Glasgow and once by those of Aberdeen: but both
  of these invitations he had declined." This as regards Glasgow is
  incorrect.]

  Mr. Carlyle neither possesses the talent nor the distinction, nor
  does he occupy the position which entitle a man to such an honour
  as the Rectorial Chair. The _Scotch Guardian_  writes: But for the
  folly exhibited in bringing forward Mr. Disraeli, scarcely any
  party within the College or out of it would have ventured to
  nominate a still more obnoxious personage. This is the first
  instance we have been able to discover in which the suffrages of
  the youth of the University have been sought for a candidate who
  denied in his writings that the revealed Word of God is "the way,
  the truth, the life." It is impossible to separate Mr. Carlyle
  from that obtrusive feature of his works in which the solemn
  verities of our holy religion are sneered at as wornout
  "biblicalities," "unbelievabilities," and religious profession is
  denounced as "dead putrescent cant." The reader of the _Life of
  Sterling_ is not left to doubt for a moment the author's malignant
  hostility to the religion of the Bible. In that work, saving faith
  is described as "stealing into heaven by the modern method of
  sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on earth," that is
  to say, by believing in the doctrines of the Gospels. How, after
  this, could the Principal and Professors of the University, the
  guardians of the faiths and morals of its inexperienced youth,
  accompany to the Common Hall, and allow to address the students a
  man who has degraded his powers to the life-labour of sapping and
  mining the foundations of the truth, and opened the fire of his
  fiendish raillery against the citadel of our best aspirations and
  dearest hopes?

In the result, two men of genius--however diverse--were discarded, and
a Scotch nobleman of conspicuous talent, always an active, if not
intrusive, champion of orthodoxy, was returned by an "overwhelming
majority." In answer to intelligence transmitted to Mr. Carlyle of these
events, the president of the Association of his supporters--who had
nothing on which to congratulate themselves save that only the benches
of the rooms in which they held their meetings had been riotously
broken,--received the following previously unpublished letter:--

  Chelsea, _16th December_ 1854.

  DEAR SIR--I have received your Pamphlet; and return many
  thanks for all your kindness to me. I am sorry to learn, as
  I do for the first time from this narrative, what angry
  nonsense some of my countrymen see good to write of me. Not
  being much a reader of Newspapers, I had hardly heard of the
  Election till after it was finished; and I did not know that
  anything of this melancholy element of Heterodoxy,
  "Pantheism," etc. etc., had been introduced into the matter.
  It is an evil, after its sort, this of being hated and
  denounced by fools and ignorant persons; but it cannot be
  mended for the present, and so must be left standing there.

  That another wiser class think differently, nay, that they
  alone have any real knowledge of the question, or any real
  right to vote upon it, is surely an abundant compensation.
  If that be so, then all is still right; and probably there
  is no harm done at all!--To you, and the other young
  gentlemen who have gone with you on this occasion, I can
  only say that I feel you have loyally meant to do me a great
  honour and kindness; that I am deeply sensible of your
  genial recognition, of your noble enthusiasm (which reminds
  me of my own young years); and that in fine there is no loss
  or gain of an Election which can in the least alter these
  valuable facts, or which is not wholly insignificant to me,
  in comparison with them. "Elections" are not a thing
  transacted by the gods, in general; and I have known very
  unbeautiful creatures "elected" to be kings, chief-priests,
  railway kings, etc., by the "most sweet voices," and the
  spiritual virtue that inspires these, in our time!

  Leaving all that, I will beg you all to retain your
  honourable good feelings towards me; and to think that if
  anything I have done or written can help any one of you in
  the noble problem of living like a wise man in these evil
  and foolish times, it will be more valuable to me than never
  so many Elections or Non-elections. With many good wishes
  and regards I heartily thank you all, and remain--Yours very
  sincerely,

  T. CARLYLE.

[Footnote: For the elucidation of some points of contact between Carlyle
and Lord Beaconsfield, _vide_ Mr. Froude's _Life_ of the latter.]

Carlyle's letters to strangers are always valuable, for they are terse
and reticent. In writing to weavers, like Bamford; to men in trouble, as
Cooper; to students, statesmen, or earnest inquirers of whatever degree,
a genuine sympathy for them takes the place of the sympathy for himself,
often too prominent in the copious effusions to his intimates. The letter
above quoted is of special interest, as belonging to a time from which
comparatively few survive; when he was fairly under weigh with a task
which seemed to grow in magnitude under his gaze. The _Life of Friedrich_
could not be a succession of dramatic scenes, like the _French
Revolution_, nor a biography like _Cromwell_, illustrated by the
surrounding events of thirty years. Carlyle found, to his dismay, that he
had involved himself in writing the History of Germany, and in a measure
of Europe, during the eighteenth century, a period perhaps the most
tangled and difficult to deal with of any in the world's annals. He was
like a man who, with intent to dig up a pine, found himself tugging at
the roots of an Igdrasil that twined themselves under a whole Hercynian
forest. His constant cries of positive pain in the progress of the work
are distressing, as his indomitable determination to wrestle with and
prevail over it is inspiring. There is no imaginable image that he does
not press into his service in rattling the chains of his voluntary
servitude. Above all, he groans over the unwieldy mass of his
authorities--"anti-solar systems of chaff."

  "I read old German books dull as stupidity itself--nay
  superannuated stupidity--gain with labour the dreariest
  glimpses of unimportant extinct human beings ... but when I
  begin operating: _how_ to reduce that widespread black
  desert of Brandenburg sand to a small human garden! ... I have
  no capacity of grasping the big chaos that lies around me,
  and reducing it to order. Order! Reducing! It is like
  compelling the grave to give up its dead!"

Elsewhere he compares his travail with the monster of his own creation
to "Balder's ride to the death kingdoms, through frozen rain, sound of
subterranean torrents, leaden-coloured air"; and in the retrospect of
the _Reminiscences_ touchingly refers to his thirteen years of rarely
relieved isolation. "A desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my whole
strength devoted to it ... withdrawn from all the world." He received few
visitors and had few correspondents, but kept his life vigorous by riding
on his horse Fritz (the gift of the Marshalls), "during that book, some
30,000 miles, much of it, all the winter part of it, under cloud of
night, sun just setting when I mounted. All the rest of the day I sat,
silent, aloft, insisting upon work, and such work, _invitissimâ Minervâ_,
for that matter." Mrs. Carlyle had her usual share of the sufferings
involved in "the awful _Friedrich_." "That tremendous book," she writes,
"made prolonged and entire devastation of any satisfactory semblance of
home life or home happiness." But when at last, by help of Neuberg and of
Mr. Larkin, who made the maps of the whole book, the first two volumes
were in type (they appeared in autumn 1858), his wife hailed them in a
letter sent from Edinburgh to Chelsea: "Oh, my dear, what a magnificent
book this is going to be, the best of all your books, forcible, clear, and
sparkling as the _French Revolution_; compact and finished as _Cromwell_.
Yes, you shall see that it will be the best of all your books, and small
thanks to it, it has taken a doing." On which the author naively purrs:
"It would be worth while to write books, if mankind would read them as
you." Later he speaks of his wife's recognition and that of Emerson--who
wrote enthusiastically of the art of the work, though much of it was
across his grain--as "the only bit of human criticism in which he could
discern lineaments of the thing." But the book was a swift success, two
editions of 2000 and another of 1000 copies being sold in a comparatively
brief space. Carlyle's references to this--after his return from another
visit to the north and the second trip to Germany--seen somewhat
ungracious:--

  Book ... much babbled over in newspapers ... no better to me
  than the barking of dogs ... officious people put reviews
  into my hands, and in an idle hour I glanced partly into
  these; but it would have been better not, so sordidly ignorant
  and impertinent were they, though generally laudatory.

[Footnote: Carlyle himself writes: "I felt well enough how it was crushing
down her existence, as it was crushing down my own; and the thought that
she had not been at the choosing of it, and yet must suffer so for it, was
occasionally bitter to me. But the practical conclusion always was, Get
done with it, get done with it! For the saving of us both that is the one
outlook. And sure enough, I did stand by that dismal task with all my time
and all my means; day and night wrestling with it, as with the ugliest
dragon, which blotted out the daylight and the rest of the world to me
till I should get it slain."]

But these notices recall the fact familiar to every writer, that while
the assailants of a book sometimes read it, favourable reviewers hardly
ever do; these latter save their time by payment of generally superficial
praise, and a few random quotations.

Carlyle scarcely enjoyed his brief respite on being discharged of the
first instalment of his book: the remainder lay upon him like a menacing
nightmare; he never ceased to feel that the work must be completed ere he
could be free, and that to accomplish this he must be alone. Never absent
from his wife without regrets, lamentations, contrite messages, and
childlike entreaties for her to "come and protect him," when she came
it was to find that they were better apart; for his temper was never
softened by success. "Living beside him," she writes in 1858, is "the
life of a weathercock in high wind." During a brief residence together
in a hired house near Aberdour in Fifeshire, she compares herself to a
keeper in a madhouse; and writes later from Sunny bank to her husband,
"If you could fancy me in some part of the house out of sight, my absence
would make little difference to you, considering how little I do see of
you, and how preoccupied you are when I do see you." Carlyle answers in
his touching strain, "We have had a sore life pilgrimage together, much
bad road. Oh, forgive me!" and sends her beautiful descriptions; but her
disposition, not wholly forgiving, received them somewhat sceptically.
"Byron," said Lady Byron, "can write anything, but he does not feel it";
and Mrs. Carlyle on one occasion told her "harsh spouse" that his fine
passages were very well written for the sake of future biographers:
a charge he almost indignantly repudiates. He was then, August 1860,
staying at Thurso Castle, the guest of Sir George Sinclair; a visit that
terminated in an unfortunate careless mistake about a sudden change of
plans, resulting in his wife, then with the Stanleys at Alderley,
being driven back to Chelsea and deprived of her promised pleasure and
requisite rest with her friends in the north.

The frequency of such incidents,--each apart capable of being palliated
by the same fallacy of division that has attempted in vain to justify the
domestic career of Henry VIII.,--points to the conclusion of Miss Gully
that Carlyle, though often nervous on the subject, acted to his wife as
if he were "totally inconsiderate of her health," so much so that she
received medical advice not to be much at home when he was in the stress
of writing. In January 1858 he writes to his brother John an anxious
letter in reference to a pain about a hand-breadth below the heart, of
which she had begun to complain, the premonitory symptom of the disease
which ultimately proved fatal; but he was not sufficiently impressed
to give due heed to the warning; nor was it possible, with his
long-engrained habits, to remove the Marah spring that lay under all the
wearisome bickerings, repentances, and renewals of offence. The "very
little herring" who declined to be made a part of Lady Ashburton's
luggage now suffered more than ever from her inanimate rival. The
highly-endowed wife of one of the most eminent philanthropists of
America, whose life was devoted to the awakening of defective intellects,
thirty-five years ago murmured, "If I were only an idiot!" Similarly Mrs.
Carlyle might have remonstrated, "Why was I not born a book!" Her letters
and journal teem to tiresomeness with the refrain, "I feel myself
extremely neglected for unborn generations." Her once considerable
ambitions had been submerged, and her own vivid personality overshadowed
by a man she was afraid to meet at breakfast, and glad to avoid at
dinner. A woman of immense talent and a spark of genius linked to a man
of vast genius and imperious will, she had no choice but to adopt his
judgments, intensify his dislikes, and give a sharper edge to his sneers.

Mr. Froude, who for many years lived too near the sun to see the sun,
and inconsistently defends many of the inconsistencies he has himself
inherited from his master, yet admits that Carlyle treated the Broad
Church party in the English Church with some injustice. His recorded
estimates of the leading theologians of the age, and personal relation to
them, are hopelessly bewildering. His lifelong friendship for Erskine of
Linlathen is intelligible, though he did not extend the same charity to
what he regarded as the muddle-headedness of Maurice (Erskine's spiritual
son), and keenly ridiculed the reconciliation pamphlet entitled
"Subscription no Bondage." The Essayists and Reviewers, "Septem contra
Christum," "should," he said, "be shot for deserting their posts"; even
Dean Stanley, their _amicus curioe,_ whom he liked, came in for a share
of his sarcasm; "there he goes," he said to Froude, "boring holes in the
bottom of the Church of England." Of Colenso, who was doing as much as
any one for the "Exodus from Houndsditch," he spoke with open contempt,
saying, "he mistakes for fame an extended pillory that he is standing
on"; and was echoed by his wife, "Colenso isn't worth talking about for
five minutes, except for the absurdity of a man making arithmetical
onslaughts on the Pentateuch with a bishop's little black silk apron on."
This is not the place to discuss the controversy involved; but we
are bound to note the fact that Carlyle was, by an inverted Scotch
intolerance, led to revile men rowing in the same boat as himself, but
with a different stroke. To another broad Churchman, Charles Kingsley,
partly from sympathy with this writer's imaginative power, he was more
considerate; and one of the still deeply religious freethinkers of the
time was among his closest friends. The death of Arthur Clough in 1861
left another blank in Carlyle's life: we have had in this century to
lament the comparatively early loss of few men of finer genius. Clough
had not, perhaps, the practical force of Sterling, but his work is of a
higher order than any of the fragments of the earlier favourite. Among
High Churchmen Carlyle commended Dr. Pusey as "solid and judicious," and
fraternised with the Bishop of Oxford; but he called Keble "an ape,"
and said of Cardinal Newman that he had "no more brains than an
ordinary-sized rabbit."

These years are otherwise marked by his most glaring political blunder.
The Civil War, then raging in America, brought, with its close, the
abolition of Slavery throughout the States, a consummation for which he
cared little, for he had never professed to regard the negroes as fit for
freedom; but this result, though inevitable, was incidental. As is known
to every one who has the remotest knowledge of Transatlantic history,
the war was in great measure a struggle for the preservation of National
Unity: but it was essentially more; it was the vindication of Law and
Order against the lawless and disorderly violence of those who, when
defeated at the polling-booth, flew to the bowie knife; an assertion of
Right as Might for which Carlyle cared everything: yet all he had to
say of it was his "Ilias Americana in nuce," published in _Macmillan's
Magazine_, August 1863.

  _Peter of the North_ (to Paul of the South): "Paul, you
  unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for
  life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going
  straight to Hell, you----"

  _Paul_: "Good words, Peter. The risk is my own. I am
  willing to take the risk. Hire you your servants by the
  month or the day, and get straight to Heaven; leave me to my
  own method."

  _Peter_: "No, I won't. I will beat your brains out
  first!" [And is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet
  manage it.]

This, except the _Prinzenraub_, a dramatic presentation of a dramatic
incident in old German history, was his only side publication during the
writing of _Friedrich_.

After the war ended and Emerson's letters of remonstrance had proved
prophetic, Carlyle is said to have confessed to Mr. Moncure Conway as
well as to Mr. Froude that he "had not seen to the bottom of the matter."
But his republication of this nadir of his nonsense was an offence,
emphasising the fact that, however inspiring, he is not always a safe
guide, even to those content to abide by his own criterion of success.

There remains of this period the record of a triumph and of a tragedy.
After seven years more of rarely intermitted toil, broken only by a few
visits, trips to the sea-shore, etc., and the distress of the terrible
accident to his wife,--her fall on a curbstone and dislocation of a
limb,--which has been often sufficiently detailed, he had finished his
last great work. The third volume of _Friedrich_ was published in May
1862, the fourth appeared in February 1864, the fifth and sixth in March
1865. Carlyle had at last slain his Minotaur, and stood before the
world as a victorious Theseus, everywhere courted and acclaimed, his
hard-earned rest only disturbed by a shower of honours. His position
as the foremost prose writer of his day was as firmly established in
Germany, where his book was at once translated and read by all readers of
history, as in England. Scotland, now fully awake to her reflected fame,
made haste to make amends. Even the leaders of the sects, bond and
"free," who had denounced him, were now eager to proclaim that he had
been intrinsically all along, though sometimes in disguise, a champion of
their faith. No men knew better how to patronise, or even seem to lead,
what they had failed to quell. The Universities made haste with their
burnt-offerings. In 1856 a body of Edinburgh students had prematurely
repeated the attempt of their forerunners in Glasgow to confer on him
their Lord Rectorship, and failed. In 1865 he was elected, in opposition
again to Mr. Disraeli, to succeed Mr. Gladstone, the genius of elections
being in a jesting mood. He was prevailed on to accept the honour, and,
later, consented to deliver in the spring of 1866 the customary Inaugural
Address. Mrs. Carlyle's anxiety on this occasion as to his success and
his health is a tribute to her constant and intense fidelity. He went
north to his Installation, under the kind care of encouraging friends,
imprimis of Professor Tyndall, one of his truest; they stopped on the road
at Fryston, with Lord Houghton, and there met Professor Huxley, who
accompanied them to Edinburgh. Carlyle, having resolved to speak and not
merely to read what he had to say, was oppressed with nervousness; and of
the event itself he writes: "My speech was delivered in a mood of defiant
despair, and under the pressure of nightmare. Some feeling that I was not
speaking lies alone sustained me. The applause, etc., I took for empty
noise, which it really was not altogether." The address, nominally on the
"Reading of Books," really a rapid autobiography of his own intellectual
career, with references to history, literature, religion, and the conduct
of life, was, as Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs. Carlyle,--save for some
difficulty the speaker had in making himself audible--"a perfect triumph."
His reception by one of the most enthusiastic audiences ever similarly
assembled marked the climax of a steadily-increasing fame. It may be
compared to the late welcome given to Wordsworth in the Oxford Theatre.
After four days spent with Erskine and his own brother James in Edinburgh,
he went for a week's quiet to Scotsbrig, and was kept there, lingering
longer than he had intended, by a sprained ankle, "blessed in the country
stillness, the purity of sky and earth, and the absence of all babble." On
April 20th he wrote his last letter to his wife, a letter which she never
read. On the evening of Saturday the 21st, when staying on the way south
at his sister's house at Dumfries, he received a telegram informing him
that the close companionship of forty years--companionship of struggle and
victory, of sad and sweet so strangely blent--was for ever at an end. Mrs.
Carlyle had been found dead in her carriage when driving round Hyde Park
on the afternoon of that day, her death (from heart-disease) being
accelerated by an accident to a favourite little dog. Carlyle felt as "one
who hath been stunned," hardly able to realise his loss. "They took me out
next day ... to wander in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and
anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation, 'My poor little
woman,' but no full gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come." On
the following Monday he set off with his brother for London. "Never for a
thousand years shall I forget that arrival hero of ours, my first
unwelcomed by her. She lay in her coffin, lovely in death. Pale death Hid
things not mine or ours had possession of our poor darling." On Wednesday
they returned, and on Thursday the 26th she was buried in the nave of the
old Abbey Kirk at Haddington, in the grave of her father The now desolate
old man, who had walked with her over many a stony road, paid the first of
his many regretful tributes in the epitaph inscribed over her tomb: in
which follows, after the name and date of birth:--

IN HER BRIGHT EXISTENCE SHE HAD MORE SORROWS THAN ARE COMMON, BUT ALSO
A SOFT INVINCIBILITY, A CAPACITY OF DISCERNMENT, AND A NOBLE LOYALTY OF
HEART WHICH ARE RARE. FOR 40 YEARS SHE WAS THE TRUE AND LOVING HELP-MATE
OF HER HUSBAND, AND BY ACT AND WORD UNWEARIEDLY FORWARDED HIM AS NONE
ELSE COULD IN ALL OF WORTHY THAT HE DID OR ATTEMPTED. SHE DIED AT
LONDON, 21ST APRIL 1866, SUDDENLY SNATCHED FROM HIM, AND THE LIGHT OF HIS
LIFE AS IF GONE OUT.

[Footnote: For the most interesting, loyally sympathetic, and
characteristic account of Carlyle's journey north on this occasion, and of
the incidents which followed, we may refer to _New fragments_, by John
Tyndall, just published.]




CHAPTER VII

DECADENCE

[1866-1881]

After this shock of bereavement Carlyle's days went by "on broken wing,"
never brightening, slowly saddening to the close; but lit up at intervals
by flashes of the indomitable energy that, starting from no vantage,
had conquered a world of thought, and established in it, if not a new
dynasty, at least an intellectual throne. Expressions of sympathy came
to him from all directions, from the Queen herself downwards, and he
received them with the grateful acknowledgment that he had, after all,
been loved by his contemporaries. When the question arose as to his
future life, it seemed a natural arrangement that he and his brother
John, then a childless widower who had retired from his profession with a
competence, should take up house together. The experiment was made, but,
to the discredit of neither, it proved a failure. They were in some
respects too much alike. John would not surrender himself wholly to the
will or whims even of one whom he revered, and the attempt was by mutual
consent abandoned; but their affectionate correspondence lasted through
the period of their joint lives. Carlyle, being left to himself in his
"gaunt and lonesome home," after a short visit to Miss Bromley, an
intimate friend of his wife, at her residence in Kent, accepted the
invitation of the second Lady Ashburton to spend the winter in her house
at Mentone. There he arrived on Christmas Eve 1866, under the kind convoy
of Professor Tyndall, and remained breathing the balmy air and gazing on
the violet sea till March of the following year. During the interval he
occupied himself in writing his _Reminiscences,_ drawing pen-and-ink
pictures of the country, steeped in beauty fit to soothe any sorrow save
such as his, and taking notes of some of the passers-by. Of the greatest
celebrity then encountered, Mr. Gladstone, he writes in his journal, in a
tone intensified as time went on: "Talk copious, ingenious,... a man
of ardent faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons
shape.... Man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed
by the Prince, or many Princes, of the Air." Back in Chelsea, he was
harassed by heaps of letters, most of which, we are told, he answered,
and spent a large portion of his time and means in charities.

Amid Carlyle's irreconcilable inconsistencies of theory, and sometimes
of conduct, he was through life consistent in practical benevolence. The
interest in the welfare of the working classes that in part inspired his
_Sartor, Chartism,_ and _Past and Present_ never failed him. He was
among the foremost in all national movements to relieve and solace their
estate. He was, further, with an amiable disregard of his own maxims,
over lenient towards the waifs and strays of humanity, in some instances
careless to inquire too closely into the causes of their misfortune or
the degree of their demerits. In his latter days this disposition grew
upon him: the gray of his own evening skies made him fuller of compassion
to all who lived in the shade. Sad himself, he mourned with those who
mourned; afflicted, he held out hands to all in affliction. Consequently
"the poor were always with him," writing, entreating, and personally
soliciting all sorts of alms, from advice and help to ready money. His
biographer informs us that he rarely gave an absolute refusal to any
of these various classes of beggars. He answered a letter which is a
manifest parody of his own surface misanthropy; he gave a guinea to a
ticket-of-leave-convict, pretending to be a decayed tradesman; and a
shilling to a blind man, whose dog took him over the crossing to a gin
shop. Froude remonstrated; "Poor fellow," was the answer, "I daresay he
is cold and thirsty." The memory of Wordsworth is less warmly cherished
among the dales of Westmoreland than that of Carlyle in the lanes of
Chelsea, where "his one expensive luxury was charity."

His attitude on political questions, in which for ten years he still took
a more or less prominent part, represents him on his sterner side. The
first of these was the controversy about Governor Eyre, who, having
suppressed the Jamaica rebellion by the violent and, as alleged, cruel
use of martial law, and hung a quadroon preacher called Gordon--the man
whether honest or not being an undoubted incendiary--without any law at
all, was by the force of popular indignation dismissed in disgrace, and
then arraigned for mis-government and illegality. In the movement, which
resulted in the governor's recall and impeachment, there was doubtless
the usual amount of exaggeration--represented by the violent language
of one of Carlyle's minor biographers: "There were more innocent people
slain than at Jeffreys' Bloody Assize"; "The massacre of Glencoe was
nothing to it"; "Members of Christian Churches were flogged," etc.
etc.--but among its leaders there were so many men of mark and celebrity,
men like John S. Mill, T. Hughes, John Bright, Fawcett, Cairnes, Goldwin
Smith, Herbert Spencer, and Frederick Harrison, that it could not be set
aside as a mere unreasoning clamour. It was a hard test of Carlyle's
theory of strong government; and he stood to his colours. Years before,
on John Sterling suggesting that the negroes themselves should be
consulted as to making a permanent engagement with their masters, he had
said, "I never thought the rights of the negroes worth much discussing
in any form. Quashee will get himself made a slave again, and with
beneficent whip will be compelled to work." On this occasion he regarded
the black rebellion in the same light as the Sepoy revolt. He organised
and took the chair of a "Defence Committee," joined or backed by Ruskin,
Henry Kingsley, Tyndall, Sir R. Murchison, Sir T. Gladstone, and others.
"I never," says Mr. Froude, "knew Carlyle more anxious about anything."
He drew up a petition to Government and exerted himself heart and soul
for the "brave, gentle, chivalrous, and clear man," who when the ship was
on fire "had been called to account for having flung a bucket or two of
water into the hold beyond what was necessary." He had damaged some of
the cargo perhaps, but he had saved the ship, and deserved to be made
"dictator of Jamaica for the next twenty-five years," to govern after
the model of Dr. Francia in Paraguay. The committee failed to get
Eyre reinstalled or his pension restored; but the impeachment was
unsuccessful.

The next great event was the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, by the
Tories, educated by Mr. Disraeli to this method of "dishing the Whigs,"
by outbidding them in the scramble for votes. This instigated the famous
tract called _Shooting Niagara_, written in the spirit of the _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_--Carlyle's final and unqualified denunciation of this
concession to Democracy and all its works. But the upper classes in
England seemed indifferent to the warning. "Niagara, or what you like,"
the author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, "we will
at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when Church and State have
gone." A _mot_ emphatically of the decadence.

Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions being a means of
bringing the Irish question within the range of practical politics.

  I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of
  those Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house
  had decided to expel and extirpate the human inhabitants,
  which latter seemed to have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor
  arsenic, and are trying to prevail by the method of love.

Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland for text and Cromwell's
storm of Drogheda for example, or Otto von Bismarck, would have been, in
his view, in place at Dublin Castle.

In the next great event of the century, the close of the greatest
European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which pleased Cato pleased
also the gods. Carlyle, especially in his later days, had a deepening
confidence in the Teutonic, a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He
regarded the contest between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, and
wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with exultation. When
a feeling spread in this country, naming itself sympathy for the
fallen,--really half that, the other half, as in the American war, being
jealousy of the victor,--and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a
decisive letter to the _Times_, November 11th 1870, tracing the sources
of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV., and ridiculing the
prevailing sentiment about the recaptured provinces of Lothringen and
Elsass. With a possible reference to Victor Hugo and his clients, he
remarks--

  They believe that they are the "Christ of Nations."... I
  wish they would inquire whether there might not be a
  Cartouche of nations. Cartouche had many gallant
  qualities--had many fine ladies begging locks of his hair
  while the indispensable gibbet was preparing. Better he
  should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, who has
  him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part
  of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and
  try to become again a Chevalier Bayard. All Europe does
  _not_ come to the rescue in gratitude for the heavenly
  illumination it is getting from France: nor could all Europe
  if it did prevent that awful Chancellor from having his own
  way. Metz and the boundary fence, I reckon, will be
  dreadfully hard to get out of that Chancellor's hands
  again.... Considerable misconception as to Herr von Bismarck
  is still prevalent in England. He, as I read him, is not a
  person of Napoleonic ideas, but of ideas quite superior to
  Napoleonic.... That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid
  Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become
  Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious,
  gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive
  France, seems to me the hopefulest fact that has occurred in
  my time.

Carlyle seldom wrote with more force, or with more justice. Only, to be
complete, his paper should have ended with a warning. He has done more
than any other writer to perpetuate in England the memories of the great
thinkers and actors--Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Körner, Stein, Goethe,--who
taught their countrymen how to endure defeat and retrieve adversity. Who
will celebrate their yet undefined successors, who will train Germany
gracefully to bear the burden of prosperity? Two years later Carlyle
wrote or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to shake, his
historical sketch of the _Early Kings of Norway_, showing no diminution
of power either of thought or expression, his estimates of the three
Hakons and of the three Olafs being especially notable; and a paper
on _The Portraits of John Knox_, the prevailing dull gray of which is
relieved by a radiant vision of Mary Stuart.

He was incited to another public protest, when, in May 1877, towards the
close of the Russo-Turkish war, he had got, or imagined himself to have
got, reliable information that Lord Beaconsfield, then Prime Minister,
having sent our fleet to the Dardanelles, was planning to seize Gallipoli
and throw England into the struggle. Carlyle never seems to have
contemplated the possibility of a Sclavo-Gallic alliance against the
forces of civilised order in Europe, and he chose to think of the Czars
as the representatives of an enlightened autocracy. We are here mainly
interested in the letter he wrote to the _Times_, as "his last public act
in this world,"--the phrase of Mr. Froude, who does not give the letter,
and unaccountably says it "was brief, not more than three or four lines."
It is as follows:--

  Sir--A rumour everywhere prevails that our miraculous
  Premier, in spite of the Queen's Proclamation of Neutrality,
  intends, under cover of care for "British interests," to
  send the English fleet to the Baltic, or do some other feat
  which shall compel Russia to declare war against England.
  Latterly the rumour has shifted from the Baltic and become
  still more sinister, on the eastern side of the scene, where
  a feat is contemplated  that will force, not Russia only,
  but all Europe, to declare war against us. This latter I
  have come to know as an indisputable fact; in our present
  affairs and outlooks surely a grave one.

  As to "British interests" there is none visible or
  conceivable to me, except taking strict charge of our route
  to India by Suez and Egypt, and for the rest, resolutely
  steering altogether clear of any copartnery with the Turk in
  regard to this or any other "British interest" whatever. It
  should be felt by England as a real ignominy to be connected
  with such a Turk at all. Nay, if we still had, as we ought
  to have, a wish to save him from perdition and annihilation
  in God's world, the one future for him that has any hope in
  it is even now that of being conquered by the Russians, and
  gradually schooled and drilled into peaceable attempt at
  learning to be himself governed. The newspaper outcry
  against Russia is no more respectable to me than the howling
  of Bedlam, proceeding as it does from the deepest ignorance,
  egoism, and paltry national jealousy.

  These things I write, not on hearsay, but on accurate
  knowledge, and to all friends of their country will
  recommend immediate attention to them while there is yet
  time, lest in a few weeks the maddest and most criminal
  thing that a British government could do, should be done
  and all Europe kindle into flames of war.--I am, etc.

  T. CARLYLE.
  5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea,
  _May 4th._

Meanwhile honours without stint were being rendered to the great author
and venerable sage. In 1868 he had by request a personal interview with
the Queen, and has left, in a letter, a graphic account of the interview
at the Deanery of Westminster. Great artists as Millais, Watts, and
Boehm vied with one another, in painting or sculpture, to preserve his
lineaments; prominent reviews to record their impression of his work,
and disciples to show their gratitude. One of these, Professor Masson
of Edinburgh, in memory of Carlyle's own tribute to Goethe, started a
subscription for a medal, presented on his eightieth birthday; but he
valued more a communication of the same date from Prince Bismarck. Count
Bernstoff from Berlin wrote him (1871) a semi-official letter of thanks
for the services he had conferred on Germany, and in 1874 he was
prevailed on to accept the Prussian "Ordre pour le mérite." In the same
year Mr. Disraeli proposed, in courteous oblivion of bygone hostilities,
to confer on him a pension and the "Order of the Grand Cross of Bath," an
emolument and distinction which Carlyle, with equal courtesy, declined.
To the Countess of Derby, whom he believed to be the originator of the
scheme, he (December 30th) expressed his sense of the generosity of the
Premier's letter: "It reveals to me, after all the hard things I have
said of him, a now and unexpected stratum of genial dignity and manliness
of character." To his brother John he wrote: "I do, however, truly admire
the magnanimity of Dizzy in regard to me. He is the only man I almost
never spoke of without contempt ... and yet see here he comes with a
pan of hot coals for my guilty head." That he was by no means gagged by
personal feeling or seduced in matters of policy is evident from the
above-quoted letter to the _Times_; but he liked Disraeli better than
he did his great rival; the one may have bewildered his followers, the
other, according to his critic's view, deceived himself--the lie, in
Platonic phrase, had got into the soul, till, to borrow an epigram, "he
made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice." "Carlyle," says
Mr. Froude, "did not regard Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who,
knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into
specious sentiments, but as the representative of the numerous cants of
the age ... differing from others in that the cant seemed true to him.
He in fact believed him to be one of those fatal figures created by
England's evil genius to work irreparable mischief." It must be admitted
that Carlyle's censures are so broadcast as to lose half their sting.
In uncontroversial writing, it is enough to note that his methods of
reforming the world and Mr. Gladstone's were as far as the poles asunder;
and the admirers of the latter may console themselves with the reflection
that the censor was, at the same time, talking with equal disdain of the
scientific discoverers of the age--conspicuously of Mr. Darwin, whom he
describes as "evolving man's soul from frog spawn," adding, "I have
no patience with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other
criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose _Adam Bede_ he pronounced
"simply dull," display a curious limitation or obtuseness of mind.

One of the pleasantest features of his declining years is the ardour of
his attachment to the few staunch friends who helped to cheer and console
them. He had a sincere regard for Fitzjames Stephen, "an honest man with
heavy strokes"; for Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he said in effect, "Your
duty one day will be to take away that bauble and close the doors of
the House of Discord"; for Tyndall always; for Lecky, despite their
differences; for Moncure Conway, athwart the question of "nigger"
philanthropies; for Kingsley and Tennyson and Browning, the last of whom
was a frequent visitor till near the end. Froude he had bound to his soul
by hoops of steel; and a more faithful disciple and apostle, in intention
always, in practice in the main (despite the most perplexing errors of
judgment), no professed prophet ever had. But Carlyle's highest praise
is reserved for Ruskin, whom he regarded as no mere art critic, but as a
moral power worthy to receive and carry onward his own "cross of fire."
The relationship between the two great writers is unchequered by any
shade of patronage on the one hand, of jealousy or adulation on the
other. The elder recognised in the younger an intellect as keen, a spirit
as fearless as his own, who in the Eyre controversy had "plunged his
rapier to the hilt in the entrails of the Blatant Beast," _i.e._ Popular
Opinion. He admired all Ruskin's books; the _Stones of Venice,_ the most
solid structure of the group, he named "Sermons in Stones"; he resented
an attack on _Sesame and Lilies_ as if the book had been his own; and
passages of the _Queen of the Air_ went into his heart "like arrows." The
_Order of the Rose_ has attempted a practical embodiment of the review
contemplated by Carlyle, as a counteractive to the money making practice
and expediency-worships of the day.

Meanwhile he had been putting his financial affairs in order. In 1867,
on return from Mentone, he had recorded his bequest of the revenues of
Graigenputtock for the endowment of three John Welsh bursaries in the
University of Edinburgh. In 1873 he made his will, leaving John Forster
and Froude his literary executors: a legacy of trust which, on the death
of the former, fell to the latter, to whose discretion, by various later
bequests, less and less limited, there was confided the choice--at
last almost made a duty--of editing and publishing the manuscripts and
journals of himself and his wife.

Early in his seventy-third year (December 1867) Carlyle quotes, "Youth is
a garland of roses," adding, "I did not find it such. 'Age is a crown of
thorns.' Neither is this altogether true for me. If sadness and sorrow
tend to loosen us from life, they make the place of rest more desirable."
The talk of Socrates in the _Republic_, and the fine phrases in Cicero's
_De Senectute_, hardly touch on the great grief, apart from physical
infirmities, of old age--its increasing solitariness. After sixty, a man
may make disciples and converts, but few new friends, while the old ones
die daily; the "familiar faces" vanish in the night to which there is no
morning, and leave nothing in their stead.

During these years Carlyle's former intimates were falling round him like
the leaves from an autumn tree, and the kind care of the few survivors,
the solicitous attention of his niece, nurse, and amanuensis, Mary
Aitken, yet left him desolate. Clough had died, and Thomas Erskine, and
John Forster, and Wilberforce, with whom he thought he agreed, and Mill,
his old champion and ally, with whom he so disagreed that he
almost maligned his memory--calling one of the most interesting of
autobiographies "the life of a logic-chopping machine." In March 1876 he
attended the funeral of Lady Augusta Stanley; in the following month his
brother Aleck died in Canada; and in 1878 his brother John at Dumfries.
He seemed destined to be left alone; his physical powers were waning. As
early as 1868 he and his last horse had their last ride together; later,
his right hand failed, and he had to write by dictation. In the gathering
gloom he began to look on death as a release from the shreds of life, and
to envy the old Roman mode of shuffling off the coil. His thoughts turned
more and more to Hamlet's question of the possible dreams hereafter, and
his longing for his lost Jeannie made him beat at the iron gates of the
"Undiscovered Country" with a yearning cry; but he could get no answer
from reason, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, least
of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven "by way of mesmeric and
spiritualistic trances." His question and answer are always--

  Strength quite a stranger to me.... Life is verily a
  weariness on those terms. Oftenest I feel willing to go, were
  my time come. Sweet to rejoin, were it only in eternal sleep,
  those that are away. That ... is now and then the whisper
  of my worn-out heart, and a kind of solace to me. "But why
  annihilation or eternal sleep?" I ask too. They and I are
  alike in the will of the Highest.

"When," says Mr. Froude, "he spoke of the future and its uncertainties,
he fell back invariably on the last words of his favourite hymn--

  Wir heissen euch hoffen."

His favourite quotations in those days were Macbeth's "To-morrow and
to-morrow and to-morrow"; Burns's line, "Had we never lo'ed sae
kindly,"--thinking of the tomb which he was wont to kiss in the gloamin'
in Haddington Church,--the lines from "The Tempest" ending, "our little
life is rounded with a sleep," and the dirge in "Cymbeline." He lived on
during the last years, save for his quiet walks with his biographer about
the banks of the Thames, like a ghost among ghosts, his physical life
slowly ebbing till, on February 4th 1881, it ebbed away. His remains
were, by his own desire, conveyed to Ecclefechan and laid under the
snow-clad soil of the rural churchyard, beside the dust of his kin. He
had objected to be buried, should the request be made (as it was by Dean
Stanley), in Westminster Abbey:[greek: andron gar epiphanon pasa gae
taphos.]

Of no man whose life has been so laid bare to us is it more difficult to
estimate the character than that of Thomas Carlyle; regarding no one of
equal eminence, with the possible exception of Byron, has opinion been
so divided. After his death there was a carnival of applause from his
countrymen in all parts of the globe, from Canton to San Francisco. Their
hot zeal, only equalled by that of their revelries over the memory of
Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer
than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one
perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist":
"Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
will be heard no more": the _Scotsman_ newspaper writes of him as
"probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the volcanic
glare of his _French Revolution_ all Epics, ancient and modern, grow pale
and shadowy,... his like is not now left in the world." More recently a
stalwart Aberdonian, on helping to put a bust into a monument, exclaims
in a strain of genuine ardour, "I knew Carlyle, and I aver to you that
his heart was as large and generous as his brain was powerful; that
he was essentially a most lovable man, and that there were depths of
tenderness, kindliness, benevolence, and most delicate courtesy in him,
with all his seeming ruggedness and sternness, such as I have found
throughout my life rarely in any human being."

On the other side, a little later, after the publication of the
_Reminiscences_, _Blackwood_ denounced the "old man eloquent" as "a
blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were the only person who knew good
from bad. ... Every one and every thing dealt with in his _History_ is
treated in the tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The _World_
remarks that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthumous
depreciation for a factitious fame; "but the game of venomous
recrimination was begun by himself.... There is little that is
extraordinary, still less that is heroic in his character. He had no
magnanimity about him ... he was full of littleness and weakness, of
shallow dogmatism and of blustering conceit." The _Quarterly_,
after alluding to Carlyle's style "as the eccentric expression of
eccentricity," denounces his choice of "heroes" as reckless of morality.
According to the same authority, he "was not a deep thinker, but he was a
great word-painter ... he has the inspiration as well as the contortions
of the Sibyl, the strength as well as the nodosities of the oak. ... In
the _French Revolution_ he rarely condescends to plain narrative ... it
resembles a drama at the Porte St. Martin, in so many acts and tableaux.
... The raisers of busts and statues in his honour are winging and
pointing new arrows aimed at the reputation of their most distinguished
contemporaries, and doing their best to perpetuate a baneful influence."
_Fraser_, no longer edited by Mr. Froude, swells the chorus of dissent:
"Money, for which he cared little, only came in quantity after the death
of his wife, when everything became indifferent to an old and life-weary
man. Who would be great at such a price? Who would buy so much misery
with so much labour? Most men like their work. In his Carlyle seems to
have found the curse imposed upon Adam.... He cultivated contempt of the
kindly race of men."

Ample texts for these and similar censures are to be found in the pages
of Mr. Froude, and he has been accused by Carlyle's devotees of having
supplied this material of malice prepense. No accusation was over more
ridiculously unjust. To the mind of every impartial reader, Froude
appears as one of the loyallest if one of the most infatuated of friends.
Living towards the close in almost daily communion with his master, and
in inevitable contact with his numerous frailties, he seems to have
revered him with a love that passeth understanding, and attributed to him
in good faith, as Dryden did in jest to the objects of his mock heroics,
every mental as well as every moral power, _e.g.,_ "Had Carlyle turned
his mind to it he would have been a great philologer." "A great
diplomatist was lost in Carlyle." "He would have done better as a man of
action than a man of words." By kicking the other diplomatists into the
sea, as he threatened to do with the urchins of Kirkcaldy! Froude's
panegyrics are in style and tone worthy of that put into the mouth of
Pericles by Thucydides, with which the modern biographer closes his
only too faithful record. But his claims for his hero--amounting to the
assertions that he was never seriously wrong; that he was as good as he
was great; that "in the weightier matters of the law his life had been
without speck or flaw"; that "such faults as he had were but as the
vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the
man"; that he never, in their intercourse, uttered a "trivial word, nor
one which he had better have left unuttered"--these claims will never be
honoured, for they are refuted in every third page after that on which
they appear:--_e.g._ in the Biography, vol. iv. p. 258, we are told that
Carlyle's "knowledge was not in points or lines but complete and solid":
facing the remark we read, "He liked _ill_ men like Humboldt, Laplace,
or the author of the _Vestiges_. He refused Darwin's transmutation of
species as unproved: he fought against it, though I could see he dreaded
that it might turn out true." The statement that "he always spoke
respectfully of Macaulay" is soon followed by criticisms that make us
exclaim, "Save us from such respect." The extraordinary assertion that
Carlyle was "always just in speaking of living men" is safeguarded by the
quotation of large utterances of injustice and contempt for Coleridge,
Byron, Shelley, Keats, Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and
disparaging patronage of Scott, of Jeffrey, of Mazzini, and of Mill. The
dog-like fidelity of Boswell and Eckermann was fitting to their attitude
and capacity; but the spectacle of one great writer surrendering himself
to another is a new testimony to the glamour of conversational genius.

[Footnote: This patronage of men, some quite, others nearly on his own
level, whom he delights in calling "small," "thin," and "poor," as if he
were the only big, fat, and rich, is more offensive than spurts of merely
dyspeptic abuse. As regards the libels on Lamb, Dr. Ireland has
endeavoured to establish that they were written in ignorance of the noble
tragedy of "Elia's" life; but this contention cannot be made good as
regards the later attacks.]

Carlyle was a great man, but a great man spoiled, that is, largely
soured. He was never a Timon; but, while at best a Stoic, he was at worst
a Cynic, emulous though disdainful, trying all men by his own standard,
and intolerant of a rival on the throne. To this result there contributed
the bleak though bracing environment of his early years, amid kindred
more noted for strength than for amenity, whom he loved, trusted, and
revered, but from whose grim creed, formally at least, he had to
tear himself with violent wrenches apart; his purgatory among the
border-ruffians of Annan school; his teaching drudgeries; his hermit
college days; ten years' struggle for a meagre competence; a lifelong
groaning under the Nessus shirt of the irritable yet stubborn
constitution to which genius is often heir; and above all his unusually
late recognition. There is a good deal of natural bitterness in reference
to the long refusal by the publishers of his first original work--an
idyll like Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_, and our finest prose poem in
philosophy. "Popularity," says Emerson, "is for dolls"; but it remains
to find the preacher, prophet, or poet wholly impervious to unjust
criticism. Neglect which crushes dwarfs only exasperates giants, but to
the latter also there is great harm done. Opposition affected Carlyle as
it affected Milton, it made him defiant, at times even fierce, to those
beyond his own inner circle. When he triumphed, he accepted his success
without a boast, but not without reproaches for the past. He was crowned;
but his coronation came too late, and the death of his wife paralysed his
later years.

Let those who from the Clyde to the Isis, from the Dee to the Straits,
make it their pastime to sneer at living worth, compare Ben Jonson's
lines,

  Your praise and dispraise are to me alike,
  One does not stroke me, nor the other strike,

with Samuel Johnson's, "It has been delayed till most of those whom I
wished to please are sunk into the grave, and success and failure are
empty sounds," and then take to heart the following:--

  The "recent return of popularity greater than ever," which
  I hear of, seems due alone to that late Edinburgh affair;
  especially to the Edinburgh "Address," and affords new proof
  of the singularly dark and feeble condition of "public
  judgment" at this time. No idea, or shadow of an idea, is in
  that Address but what had been set forth by me tens of times
  before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism
  receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to
  buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done
  with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me
  £10,000 a year and bray unanimously their hosannahs
  heaven-high for the rest of my life, who now would there be
  to get the smallest joy or profit from it? To me I feel as
  if it would be a silent sorrow rather, and would bring me
  painful retrospections, nothing else.

We require no open-sesame, no clumsy confidence from attaches flaunting
their intimacy, to assure us that there were "depths of tenderness" in
Carlyle. His susceptibility to the softer influences of nature, of family
life, of his few chosen friends, is apparent in almost every page of his
biography, above all in the _Reminiscences_, those supreme records of
regret, remorse, and the inspiration of bereavement. There is no surge of
sorrow in our literature like that which is perpetually tossed up in
the second chapter of the second volume, with the never-to-be-forgotten
refrain--

  Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait
  not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh,
  think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death
  sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of
  the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and
  beautiful, when it is too late!

Were we asked to bring together the three most pathetic sentences in our
tongue since Lear asked the question, "And have his daughters brought him
to this pass?" we should select Swift's comment on the lock of Stella,
"Only a woman's hair"; the cry of Tennyson's Rizpah, "The bones had moved
in my side"; and Carlyle's wail, "Oh that I had you yet but for five
minutes beside me, to tell you all!" But in answer we hear only the
flapping of the folds of Isis, "strepitumque Acherontis avari."

  All of sunshine that remained in my life went out in that
  sudden moment. All of strength too often seems to have
  gone.... Were it permitted, I would pray, but to whom? I can
  well understand the invocation of saints. One's prayer now
  has to be voiceless, done with the heart still, but also
  with the hands still more.... Her birthday. She not here--I
  cannot keep it for her now, and send a gift to poor old
  Betty, who next to myself remembers her in life-long love
  and sacred sorrow. This is all I can do.... Time was to
  bring relief, said everybody; but Time has not to any
  extent, nor, in truth, did I much wish him

  Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua,
  Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae.

Carlyle's pathos, far from being confined to his own calamity, was ready
to awake at every touch. "I was walking with him," writes Froude, "one
Sunday afternoon in Battersea Park. In the open circle among the trees
was a blind man and his daughter, she singing hymns, he accompanying her
on some instrument. We stood listening. She sang Faber's 'Pilgrims of the
Night.' The words were trivial, but the air, though simple, had something
weird and unearthly about it. 'Take me away,' he said, after a few
minutes, 'I shall cry if I stay longer.'"

The melancholy, "often as of deep misery frozen torpid," that runs
through his writing, that makes him forecast death in life and paint the
springs of nature in winter hue, the "hoarse sea," the "bleared skies,"
the sunsets "beautiful and brief and wae," compels our compassion in a
manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne, and De Quincey,
and other colour dramatists, because we feel it is as genuine as the
melancholy of Burns. Both had the relief of humour, but Burns only of the
two was capable of gaiety. "Look up there," said Leigh Hunt, pointing to
the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony that sings with infinite
voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man." "Eh, it's a sair
sicht," was the reply.

We have referred to a few out of a hundred instances of Carlyle's
practical benevolence. To all deserving persons in misfortune he was a
good Samaritan, and like all benefactors the dupe of some undeserving.
Charity may be, like maternal affection, a form of self-indulgence, but
it is so only to kind-hearted men. In all that relates to money Carlyle's
career is exemplary. He had too much common sense to affect to despise
it, and was restive when he was underpaid; he knew that the labourer was
worthy of his hire. But, after hacking for Brewster he cannot be said to
have ever worked for wages, his concern was rather with the quality of
his work, and, regardless of results, he always did his best. A more
unworldly man never lived; from his first savings he paid ample tributes
to filial piety and fraternal kindness, and to the end of his life
retained the simple habits in which he had been trained. He hated waste
of all kinds, save in words, and carried his home frugalities even to
excess. In writing to James Aitken, engaged to his sister, "the Craw," he
says, "remember in marriage you have undertaken to do to others as you
would wish they should do to you." But this rede he did not reck.

"Carlyle," writes Longfellow, "was one of those men who sacrificed their
happiness to their work"; the misfortune is that the sacrifice did not
stop with himself. He seemed made to live with no one but himself.
Alternately courteous and cross-grained, all his dramatic power went into
his creations; he could not put himself into the place of those near him.
Essentially perhaps the bravest man of his age, he would not move an inch
for threat or flattery; centered in rectitude, conscience never made
him a coward. He bore great calamities with the serenity of a Marcus
Aurelius: his reception of the loss of his first volume of the _French
Revolution_ was worthy of Sidney or of Newton: his letters, when the
successive deaths of almost all that were dearest left him desolate, are
among the noblest, the most resigned, the most pathetic in biography.
Yet, says Mr. Froude, in a judgment which every careful reader must
endorse: "Of all men I have ever seen Carlyle was the least patient of
the common woes of humanity." "A positive Christian," says Mrs. Carlyle,
"in bearing others' pain, he was a roaring Thor when himself pricked by
a pin," and his biographer corroborates this: "If matters went well with
himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any
one else; and, on the other hand, if he were uncomfortable he required
all the world to be uncomfortable along with him." He did his work with
more than the tenacity of a Prescott or a Fawcett, but no man ever made
more noise over it than this apostle of silence. "Sins of passion he
could forgive, but those of insincerity never." Carlyle has no tinge of
insincerity; his writing, his conversation, his life, are absolutely,
dangerously, transparent. His utter genuineness was in the long run one
of the sources of his success. He always, if we allow for a habit of
rhetorical exaggeration, felt what he made others feel.

Sullen moods, and "words at random sent," those judging him from a
distance can easily condone; the errors of a hot head are pardonable to
one who, in his calmer hours, was ready to confess them. "Your temptation
and mine," he writes to his brother Alexander, "is a tendency to
imperiousness and indignant self-help; and, if no wise theoretical,
yet, practical forgetfulness and tyrannical contempt of other men." His
nicknaming mania was the inheritance of a family failing, always fostered
by the mocking-bird at his side. Humour, doubtless, ought to discount
many of his criticisms. Dean Stanley, in his funeral sermon, charitably
says, that in pronouncing the population of England to be "thirty
millions, mostly fools," Carlyle merely meant that "few are chosen and
strait is the gate," generously adding--"There was that in him, in spite
of his contemptuous descriptions of the people, which endeared him to
those who knew him best. The idols of their market-place he trampled
under foot, but their joys and sorrows, their cares and hopes, were to
him revered things." Another critic pleads for his discontent that it had
in it a noble side, like that of Faust, and that his harsh judgments of
eminent men were based on the belief that they had allowed meaner to
triumph over higher impulses, or influences of society to injure their
moral fibre. This plea, however, fails to cover the whole case. Carlyle's
ignorance in treating men who moved in spheres apart from his own, as the
leaders of science, definite theological enlightenment, or even poetry
and arts, was an intellectual rather than a moral flaw; but in the
implied assertion, "what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to
regret the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous powers,
which, beginning with his student days, possessed him to the last. The
fame of Newton, Leibnitz, Gibbon, whose works he came to regard as the
spoon-meat of his "rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his
or of any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot career, as a
"rose-water imbecility," or maligned Mill's intrepid thought as that of a
mere machine, he was astray on more delicate ground, and alienated some
of his truest friends. Among the many curses of our nineteenth-century
literature denounced by its leading Censor, the worst, the want of
loyalty among literary men, he fails to denounce because he largely
shares in it. "No sadder proof," he declares, "can be given by a man of
his own littleness than disbelief in great men," and no one has done more
to retrieve from misconception the memories of heroes of the past;
but rarely does either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a good word for any
considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises,
more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from _Sartor,_ of which
he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his
self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his
enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger
Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson
would he grant the privilege to hold his own. _Per contra,_ he
overestimated those who were content to be his echoes.

Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he used
and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who had preceded him in
his lines of historical investigation, as if they had been poachers on
his premises, _e.g._ Heath, the royalist writer of the Commonwealth
time, is "carrion Heath": Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is "my
reverend imbecile friend": his predecessors in _Friedrich,_ as Schlosser,
Preuss, Ranke, Förster, Vehse, are "dark chaotic dullards whose books
are mere blotches of printed stupor, tumbled mountains of marine stores
"--criticism valueless even when it raises the laughter due to a
pantomime. Carlyle assailed three sets of people:--

1. Real humbugs, or those who had behaved, or whom he believed to have
behaved, badly to him.

2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could not understand--as
Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and the leaders of Physics and
Metaphysics.

3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him an unrestricted
homage or an implicit following, as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc.

The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his strictures been
always just,--so winged with humorous epigram,--they would have blasted a
score of reputations: as it is they have only served to mar his own. He
was a typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the *_oistros_
of their ambitious competition and restless push, wanting in repose,
never like

  a gentleman at wise
  With moral breadth of tomperament,

too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call this man as
good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast
between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is
possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others
of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when
he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a
rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if
not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard at
Ecclefechan.

Truth, in the sense of saying what he thought, was one of his ruling
passions. To one of his brothers on the birth of a daughter, he writes,
"Train her to this, as the cornerstone of all morality, to stand by the
truth, to abhor a lie as she does hell-fire." The "gates of hell" is the
phrase of Achilles; but Carlyle has no real point of contact with the
Greek love of abstract truth. He objects that "Socrates is terribly at
ease in Zion": he liked no one to be at ease anywhere. He is angry with
Walter Scott because he hunted with his friends over the breezy heath
instead of mooning alone over twilight moors. Read Scott's _Memoirs_ in
the morning, the _Reminiscences_ at night, and dispute if you like about
the greater genius, but never about the healthier, better, and larger
man.

Hebraism, says Matthew Arnold, is the spirit which obeys the mandate,
"walk by your light"; Hellenism the spirit which remembers the other,
"have a care your light be not darkness." The former prefers doing to
thinking, the latter is bent on finding the truth it loves. Carlyle is
a Hebraist unrelieved and unretrieved by the Hellene. A man of
inconsistencies, egotisms, Alpine grandeurs and crevasses, let us take
from him what the gods or protoplasms have allowed. His way of life,
duly admired for its stern temperance, its rigidity of noble aim--eighty
years spent in contempt of favour, plaudit, or reward,--left him austere
to frailty other than his own, and wrapt him in the repellent isolation
which is the wrong side of uncompromising dignity. He was too great to
be, in the common sense, conceited. All his consciousness of power left
him with the feeling of Newton, "I am a child gathering shells on the
shore": but what sense he had of fallibility arose from his glimpse of
the infinite sea, never from any suspicion that, in any circumstances, he
might be wrong and another mortal right: Shelley's lines on Byron--

  The sense that he was greater than his kind
  Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind
  By gazing on its own exceeding light.

fit him, like Ruskin's verdict, "What can you say of Carlyle but that he
was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning?" which withers while
it immortalises.

[Footnote: In the _Times_ of February 7th 1881, there appeared an
interesting account of Carlyle's daily routine. "No book hack could have
surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and late
in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties.
At ten o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he
took up his pen and laboured hard until three o'clock. Nothing, not even
the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then
came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends.... In the evening he
read and prepared for the work of the morrow."]




CHAPTER VIII

CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN

Carlyle was so essentially a Preacher that the choice of a profession
made for him by his parents was in some measure justified; but he was
also a keen Critic, unamenable to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of
the revolutionary spirit of the age, even while protesting against its
extremes: above all, he was a literary Artist. Various opinions will
continue to be held as to the value of his sermons; the excellence of his
best workmanship is universally acknowledged. He was endowed with few of
the qualities which secure a quick success--fluency, finish of style,
the art of giving graceful utterance to current thought; he had in
full measure the stronger if slower powers--sound knowledge, infinite
industry, and the sympathetic insight of penetrative imagination--that
ultimately hold the fastnesses of fame. His habit of startling his
hearers, which for a time restricted, at a later date widened their
circle. There is much, sometimes even tiresome, repetition in Carlyle's
work; the range of his ideas is limited, he plays on a few strings, with
wonderfully versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually
confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But,
after the perfunctory work for Brewster he wrote nothing wholly
commonplace; occasionally paradoxical to the verge of absurdity, he is
never dull.

Setting aside his TRANSLATIONS, always in prose,--often in
verse,--masterpieces of their kind, he made his first mark in CRITICISM,
which may be regarded as a higher kind of translation: the great value of
his work in this direction is due to his so regarding it. Most criticism
has for its aim to show off the critic; good criticism interprets the
author. Fifty years ago, in allusion to methods of reviewing, not even
now wholly obsolete, Carlyle wrote:--

  The first and most convenient is for the reviewer to perch
  himself resolutely, as it were, on the shoulder of his
  author, and therefrom to show as if he commanded him and
  looked down upon him by natural superiority of stature.
  Whatsoever the great man says or does the little man shall
  treat with an air of knowingness and light condescending
  mockery, professing with much covert sarcasm that this or
  that is beyond _his_ comprehension, and cunningly
  asking his readers if _they_ comprehend it.

There is here perhaps some "covert sarcasm" directed against
contemporaries who forgot that their mission was to pronounce on the
merits of the books reviewed, and not to patronise their authors; it may
be set beside the objection to Jeffrey's fashion of saying, "I like this;
I do not like that," without giving the reason why. But in this instance
the writer did reck his own rede. The temptation of a smart critic is to
seek or select legitimate or illegitimate objects of attack; and that
Carlyle was well armed with the shafts of ridicule is apparent in his
essays as in his histories; superabundantly so in his letters and
conversation. His examination of the _German Playwrights_, of _Taylor's
German Literature_, and his inimitable sketch of Herr Döring, the hapless
biographer of Richter, are as amusing as is Macaulay's _coup de grâce_ to
Robert Montgomery. But the graver critic would have us take to heart
these sentences of his essay on Voltaire:--

  Far be it from us to say that solemnity is an essential of
  greatness; that no great man can have other than a rigid
  vinegar aspect of countenance, never to be thawed or warmed
  by billows of mirth. There are things in this world to be
  laughed at as well as things to be admired. Nevertheless,
  contempt is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one if
  we habitually live in it. The faculty of love, of admiration,
  is to be regarded as a sign and the measure of high souls;
  unwisely directed, it leads to many evils; but without it,
  there cannot be any good. Ridicule, on the other hand, is
  the smallest of all faculties that other men are at pains to
  repay with any esteem.... Its nourishment and essence is
  denial, which hovers only on the surface, while knowledge
  dwells far below,... it cherishes nothing but our vanity,
  which may in general be left safely enough to shift for
  itself.

[Footnote: As an estimate of Voltaire this brilliant essay is inadequate.
Carlyle's maxim, we want to be told "not what is _not_ true but what _is_
true," prevented him from appreciating the great work of Encyclopaedists.]

We may compare with this one of the writer's numerous warnings to young
men taking to literature, as to drinking, in despair of anything better
to do, ending with the exhortation, "Witty above all things, oh, be not
witty"; or turn to the passage in the review of Sir Walter Scott:--

  Is it with ease or not with ease that a man shall do his
  best in any shape; above all, in this shape justly named of
  soul's travail, working in the deep places of thought?... Not
  so, now nor at any time.... Virgil and Tacitus, were they
  ready writers? The whole _Prophecies of Isaiah_ are not
  equal in extent to this cobweb of a Review article.
  Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity; but not till
  he had thought with intensity,... no easy writer he. Neither
  was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with case.
  Goethe tells us he "had nothing sent to him in his sleep," no
  page of his but he knew well how it came there.
  Schiller--"konnte nie fertig werden"--never could get done.
  Dante sees himself "growing lean" over his _Divine Comedy_;
  in stern solitary death wrestle with it, to prevail over it
  and do it, if his uttermost faculty may; hence too it is done
  and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures for
  evermore among men. No; creation, one would think, cannot be
  easy; your Jove has severe pains and fire flames in the head,
  out of which an armed Pallas is struggling! As for
  manufacture, that is a different matter.... Write by steam
  if thou canst contrive it and sell it, but hide it like
  virtue.

In these and frequent similar passages lies the secret of Carlyle's slow
recognition, long struggle, and ultimate success; also of his occasional
critical intolerance. Commander-in-chief of the "red artillery," he sets
too little store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of the
light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but contempt for the
banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and
salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with
the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he
deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt to
leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can
only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of
ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every
ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher.
Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been
inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no
amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in
"the chamber of little ease," Carlyle travestied Goethe's "worship of
sorrow" till it became a pride in pain. He forgot that rude energy
requires restraint. Hercules Furens and Orlando Furioso did more than cut
down trees; they tore them up; but to no useful end. His power is often
almost Miltonic; it is never Shakespearian; and his insistent earnestness
would run the risk of fatiguing us were it not redeemed by his
humour. But he errs on the better side; and his example is a salutary
counteractive in an age when the dust of so many skirmishers obscures the
air, and laughter is too readily accepted as the test of truth, his stern
conception of literature accounts for his exaltations of the ideal, and
denunciations of the actual, profession of letters in passages which,
from his habit of emphasising opposite sides of truth, instead of
striking a balance, appear almost side by side in contradiction. The
following condenses the ideal:--

  If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the
  high and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have
  guidance, freedom, immortality? These two in all degrees
  I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind
  blow whither it listeth. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse,
  indignation, despair itself--all these like hell-hounds lie
  beleaguering the souls of the poor day worker as of every
  man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task,
  and all these are stifled--all  these shrink murmuring far
  off in their caves.

Against this we have to set innumerable tirades on the crime of worthless
writing, _e.g._--

  No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag
  his pen, without saying something; he knows not what
  mischief he does, past computation, scattering words without
  meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease.
  For thistle-down  flies abroad on all winds and airs of
  wind.... Ship-loads of fashionable novels, sentimental
  rhymes, tragedies, farces ... tales by flood and field are
  swallowed monthly into the bottomless  pool; still does the
  press toil,... and still in torrents rushes on the great
  army of publications to their final home; and still oblivion,
  like the grave, cries give! give! How is it that of all
  these countless multitudes no one can ... produce ought that
  shall endure longer than "snowflake on the river? Because
  they are foam, because there is no reality in them. . . ."
  Not by printing ink alone does man live. Literature, as
  followed at present, is but a species of brewing or cooking,
  where the cooks use poison and vend it by telling
  innumerable lies.

These passages owe their interest to the attestation of their sincerity
by the writer's own practice. "Do not," he counsels one of his unknown
correspondents, "take up a subject because it is singular and will get
you credit, but because you _love_ it;" and he himself acted on the
rule. Nothing more impresses the student of Carlyle's works than his
_thoroughness._ He never took a task in hand without the determination to
perform it to the utmost of his ability; consequently when he satisfied
himself that he was master of his subject he satisfied his readers; but
this mastery was only attained, as it is only attainable, by the most
rigorous research. He seems to have written down his results with
considerable fluency: the molten ore flowed freely forth, but the process
of smelting was arduous. The most painful part of literary work is not
the actual composition, but the accumulation of details, the wearisome
compilation of facts, weighing of previous criticisms, the sifting of the
grains of wheat from the bushels of chaff. This part of his task Carlyle
performed with an admirable conscientiousness. His numerous letters
applying for out-of-the-way books to buy or borrow, for every pamphlet
throwing light on his subject, bear testimony to the careful exactitude
which rarely permitted him to leave any record unread or any worthy
opinion untested about any event of which or any person of whom he
undertook to write. From Templand (1833) he applies for seven volumes of
Beaumarchais, three of Bassompierre, the Memoirs of Abbé Georgel, and
every attainable account of Cagliostro and the Countess de la Motte, to
fuse into _The Diamond Necklace._ To write the essay on _Werner_ and
the _German Playwrights_ he swam through seas of trash. He digested the
whole of _Diderot_ for one review article. He seems to have read through
_Jean Paul Richter,_ a feat to accomplish which Germans require a
special dictionary. When engaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole
shoal of obscure seventeenth-century papers from Yarmouth, the remnant of
a yet larger heap, "read hundredweights of dreary books," and endured
"a hundred Museum headaches." In grappling with _Friedrich_ he waded
through so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping
condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes and places of
which he meant to speak, from St. Ives to Prague, and explored the
battlefields. Work done after this fashion seldom brings a swift return;
but if it is utilised and made vivid by literary genius it has a claim to
permanence. Bating a few instances where his sense of proportion is
defective, or his eccentricity is in excess, Carlyle puts his ample
material to artistic use; seldom making ostentation of detail, but
skilfully concentrating, so that we read easily and readily recall what he
has written. Almost everything he has done has made a mark: his best work
in criticism is final, it does not require to be done again. He interests
us in the fortunes of his leading characters: _first_, because he feels
with them; _secondly_, because he knows how to distinguish the essence
from the accidents of their lives, what to forget and what to remember,
where to begin and where to stop. Hence, not only his set biographies, as
of Schiller and of Sterling, but the shorter notices in his Essays, are
intrinsically more complete and throw more real light on character than
whole volumes of ordinary memoirs.

With the limitations above referred to, and in view of his antecedents,
the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation is wonderfully wide. Often
perversely unfair to the majority of his English contemporaries, the
scales seem to fall from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of
other nations. The charity expressed in the saying that we should judge
men, not by the number of their faults, but by the amount of their
deflection from the circle, great or small, that bounds their being,
enables him often to do justice to those most widely differing in creed,
sentiment, and lines of activity from one another and from himself.
When treating congenial themes he errs by overestimate rather than by
depreciation: among the qualities of his early work, which afterwards
suffered some eclipse in the growth of other powers, is its flexibility.
It was natural for Carlyle, his successor in genius in the Scotch
lowlands, to give an account of Robert Burns which throws all previous
criticism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong affinities
to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his so-called heroes: but he
is fair to the characters, if not always to the work, of Voltaire and
Diderot, slurs over or makes humorous the escapades of Mirabeau, is
undeterred by the mysticism of Novalis, and in the fervour of his worship
fails to see the gulf between himself and Goethe.

Carlyle's ESSAYS mark an epoch, _i.e._ the beginning of a new era, in
the history of British criticism. The able and vigorous writers who
contributed to the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly
Reviews_ successfully applied their taste and judgment to such works as
fell within their sphere, and could be fairly tested by their canons; but
they passed an alien act on everything that lay beyond the range of their
insular view. In dealing with the efforts of a nation whose literature,
the most recent in Europe save that of Russia, had only begun to command
recognition, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous. If
the old formulas have been theoretically dismissed, and a conscientious
critic now endeavours to place himself in the position of his author,
the change is largely due to the influence of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._
Previous to their appearance, the literature of Germany, to which half
of these papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir Walter
Scott's translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen,_ De Quincey's travesties,
and Taylor's renderings from Lessing) a sealed book to English readers,
save those who were willing to breathe in an atmosphere of Coleridgean
mist. Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because he was
the first fully to apprehend its meaning. The _Life of Schiller,_ which
the author himself depreciated, remains one of the best of comparatively
short biographies, it abounds in admirable passages (conspicuously the
contrast between the elder and the younger of the Dioscuri at Weimar) and
has the advantage to some readers of being written in classical English
prose.

To the essays relating to Germany, which we may accept as the _disjecta
membra_ of the author's unpublished History, there is little to add.
In these volumes we have the best English account of the Nibelungen
Lied--the most graphic, and in the main most just analyses of the genius
of Heyne, Rchter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, who is
recorded to have said, "Carlyle is almost more at home in our literature
than ourselves." With the Germans he is on his chosen ground; but the
range of his sympathies is most apparent in the portrait gallery of
eighteenth-century Frenchmen that forms, as it were, a proscenium to his
first great History. Among other papers in the same collection the most
prominent are the _Signs of the Times_ and _Characteristics,_ in which
he first distinctly broaches some of his peculiar views on political
philosophy and life.

The scope and some of the limitations of Carlyle's critical power are
exhibited in his second Series of Lectures, delivered in 1838, when (_æt_.
43) he had reached the maturity of his powers. The first three of these
lectures, treating of Ancient History and Literature, bring into strong
relief the speaker's inadequate view of Greek thought and civilisation:--

  Greek transactions had never anything alive, no result for
  us, they were dead entirely ... all left is a few ruined
  towers, masses of stone and broken statuary.... The writings
  of Socrates are made up of a few wire-drawn notions about
  virtue; there is no conclusion, no word of life in him.

[Footnote: Though a mere reproduction of the notes of Mr. Chisholm Anstey,
this posthumous publication is justified by its interest and obvious
authenticity. The appearance in a prominent periodical (while these sheets
are passing through the press) of _Wotton Reinfred_ is more open to
question. This fragment of a romance, partly based on the plan of _Wilhelm
Meister_, with shadowy love episodes recalling the manner of the "Minerva
Press," can add nothing to Carlyle's reputation.]


These and similar dogmatic utterances are comments of the Hebrew on the
Hellene. To the Romans, "the men of antiquity," he is more just, dwelling
on their agriculture and road-making as their "greatest work written
on the planet;" but the only Latin author he thoroughly appreciates is
Tacitus, "a Colossus on edge of dark night." Then follows an exaltation
of the Middle Ages, in which "we see belief getting the victory over
unbelief," in the strain of Newman's _Grammar of Assent_. On the
surrender of Henry to Hildebrand at Canossa his approving comment is,
"the clay that is about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its
rights; the danger is always the other way, that the spiritual part of
man will become overlaid with the bodily part." In the later struggle
between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens his sympathy is with Gregory and
Innocent. In the same vein is his praise of Peter the Hermit, whose motto
was not the "action, action" of Demosthenes, but, "belief, belief." In
the brief space of those suggestive though unequal discourses the speaker
allows awkward proximity to some of the self-contradictions which, even
when scattered farther apart, perplex his readers and render it impossible
to credit his philosophy with more than a few strains of consistent
thought.

  In one page "the judgments of the heart are of more value than those of
  the head." In the next "morals in a man are the counterpart of the
  intellect that is in him." The Middle Ages were "a healthy age," and
  therefore there was next to no Literature. "The strong warrior disdained
  to write." "Actions will be preserved when all writers are forgotten."
  Two days later, apropos of Dante, he says, "The great thing which any
  nation can do is to produce great men.... When the Vatican shall have
  crumbled to dust, and St. Peter's and Strassburg Minster be no more; for
  thousands of years to come Catholicism will survive in this sublime
  relic of antiquity--the _Divina Commedia."_

  [Footnote: It has been suggested that Carlyle may have been in this
  instance a student of Vauvenargues, who in the early years of the much-
  maligned eighteenth century wrote "Les graudes pensées viennent du
  coeur."]

Passing to Spain, Carlyle salutes Cervantes and the Cid,--calling Don
Quixote the "poetry of comedy," "the age of gold in self-mockery,"--pays
a more reserved tribute to Calderon, ventures on the assertion that
Cortes was "as great as Alexander," and gives a sketch, so graphic that
it might serve as a text for Motley's great work, of the way in which
the decayed Iberian chivalry, rotten through with the Inquisition, broke
itself on the Dutch dykes. After a brief outline of the rise of the
German power, which had three avatars--the overwhelming of Rome, the
Swiss resistance to Austria, and the Reformation--we have a rough
estimate of some of the Reformers. Luther is exalted even over Knox;
Erasmus is depreciated, while Calvin and Melanchthon are passed by.

The chapter on the Saxons, in which the writer's love of the sea appears
in picturesque reference to the old rover kings, is followed by unusually
commonplace remarks on earlier English literature, interspersed with some
of Carlyle's refrains.

  The mind is one, and consists not of bundles of faculties at
  all ... the same features appear in painting, singing,
  fighting ... when I hear of the distinction between the poet
  and the thinker, I really see no difference at all.... Bacon
  sees, Shakespeare sees through,... Milton is altogether
  sectarian--a Presbyterian one might say--he got his
  knowledge out of Knox.... Eve is a cold statue.

Coming to the well-belaboured eighteenth century--when much was done of
which the nineteenth talks, and massive books were written that we are
content to criticise--we have the inevitable denunciations of scepticism,
materialism, argumentation, logic; the quotation, (referred to a motto
"in the Swiss gardens"), "Speech is silvern, silence is golden," and a
loud assertion that all great things are silent. The age is commended
for Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's spinning jenny, and Whitfield's
preaching, but its policy and theories are alike belittled. The summaries
of the leading writers are interesting, some curious, and a few absurd.
On the threshold of the age Dryden is noted "as a great poet born in the
worst of times": Addison as "an instance of one formal man doing great
things": Swift is pronounced "by far the greatest man of that time, not
unfeeling," who "carried sarcasm to an epic pitch": Pope, we are told,
had "one of the finest heads ever known." Sterne is handled with a
tenderness that contrasts with the death sentence pronounced on him by
Thackeray, "much is forgiven him because he loved much,... a good simple
being after all." Johnson, the "much enduring," is treated as in the
_Heroes_ and the Essay. Hume, with "a far duller kind of sense," is
commended for "noble perseverance and Stoic endurance of failure; but his
eye was not open to faith," etc. On which follows a stupendous criticism
of Gibbon, whom Carlyle, returning to his earlier and juster view, ended
by admiring.

  With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more
  futile account of human things than he has done of the
  _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.

The sketch of the Pre-Revolution period is slight, and marked by a
somewhat shallow reference to Rousseau. The last lecture on the recent
German writers is a mere _réchauffé_ of the Essays. Carlyle closes
with the famous passage from Richter, one of those which indicate the
influence in style as in thought of the German over the Scotch humorist.
"It is now the twelfth hour of the night, birds of darkness are on the
wing, the spectres uprear, the dead walk, the living dream. Thou, Eternal
Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn." The whole volume is a testimony
to the speaker's power of speech, to his often unsurpassed penetration,
and to the hopeless variance of the often rapidly shifting streams of his
thought.

Detailed criticism of Carlyle's HISTORIES belongs to the sphere of
separate disquisitions. Here it is only possible to take note of their
general characteristics. His conception of what history should be is
shared with Macaulay. Both writers protest against its being made a mere
record of "court and camp," of royal intrigue and state rivalry, of
pageants of procession, or chivalric encounters. Both find the sources of
these outwardly obtrusive events in the underground current of national
sentiment, the conditions of the civilisation from which they were
evolved, the prosperity or misery of the masses of the people.

  The essence of history does not lie in laws, senate-houses,
  or battle-fields, but in the tide of thought and action--the
  world of existence that in gloom and brightness blossoms and
  fades apart from these.

But Carlyle differs from Macaulay in his passion for the concrete. The
latter presents us with pictures to illustrate his political theory; the
former leaves his pictures to speak for themselves. "Give him a fact,"
says Emerson, "he loaded you with thanks; a theory, with ridicule or
even abuse." It has been said that with Carlyle History was philosophy
teaching by examples. He himself defines it as "the essence of
innumerable biographies." He individualises everything he meets; his
dislike of abstractions is everywhere extreme. Thus while other writers
have expanded biography into history, Carlyle condenses history into
biography. Even most biographies are too vague for him. He delights in
Boswell: he glides over their generalisations to pick out some previously
obscure record from Clarendon or Hume. Even in _The French Revolution,_
where the author has mainly to deal with masses in tumult, he gives most
prominence to their leaders. They march past us, labelled with strange
names, in the foreground of the scene, on which is being enacted the
death wrestle of old Feudalism and young Democracy. This book is unique
among modern histories for a combination of force and insight only
rivalled by the most incisive passages of the seventh book of Thucydides,
of Tacitus, of Gibbon, and of Michelet.

[Footnote: _Vide_ a comparison of Carlyle and Michelet in Dr. Oswald's
interesting and suggestive little volume of criticism and selection,
_Thomas Carlyle, ein Lebensbild und Goldkörner aus seinen Werken._]

_The French Revolution_ is open to the charge of being a comment and a
prophecy rather than a narrative: the reader's knowledge of the main
events of the period is too much assumed for the purpose of a school
book. Even Dryasdust will turn when trod on, and this book has been a
happy hunting field to aggressive antiquarians, to whom the mistake of a
day in date, the omission or insertion of a letter in a name, is of more
moment than the difference between vitalising or petrifying an era. The
lumber merchants of history are the born foes of historians who, like
Carlyle and Mr. Froude, have manifested their dramatic power of making
the past present and the distant near. That the excess of this power is
not always compatible with perfect impartiality may be admitted; for a
poetic capacity is generally attended by heats of enthusiasm, and is
liable to errors of detail; but without some share of it--

  Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit
  Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln.

Mere research, the unearthing and arrangement of what Sir Philip Sidney
calls "old moth-eaten records," supplies material for the work of the
historian proper; and, occasionally to good purpose, corrects it, but, as
a rule, with too much flourish. Applying this minute criticism to _The
French Revolution,_ one reviewer has found that the author has given the
wrong number to a regiment: another esteemed scholar has discovered that
there are seven errors in the famous account of the flight to Varennes,
to wit:--the delay in the departure was due to Bouille, not to the Queen;
she did not lose her way and so delay the start; Ste. Menehould is too
big to be called a village; on the arrest, it was the Queen who asked for
hot water and eggs; the King only left the coach once; it went rather
faster than is stated; and, above all, _infandum!_ it was not painted
yellow, but green and black. This criticism does not in any degree
detract from the value of one of the most vivid and substantially
accurate narratives in the range of European literature. Carlyle's object
was to convey the soul of the Revolution, not to register its upholstery.
The annalist, be he dryasdust or gossip, is, in legal phrase, "the devil"
of the prose artist, whose work makes almost as great a demand on the
imaginative faculty as that of the poet. Historiography is related to
History as the Chronicles of Holinshed and the Voyages of Hakluyt to the
Plays of Shakespeare, plays which Marlborough confessed to have been
the main source of his knowledge of English history. Some men are born
philologists or antiquarians; but, as the former often fail to see the
books because of the words, so the latter cannot read the story for the
dates. The mass of readers require precisely what has been contemptuously
referred to as the "Romance of History," provided it leaves with them
an accurate impression, as well as an inspiring interest. Save in his
over-hasty acceptance of the French _blague_ version of "The Sinking of
the Vengeur," Carlyle has never laid himself open to the reproach of
essential inaccuracy. As far as possible for a man of genius, he was
a devotee of facts. He is never a careless, though occasionally
an impetuous writer; his graver errors are those of emotional
misinterpretation. It has been observed that, while contemning
Robespierre, he has extenuated the guilt of Danton as one of the main
authors of the September massacres, and, more generally, that "his
quickness and brilliancy made him impatient of systematic thought." But
his histories remain the best illuminations of fact in our language. _The
French Revolution_ is a series of flame-pictures; every page is on fire;
we read the whole as if listening to successive volleys of artillery:
nowhere has such a motley mass been endowed with equal life. This book
alone vindicates Lowell's panegyric: "the figures of most historians seem
like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs through any hole
that criticism may tear in them; but Carlyle's are so real that if you
prick them they bleed."

When Carlyle generalises, as in the introductions to his Essays, he is
apt to thrust his own views on his subject and on his readers; but,
unlike De Quincey, who had a like love of excursus, he comes to the point
before the close.

The one claimed the privilege, assumed by Coleridge, of starting from no
premises and arriving at no conclusion; the other, in his capacity as
a critic, arrives at a conclusion, though sometimes from questionable
premises. It is characteristic of his habit of concentrating, rather than
condensing, that Carlyle abandoned his design of a history of the Civil
Wars for _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches._ The events of the
period, whose issues the writer has firmly grasped, are brought into
prominence mainly as they elucidate the career of his hero; but the
"elucidations" have been accepted, with a few reservations, as final. No
other work has gone so far to reverse a traditional estimate. The old
current conceptions of the Protector are refuted out of his own mouth;
but it was left for his editor to restore life to the half-forgotten
records, and sweep away the clouds that obscured their revelations of a
great though rugged character. _Cromwell_ has been generally accepted
in Scotland as Carlyle's masterpiece--a judgment due to the fact of its
being, among the author's mature works, the least apparently opposed
to the theological views prevalent in the north of our island. In
reality--though containing some of his finest descriptions and
battle-pieces, conspicuously that of "Dunbar"--it is the least artistic
of his achievements, being overladen with detail and superabounding in
extract. A good critic has said that it was a labour of love, like
Spedding's _Bacon;_ but that the correspondence, lavishly reproduced in
both works, has "some of the defects of lovers' letters for those to whom
they are not addressed."

[Footnote: In _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11th, 1881.]

Carlyle has established that Oliver was not a hypocrite, "not a man of
falsehood, but a man of truth": he has thrown doubts on his being a
fanatic; but he has left it open to M. Guizot to establish that his later
rule was a practical despotism.

In _Friedrich II._ he undertook a yet greater task; and his work
stretching over a wider arena, is, of necessity, more of a history, less
of a biography, than any of his others. In constructing and composing it
he was oppressed not only by the magnitude and complexity of his theme,
but, for the first time, by hesitancies as to his choice of a hero.
He himself confessed, "I never was admitted much to _Friedrich's_
confidence, and I never cared very much about him." Yet he determined,
almost of malice prepense, to exalt the narrow though vivid Prussian
as "the last of the kings, the one genuine figure in the eighteenth
century," and though failing to prove his case, he has, like a loyal
lawyer, made the best of his brief. The book embodies and conveys the
most brilliant and the most readable account of a great part of the
century, and nothing he has written bears more ample testimony to the
writer's pictorial genius. It is sometimes garrulous with the fluency of
an old man eloquent; parts of the third volume, with its diffuse extracts
from the king's survey of his realm, are hard if not weary reading; but
the rest is a masterpiece of historic restoration. The introductory
portion, leading us through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy
and political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the procession
of the half-forgotten host of German worthies,--St. Adalbert and his
mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth;
Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret with the mouth; Sigismund
_supra grammaticam_; Augustus the physically strong; Albert Achilles and
Albert Alcibiades; Anne of Cleves; Mr. John Kepler,--who move on the
pages, more brightly "pictured" than those of Livy, like marionettes
inspired with life. In the main body of the book the men and women of the
Prussian court are brought before us in fuller light and shade. Friedrich
himself, at Sans Souci, with his cocked-hat, walking-stick and wonderful
gray eyes; Sophia Charlotte's grace, wit, and music; Wilhelmina and her
book; the old Hyperborean; the black artists Seckendorf and Grumkow;
George I. and his blue-beard chamber; the little drummer; the Old
Dessaner; the cabinet Venus; Grävenitz Hecate; Algarotti; Goetz in his
tower; the tragedy of Katte; the immeasurable comedy of Maupertuis, the
flattener of the earth, and Voltaire; all these and a hundred more are
summoned by a wizard's wand from the land of shadows, to march by
the central figures of these volumes; to dance, flutter, love, hate,
intrigue, and die before our eyes. It is the largest and most varied
showbox in all history; a prelude to a series of battle-pieces--Rossbach,
Leuthen, Molwitz, Zorndorf--nowhere else, save in the author's own pages,
approached in prose, and rarely rivalled out of Homer's verse.

Carlyle's style, in the chiar-oscuro of which his Histories and
three-fourths of his Essays are set, has naturally provoked much
criticism and some objurgation. M. Taine says it is "exaggerated and
demoniacal." Hallam could not read _The French Revolution_ because of its
"abominable" style, and Wordsworth, whose own prose was perfectly limpid,
is reported to have said, "No Scotchman can write English. C---- is a pest
to the language."

[Footnote: Carlyle with equal unfairness disparaged Hallam's _Middle
Ages:--"Eh, the poor miserable skeleton of a book," and regarded the
_Literature of Europe_ as a valley of dry bones.]

Carlyle's style is not that of Addison, of Berkeley, or of Helps; its
peculiarities are due to the eccentricity of an always eccentric being;
but it is neither affected nor deliberately imitated. It has been
plausibly asserted that his earlier manner of writing, as in _Schiller,_
under the influence of Jeffrey, was not in his natural voice. "They
forget," he said, referring to his critics, "that the style is the skin
of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old woman." Erratic,
metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and therefore a dangerous model,
"the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and
angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the _Birthmark_
in Hawthorne's romance. To recast a chapter of the _Revolution_ in the
form of a chapter of Macaulay would be like rewriting Tacitus in the
form of Cicero, or Browning in the form of Pope. Carlyle is seldom
obscure, the energy of his manner is part of his matter; its abruptness
corresponds to the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often as
it were by a series of electric shocks, that threaten to break through
the formal restraints of an ordinary sentence. He writes like one who
must, under the spell of his own winged words; at all hazards,
determined to convey his meaning; willing, like Montaigne, to "despise
no phrase of those that run in the streets," to speak in strange tongues,
and even to coin new words for the expression of a new emotion. It is
his fashion to care as little for rounded phrase as for logical argument:
and he rather convinces and persuades by calling up a succession of
feelings than by a train of reasoning. He repeats himself like a
preacher, instead of condensing like an essayist. The American Thoreau
writes in the course of an incisive survey:--

  Carlyle's ... mastery over the language is unrivalled; it
  is with him a keen, resistless weapon; his power of words
  is endless. All nature, human and external, is ransacked to
  serve and run his errands. The bright cutlery, after all the
  dross of Birmingham has been thrown aside, is his style....
  He has "broken the ice, and the torrent streams forth." He
  drives six-in-hand over ruts and streams and never upsets....
  With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all
  his moods and experiences, and crashes his way through
  shoals of dilettante opinions. It is not in man to determine
  what his style shall be, if it is to be his own.

But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a careless or ready
writer. He weighed every sentence: if in all his works, from _Sartor_ to
the _Reminiscences_, you pencil-mark the most suggestive passages you
disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and
fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though
a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a
great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping
his pencil "in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse," now etching his
scenes with the tender touch of a Millet.

Emerson, in one of his early letters to Carlyle, wrote, "Nothing seems
hid from those wonderful eyes of yours; those devouring eyes; those
thirsty eyes; those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine."
Men of genius, whether expressing themselves in prose or verse, on canvas
or in harmony, are, save when smitten, like Beethoven, by some malignity
of Nature, endowed with keener physical senses than other men. They
actually, not metaphorically, see more and hear more than their fellows.
Carlyle's super-sensitive ear was to him, through life, mainly a torment;
but the intensity of his vision was that of a born artist, and to' it we
owe the finest descriptive passages, if we except those of Mr. Ruskin, in
English prose. None of our poets, from Chaucer and Dunbar to Burns and
Tennyson, has been more alive to the influences of external nature. His
early letters abound in passages like the following, on the view from
Arthur's Seat:--

  The blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills
  swelling  gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags
  and rude precipices at our feet (where not a hillock rears
  its head unsung) with Edinburgh at their base clustering
  proudly over her rugged foundations and covering with a
  vapoury mantle the jagged black masses of stonework that
  stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Faeryland....
  I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and
  the moon's fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as
  it is, was riding quietly above me.

Compare with this the picture, in a letter to Sterling, of Middlebie
burn, "leaping into its cauldron, singing a song better than Pasta's"; or
that of the Scaur Water, that may be compared with Tennyson's verses in
the valley of Cauteretz; or the sketches of the Flemish cities in the
tour of 1842, with the photograph of the lace-girl, recalling Sterne at
his purest; or the account of the "atmosphere like silk" over the moor,
with the phrase, "it was as if Pan slept"; or the few lines written at
Thurso, where "the sea is always one's friend"; or the later memories of
Mentone, old and new, in the _Reminiscences_ (vol. ii. pp. 335-340).

The most striking of those descriptions are, however, those in which the
interests of some thrilling event or crisis of human life or history
steal upon the scene, and give it a further meaning, as in the dim streak
of dawn rising over St. Abb's Head on the morning of Dunbar, or in the
following famous apostrophe:--

  O evening sun of July, how at this hour thy beams fall slant
  on reapers amid peaceful, woody fields; on old women
  spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main;
  on balls at the Orangerie at Versailles, where high-rouged
  dames of the palace are even now dancing with
  double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring
  Hell-porch of an Hôtel-de-Ville.

Carlyle is, here and there, led astray by the love of contrast; but not
even Heinrich Heine has employed antithesis with more effect than in the
familiar passage on the sleeping city in _Sartor_, beginning, "Ach mein
Lieber ... it is a true sublimity to dwell here," and ending, "But I,
mein Werther, sit above it all. I am alone with the stars." His thought,
seldom quite original, is often a resuscitation or survival, and owes
much of its celebrity to its splendid brocade. _Sartor Resartus_ itself
escaped the failure that was at first threatened by its eccentricity
partly from its noble passion, partly because of the truth of the
"clothes philosophy," applied to literature as to life.

His descriptions, too often caricatures, of men are equally vivid. They
set the whole great mass of _Friedrich_ in a glow; they lighten the
tedium of _Cromwell's_ lumbering despatches; they give a heart of fire
to _The French Revolution_. Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_ attempts
and fulfils on a smaller what Carlyle achieved on a greater scale. The
historian makes us sympathise with the real actors, even more than the
novelist does with the imaginary characters on the same stage. From the
account of the dying Louis XV. to the "whiff of grapeshot" which closed
the last scene of the great drama, there is not a dull page. Théroigne
de Méricourt, Marat, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Robespierre,
Talleyrand, Mdme. Roland, above all Marie Antoinette--for whom Carlyle
has a strong affection--and Buonaparte, so kindle and colour the scene
that we cannot pause to feel weary of the phrases with which they are
labelled. The author's letters show the same power of baptizing, which he
used often to unfair excess. We can no more forget Count d'Orsay as the
"Phoebus Apollo of Dandyism," Daniel Webster's "brows like cliffs and
huge black eyes," or Wordsworth "munching raisins" and recognising no
poet but himself, or Maurice "attacked by a paroxysm of mental cramp,"
than we can dismiss from our memories "The Glass Coachman" or "The
Tobacco Parliament."

Carlyle quotes a saying of Richter, that Luther's words were half
battles; he himself compares those of Burns to cannon-balls; much of his
own writing is a fusilade. All three were vehement in abuse of things
and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not
sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are,
by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his
humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining
over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as
finely quaint as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's. There is in
it, as in all the highest humour, a sense of apparent contrast, even of
contradiction, in life, of matter for laughter in sorrow and tears in
joy. He seems to check himself, and as if afraid of wearing his heart
in his sleeve, throws in absurd illustrations of serious propositions,
partly to show their universal range, partly in obedience to an instinct
of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermonising and to cut the story
short. Carlyle's grotesque is a mode of his golden silence, a sort of
Socratic irony, in the indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and
at himself. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, ridicule of
his own and other ages, now in droll reference or mock heroic detail,
in an odd conception, a character sketch, an event in parody, in an
antithesis or simile,--sometimes it lurks in a word, and again in a
sentence. In direct pathos--the other side of humour--he is equally
effective. His denunciations of sentiment remind us of Plato attacking
the poets, for he is at heart the most emotional of writers, the greatest
of the prose poets of England; and his dramatic sympathy extends alike to
the actors in real events and to his ideal creations. Few more pathetic
passages occur in literature than his "stories of the deaths of kings."
The following among the less known of his eloquent passages is an
apotheosis of their burials:--

  In this manner did the men of the Eastern Counties take up
  the slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in
  the village of Hoxne; seek out the severed head and
  reverently reunite the same. They embalmed him with myrrh
  and sweet spices, with love, pity, and all high and awful
  thoughts; consecrating him with a very storm of melodious,
  adoring admiration, and sun-dried showers of tears; joyfully,
  yet with awe (as all deep joy has something of the awful in
  it), commemorating his noble deeds and godlike walk and
  conversation while on Earth. Till, at length, the very Pope
  and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear of it; and they,
  summing up as correctly as they well could, with _Advocatus
  Diaboli_ pleadings and other forms of process, the
  general verdict of mankind, declared that he had in very
  fact led a hero's life in this world: and, being now gone,
  was gone, as they conceived, to God above and reaping his
  reward there. Such, they said, was the best judgment they
  could form of the case, and truly not a bad judgment.

Carlyle's reverence for the past makes him even more apt to be touched by
its sorrows than amused by its follies. With a sense of brotherhood he
holds out hands to all that were weary; he feels even for the pedlars
climbing the Hohenzollern valley, and pities the solitude of soul on the
frozen Schreckhorn of power, whether in a dictator of Paraguay or in
a Prussian prince. He leads us to the death chamber of Louis XV., of
Mirabeau, of Cromwell, of Sterling, his own lost friend; and we feel with
him in the presence of a solemnising mystery. Constantly, amid the din of
arms or words, and the sarcasms by which he satirises and contemns old
follies and idle strifes, a gentler feeling wells up in his pages like
the sound of the Angelus. Such pauses of pathos are the records of real
or fanciful situations, as of Teufelsdröckh "left alone with the night"
when Blumine and Herr Towgood ride down the valley; of Oliver recalling
the old days at St. Ives; of the Electress Louisa bidding adieu to her
Elector.

At the moment of her death, it is said, when speech had fled, he felt
from her hand, which lay in his, three slight slight pressures--farewell
thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easily to forget in this world.

There is nothing more pathetic in the range of his works, if in that of
our literature, than the account of the relations of father and son in
the domestic history of the Prussian Court, from the first estrangement
between them--the young Friedrich in his prison at Cüstrin, the old
Friedrich gliding about seeking shelter from ghosts, mourning for
Absalom--to the reconciliation, the end, and the afterthoughts:--

  The last breath of Friedrich Wilhelm having fled, Friedrich
  hurried to a private room; sat there all in tears; looking
  back through the gulfs of the Past, upon such a Father now
  rapt away for ever. Sad all and soft in the moonlight of
  memory--the lost Loved One all in the right as we now see,
  we all in the wrong!--This, it appears, was the Son's fixed
  opinion. Sever, years hence here is how Friedrich concludes
  the _History_ of his Father, written with a loyal
  admiration throughout: "We have left under silence the
  domestic chagrins of this great Prince; readers must have
  some indulgence for the faults of the children, in
  consideration of the virtues of such a Father." All in
  tears he sits at present, meditating these sad things. In a
  little while the Old Dessauer, about to leave for Dessau,
  ventures in to the Crown Prince, Crown Prince no longer;
  "embraces his knees," offers weeping his condolence, his
  congratulation; hopes withal that his sons and he will be
  continued in their old posts, and that he the Old Dessauer
  "will have the same authority as in the late reign."
  Friedrich's eyes, at this last clause, flash out tearless,
  strangely Olympian. "In your posts I have no thought of
  making change; in your posts yes; and as to authority I
  know of none there can be but what resides in the king that
  is sovereign," which, as it were, struck the breath out of
  the Old Dessauer; and sent him home with a painful
  miscellany of feelings, astonishment not wanting among them.
  At an after hour the same night Friedrich went to Berlin,
  met by acclamation enough. He slept there not without
  tumult of dreams, one may fancy; and on awakening next
  morning the first sound he heard was that of the regiment
  Glasenap under his windows, swearing fealty to the new King.
  He sprang out of bed in a tempest of emotion; bustled
  distractedly to and fro, wildly weeping. Pöllnitz, who came
  into the anteroom, found him in this state, "half-dressed,
  with dishevelled hair, in tears, and as if beside himself."
  "These huzzahings only tell me what I have lost," said the
  new King. "He was in great suffering," suggested Pöllnitz;
  "he is now at rest." True, he suffered; but he was here with
  us; and now----!

Carlyle has said of Dante's _Francesco_ "that it is a thing woven as of
rainbows on a ground of eternal black." The phrase, well applied to the
_Inferno_, is a perhaps half-conscious verdict on his own tenderness as
exhibited in his life and in his works.




CHAPTER IX

CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

One of the subtlest of Robert Browning's critics, in the opening sentence
of his work,  quotes a saying of Hegel's, "A great man condemns the world
to the task of explaining him"; adding, "The condemnation is a double one,
and it generally falls heaviest on the great man himself who has to submit
to explanation." Cousin, the graceful Eclectic, is reported to have said
to the great Philosopher, "will you oblige me by stating the results of
your teaching in a few sentences?" and to have received the reply, "It is
not easy, especially in French."

[Footnote: _Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher,_ by
Professor Henry Jones, of St. Andrews.]

The retort applies, with severity, to those who attempt to systematise
Carlyle; for he himself was, as we have seen, intolerant of system. His
mathematical attainment and his antipathy to logical methods beyond
the lines of square and circle, his love of concise fact and his often
sweeping assertions are characteristic of the same contradictions in
his nature as his almost tyrannical premises and his practically
tender-hearted conclusions. A hard thinker, he was never a close
reasoner; in all that relates to human affairs he relies on nobility of
feeling rather than on continuity of thought. Claiming the full latitude
of the prophet to warn, exhort, even to command, he declines either to
preach or to accept the rubric of the partisan or of the priest.

In praise of German literature, he remarks, "One of its chief qualities
is that it has no particular theory at all on the front of it;" and of
its leaders, "I can only speak of the revelations these men have made to
me. As to their doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be
said"; yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him "out
of the blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that
his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their
discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings,
inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of
credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or mountain air,
and found in them the key of the perennial riddle and the solution of the
insoluble mystery. But in later years the curtain to many of them became
the picture.

When Carlyle was first recognised in London as a rising author, curiosity
was rife as to his "opinions"; was he a Chartist at heart or an
Absolutist, a Calvinist like Knox, a Deist like Hume, a Feudalist with
Scott, or a Democrat with Burns--inquisitions mostly vain. He had come
from the Scotch moors and his German studies, a strange element, into the
midst of an almost foreign society, not so much to promulgate a new set
of opinions as to infuse a new life into those already existing. He
claimed to have a "mission," but it was less to controvert any form of
creed than to denounce the insufficiency of shallow modes of belief. He
raised the tone of literature by referring to higher standards than those
currently accepted; he tried to elevate men's minds to the contemplation
of something better than themselves, and impress upon them the vacuity
of lip-services; he insisted that the matter of most consequence was the
grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to
sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty
to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only
barren but obstructive; that it is only

  When half-gods go, the gods arrive.

But his manner of reading these important lessons admitted the retort
that he himself was content rather to dwell on what is _not_ than to
discover what _is_ true. Belief, he reiterates, is the cure for all the
worst of human ills; but belief in what or in whom? In "the eternities
and immensities," as an answer, requires definition. It means that we are
not entitled to regard ourselves as the centres of the universe; that
we are but atoms of space and time, with relations infinite beyond our
personalities; that the first step to a real recognition of our duties is
the sense of our inferiority to those above us, our realisation of the
continuity of history and life, our faith and acquiescence in some
universal law. This truth, often set forth

  By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet,

no one has enforced with more eloquence than Carlyle; but though he
founded a dynasty of ideas, they are comparatively few; like a group of
strolling players, each with a well-filled wardrobe, and ready for many
parts.

The difficulty of defining Carlyle results not merely from his frequent
golden nebulosity, but from his love of contradicting even himself. Dr.
Johnson confessed to Boswell that when arguing in his dreams he was often
worsted and took credit for the resignation with which he bore these
defeats, forgetting that the victor and the vanquished were one and the
same. Similarly his successor took liberties with himself which he would
allow to no one else, and in doing so he has taken liberties with his
reader. His praise and blame of the profession of letters, as the highest
priesthood and the meanest trade; his early exaltation of "the writers of
newspapers, pamphlets, books," as "the real effective working church of a
modern country"; and his later expressed contempt for journalism as
"mean and demoralising"--"we must destroy the faith in newspapers";
his alternate faith and unfaith in Individualism; the teaching of the
_Characteristics_ and the _Signs of the Times_ that all healthy genius is
unconscious, and the censure of Sir Walter Scott for troubling himself
too little with mysteries; his commendation of "the strong warrior" for
writing no books, and his taking sides with the mediæval monks against
the kings--there is no reconciliation of such contradictories. They are
the expression of diverse moods and emphatically of different stages of
mental progress, the later, as a rule, more negative than the earlier.

This change is most marked in the sphere of politics. At the close of his
student days Carlyle was to all intents a Radical, and believed in
Democracy; he saw hungry masses around him, and, justly attributing some
of their suffering to misgovernment, vented his sympathetic zeal for the
oppressed in denunciation of the oppressors.

[Footnote: Passage quoted (Chap. II.) about the Glasgow Radical rising in
1819.]

He began not only by sympathising with the people, but by believing in
their capacity to manage best their own affairs: a belief that steadily
waned as he grew older until he denied to them even the right to choose
their rulers. As late, however, as 1830, he argued against Irving's
conservatism in terms recalled in the _Reminiscences_. "He objected
clearly to my Reform Bill notions, found Democracy a thing forbidden,
leading even to outer darkness: I a thing inevitable and obliged to lead
whithersoever it could." During the same period he clenched his theory by
taking a definite side in the controversy of the age. "This," he writes to
Macvey Napier, "this is the day when the lords are to reject the Reform
Bill. The poor lords can only accelerate (by perhaps a century) their own
otherwise inevitable enough abolition."

The political part of _Sartor Resartus_, shadowing forth some scheme of
well-organised socialism, yet anticipates, especially in the chapter on
_Organic Filaments_, the writer's later strain of belief in dukes, earls,
and marshals of men: but this work, religious, ethical, and idyllic,
contains mere vague suggestions in the sphere of practical life. About
this time Carlyle writes of liberty: "What art thou to the valiant and
the brave when thou art thus to the weak and timid, dearer than life,
stronger than death, higher than purest love?" and agrees with the
verdict, "The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive
struggles of anarchy." But he soon passed from the mood represented
by Emily Brontë to that of the famous apostrophe of Madame Roland. He
proclaimed that liberty to do as we like is a fatal license, that the
only true liberty is that of doing what is right, which he interprets
living under the laws enacted by the wise. Mrs. Austin in 1832 wrote to
Mrs. Carlyle, "I am that monster made up of all the Whigs hate--a Radical
and an Absolutist." The expression, at the time, accurately defined
Carlyle's own political position: but he shifted from it, till the
Absolutist, in a spirit made of various elements, devoured the Radical.
The leading counsel against the aristocracy changed his brief and became
chief advocate on their side, declaring "we must recognise the hereditary
principle if there is to be any fixity in things." In 1835, he says to
Emerson:--

  I believe literature to be as good as dead ... and nothing
  but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps
  three generations.... I suffer also terribly from the
  solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a
  kind of passion with me to feel myself among my brothers.
  And then How? Alas I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay, I
  feel it to be a wretched necessity unfit for me;
  Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet
  these two are the grand categories under which all English
  spiritual activity, that so much as thinks remuneration
  possible, must range itself.

And somewhat later--

  People accuse me, not of being an incendiary Sansculotte,
  but of being a Tory, thank Heaven!

Some one has written with a big brush, "He who is not a radical in his
youth is a knave, he who is not a conservative in his age is a fool." The
rough, if not rude, generalisation has been plausibly supported by
the changes in the mental careers of Burke, Coleridge, Southey, and
Wordsworth. But Carlyle was "a spirit of another sort," of more mixed
yarn; and, as there is a vein of Conservatism in his early Radicalism,
so there is, as also in the cases of Landor and even of Goethe, still
a revolutionary streak in his later Conservatism. Consequently, in his
instance, there is a plea in favour of the prepossession (especially
strong in Scotland) which leads the political or religious party that a
distinguished man has left still to persist in claiming him; while
that which he has joined accepts him, if at all, with distrust. Scotch
Liberals will not give up Carlyle, one of his biographers keenly
asseverating that he was to the last "a democrat at heart"; while
the representative organ of northern Conservatism on the same ground
continues to assail him--"mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst
vergebens." On all questions directly bearing on the physical welfare of
the masses of the people, his speech and action remained consistent with
his declaration that he had "never heard an argument for the corn laws
which might not make angels weep." From first to last he was an advocate
of Free Trade--though under the constant protest that the greatness of
a nation depended in a very minor degree on the abundance of its
possessions--and of free, unsectarian, and compulsory Education. while,
in theology, though remote from either, he was more tolerant of the
dogmatic narrowness of the Low Church of the lower, than of the Ritualism
of the upper, classes. His unwavering interest in the poor and his belief
that legislation should keep them in constant view, was in accord with
the spirit of Bentham's standard: but Carlyle, rightly or wrongly,
came to regard the bulk of men as children requiring not only help and
guidance but control.

On the question of "the Suffrage" he completely revolved. It appears,
from the testimony of Mr. Froude, that the result of the Reform Bill of
1832 disappointed him in merely shifting power from the owners of land to
the owners of shops, and leaving the handicraftsmen and his own peasant
class no better off. Before a further extension became a point
of practical politics he had arrived at the conviction that the
ascertainment of truth and the election of the fittest did not lie with
majorities. These sentences of 1835 represent a transition stage:--

  Conservatism I cannot attempt to conserve, believing it to
  be a portentous embodied sham.... Whether the Tories stay
  out or in, it will be all for the advance of Radicalism,
  which means revolt, dissolution, and confusion and a
  darkness which no man can see through.

No one had less faith in the paean chanted by Macaulay and others on the
progress of the nation or of the race, a progress which, without faith
in great men, was to him inevitably downward; no one protested with more
emphasis against the levelling doctrines of the French Revolution. It has
been observed that Carlyle's _Chartism_ was "his first practical step in
politics"; it is more true to say that it first embodied, with more than
his usual precision, the convictions he had for some time held of the
dangers of our social system; with an indication of some of the means to
ward them off, based on the realisation of the interdependence of all
classes in the State. This book is remarkable as containing his last,
very partial, concessions to the democratic creed, the last in which he
is willing to regard a wide suffrage as a possible, though by no means
the best, expedient. Subsequently, in _Past and Present_ and the
_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, he came to hold "that with every extension of the
Franchise those whom the voters would elect would be steadily inferior
and more unfit." Every stage in his political progress is marked by a
growing distrust in the judgment of the multitude, a distrust set forth,
with every variety of metaphor, in such sentences as the following:--

  There is a divine message or eternal regulation of the
  Universe. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count
  heads, ask Universal Suffrage by the ballot-box and that
  will tell!" From Adam's time till now the Universe was wont
  to be of a somewhat abstruse nature, partially disclosing
  itself to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was
  not the majority. Of what use towards the general result of
  finding out what it is wise to do, can the fools be? ... If
  of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common
  calculation, how in the name of wonder will you ever get a
  ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these
  ten men? ... Only by reducing to zero nine of these votes can
  wisdom ever issue from your ten. The mass of men consulted at
  the hustings upon any high matter whatsoever, is as ugly an
  exhibition of human stupidity as this world sees.... If the
  question be asked and the answer given, I will generally
  consider in any case of importance, that the said answer is
  likely to be wrong, and that I have to go and do the reverse
  of the same ... for how should I follow a multitude to do
  evil? Cease to brag to me of America and its model
  institutions.... On this side of the Atlantic or on that,
  Democracy is for ever impossible! The Universe is a monarchy
  and a hierarchy, the noble in the high places, the ignoble in
  the low; this is in all times and in all places the Almighty
  Maker's law. Democracy, take it where you will, is found a
  regulated method of rebellion, it abrogates the old
  arrangement of things, and leaves zero and vacuity. It is the
  consummation of no-government and _laissez faire_.

Alongside of this train of thought there runs a constant protest against
the spirit of revolt. In _Sartor_ we find: "Whoso cannot obey cannot be
free, still less bear rule; he that is the inferior of nothing can be the
superior of nothing"; and in _Chartism_--

  Men who rebel and urge the lower classes to rebel ought to
  have other than formulas to go upon, ... those to whom
  millions of suffering fellow-creatures are "masses," mere
  explosive masses for blowing down Bastiles with, for voting
  at hustings for us--such men are of the questionable
  species.... Obedience ... is the primary duty of man....
  Of all "rights of men" this right of the ignorant to be
  guided by the wiser, gently or forcibly--is the
  indisputablest.... Cannot one discern, across all democratic
  turbulence, clattering of ballot-boxes, and infinite
  sorrowful jangle, that this is at bottom the wish and prayer
  of all human hearts everywhere, "Give me a leader"?

The last sentence indicates the transition from the merely negative
aspect of Carlyle's political philosophy to the positive, which is
his HERO-WORSHIP, based on the excessive admiration for individual
greatness,--an admiration common to almost all imaginative writers,
whether in prose or verse; on his notions of order and fealty, and on a
reverence for the past, which is also a common property of poets. The
Old and Middle Ages, according to his view, had their chiefs, captains,
kings, and waxed or waned with the increase or decrease of their
Loyality. Democracy, the new force of our times, must in its turn be
dominated by leaders. Raised to independence over the arbitrary will of a
multitude, these are to be trusted and followed, if need be, to death.

  Your noblest men at the summit of affairs is the ideal world
  of poets.... Other aim in this earth we have none. That
  we all reverence "great men" is to me the living rock amid
  all rushings down whatsoever. All that democracy ever meant
  lies there, the attainment of a truer Aristocracy or
  Government of the Best. Make search for the Able man. How to
  get him is the question of questions.

It is precisely the question to which Carlyle never gives, and hardly
attempts, a reply; and his failure to answer it invalidates the
larger half of his Politics. Plato has at least detailed a scheme for
eliminating his philosopher guardians, though it somewhat pedantically
suggests a series of Chinese examinations: his political, though probably
unconscious disciple has only a few negative tests. The warrior or sage
who is to rule is _not_ to be chosen by the majority, especially in our
era, when they would choose the Orators who seduce and "traduce the
State"; nor are we ever told that the election is to rest with either
Under or Upper House: the practical conclusion is that when we find a man
of great force of character, whether representing our own opinions or the
reverse, we should take him on trust. This brings us to the central maxim
of Carlyle's political philosophy, to which we must, even in our space,
give some consideration, as its true meaning has been the theme of so
much dispute.

It is a misfortune of original thought that it is hardly ever put
in practice by the original thinker. When his rank as a teacher is
recognised, his words have already lost half their value by repetition.
His manner is aped by those who find an easy path to notoriety in
imitation; the belief he held near his heart is worn as a creed like a
badge; the truth he promulgated is distorted in a room of mirrors, half
of it is a truism, the other half a falsism. That which began as a
denunciation of tea-table morality, is itself the tea-table morality of
the next generation: an outcry against cant may become the quintessence
of cant; a revolt from tyranny the basis of a new tyranny; the
condemnation of sects the foundation of a new sect; the proclamation of
peace a bone of contention. There is an ambiguity in most general maxims,
and a seed of error which assumes preponderance over the truth when the
interpreters of the maxim are men easily led by formulæ. Nowhere is this
degeneracy more strikingly manifested than in the history of some of
the maxims which Carlyle either first promulgated or enforced by his
adoption. When he said, or quoted, "Silence is better than speech," he
meant to inculcate patience and reserve. Always think before you speak:
rather lose fluency than waste words: never speak for the sake of
speaking. It is the best advice, but they who need it most are the last
to take it; those who speak and write not because they have something to
say, but because they wish to say or must say something, will continue to
write and speak as long as they can spell or articulate. Thoughtful men
are apt to misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit
still and leave the "war of words to those who like it." When Carlyle
condemned self-consciousness, a constant introspection and comparison of
self with others, he theoretically struck at the root of the morbid moods
of himself and other mental analysts; he had no intention to over-exalt
mere muscularity or to deify athletic sports. It were easy to multiply
instances of truths clearly conceived at first and parodied in their
promulgation; but when we have the distinct authority of the discoverer
himself for their correct interpretation, we can at once appeal to it.
A yet graver, not uncommon, source of error arises when a great writer
misapplies the maxims of his own philosophy, or states them in such a
manner that they are sure to be misapplied.

Carlyle has laid down the doctrine that MIGHT IS RIGHT at various times
and in such various forms, with and without modification or caveat, that
the real meaning can only be ascertained from his own application of it.
He has made clear, what goes without saying, that by "might" he does not
intend mere physical strength.

  Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute
  force; conquest of that kind does not endure. The strong man,
  what is he? The wise man. His muscles and bones are not
  stronger than ours; but his soul is stronger, clearer,
  nobler.... Late in man's history, yet clearly at length, it
  becomes manifest to the dullest that mind is stronger than
  matter, that not brute Force, but only Persuasion and Faith,
  is the king of this world.... Intellect has to govern this
  world and will do it.

There are sentences which indicate that he means something more than even
mental force; as in his Diary (Froude, iv. 422), "I shall have to tell
Lecky, Right is the eternal symbol of Might"; and again in _Chartism_,
"Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them
centuries to try it, and they are found to be identical. The strong thing
is the just thing. In kings we have either a divine right or a diabolic
wrong." On the other hand, we read in _Past and Present_:--

  Savage fighting Heptarchies: their lighting is an
  ascertainment  who has the right to rule over them.

And again--

  Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable  might: _either_ of
  these, once ascertained, puts an end to battle.

And elsewhere--

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

  Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere correctly
  articulated mights.... All goes by wager of battle in this
  world, and it is, well understood, the measure of all
  worth.... By right divine the strong and capable govern the
  weak and foolish.... Strength we may say is Justice itself.

It is not left for us to balance those somewhat indefinite definitions.
Carlyle has himself in his Histories illustrated and enforced his own
interpretations of the summary views of his political treatises. There
he has demonstrated that his doctrine, "Might is Right," is no mere
unguarded expression of the truism that moral might is right. In his
hands it implies that virtue is in all cases a property of strength, that
strength is everywhere a property of virtue; that power of whatever sort
having any considerable endurance, carries with it the seal and signal of
its claim to respect, that whatever has established itself has, in the
very act, established its right to be established. He is never careful
enough to keep before his readers what he must himself have dimly
perceived, that victory _by right_ belongs not to the force of will
alone, apart from clear and just conceptions of worthy ends. Even in its
crude form, the maxim errs not so much in what it openly asserts as
in what it implicitly denies. Aristotle (the first among ancients to
_question_ the institution of slavery, as Carlyle has been one of the
last of moderns to defend it) more guardedly admits that strength is
in itself _a_ good,--[Greek: kai estin aei to kratoun en uperochae
agathoutinos],--but leaves it to be maintained that there are forms of
good which do not show themselves in excess of strength. Several of
Carlyle's conclusions and verdicts seem to show that he only acknowledges
those types of excellence that have already manifested themselves as
powers; and this doctrine (which, if adopted in earlier ages, would
practically have left possession with physical strength) colours all his
History and much of his Biography. Energy of any sort compels his homage.
Himself a Titan, he shakes hands with all Titans, Gothic gods, Knox,
Columbus, the fuliginous Mirabeau, burly Danton dying with "no weakness"
on his lips. The fulness of his charity is for the errors of Mohammed,
Cromwell, Burns, Napoleon I.,--whose mere belief in his own star he
calls sincerity,--the atrocious Francia, the Norman kings, the Jacobins,
Brandenburg despots; the fulness of his contempt for the conscientious
indecision of Necker, the Girondists, the Moderates of our own
Commonwealth. He condones all that ordinary judgments regard as the
tyranny of conquest, and has for the conquered only a _væ victis._ In
this spirit, he writes :--

  M. Thierry celebrates with considerable pathos the fate of
  the Saxons; the fate of the Welsh, too, moves him; of the
  Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into
  the mountains, whither they were not worth following. What
  can we say, but that the cause which pleased the gods had in
  the end to please Cato also?

When all is said, Carlyle's inconsistent optimism throws no more light
than others have done on the apparent relapses of history, as the
overthrow of Greek civilisation, the long night of the Dark Ages, the
spread of the Russian power during the last century, or of continental
Militarism in the present. In applying the tests of success or failure we
must bear in mind that success is from its very nature conspicuous. We
only know that brave men have failed when they have had a "sacred bard."
The good that is lost is, _ipso facto_, forgotten. We can rarely tell of
greatness unrecognised, for the very fact of our being able to tell of it
would imply a former recognition. The might of evil walks in darkness:
we remember the martyrs who, by their deaths, ultimately drove the
Inquisition from England; not those whose courage quailed. "It was their
fate," as a recent writer remarks, "that was the tragedy." Reading
Carlyle's maxim between the lines of his chapter on the Reformation,
and noting that the Inquisition triumphed in Spain, while in Austria,
Bavaria, and Bohemia Protestantism was stifled by stratagem or by force;
that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was successful; and that the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes killed the France of Henry IV., we see
its limitations even in the long perspective of the past.  Let us,
however, grant that in the ultimate issue the Platonic creed,
"Justice is stronger than injustice," holds good.

[Footnote: _Vide_ Mill's _Liberty_, chap. ii. pp. 52-54]

It is when Carlyle turns to politics and regards them as history
accomplished instead of history in progress that his principle leads to
the most serious error. No one has a more withering contempt for evil as
meanness and imbecility; but he cannot see it in the strong hand. Of two
views, equally correct, "evil is weakness," such evil as sloth, and
"corruptio optimi pessima," such evil as tyranny--he only recognises the
first. Despising the palpable anarchies of passion, he has no word of
censure for the more settled form of anarchy which announced, "Order
reigns at Warsaw." He refuses his sympathy to all unsuccessful efforts,
and holds that if races are trodden under foot, they are [Greek: phusei
doulo dunamenoi allou einai] they who have allowed themselves to be
subjugated deserve their fate. The cry of "oppressed nationalities" was to
him mere cant. His Providence is on the side of the big battalions, and
forgives very violent means to an orderly end. To his credit he declined
to acknowledge the right of Louis Napoleon to rule France; but he accepted
the Czars, and ridiculed Mazzini till forced to admit, almost with
chagrin, that he had, "after all," substantially succeeded.

  Treason never prospers, what's the reason?
  That when it prospers, none dare call it treason.

Apprehending, on the whole more keenly than any of his contemporaries,
the foundations of past greatness, his invectives and teaching lay
athwart much that is best as well as much that is most hazardous in the
new ideas of the age. Because mental strength, endurance, and industry
do not appear prominently in the Negro race, he looks forward with
satisfaction to the day when a band of white buccaneers shall undo
Toussaint l'Ouverture's work of liberation in Hayti, advises the English
to revoke the Emancipation Act in Jamaica, and counsels the Americans
to lash their slaves--better, he admits, made serfs and not saleable by
auction--not more than is necessary to get from them an amount of work
satisfactory to the Anglo-Saxon mind. Similarly he derides all movements
based on a recognition of the claims of weakness to consideration and
aid.

  Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable,
  Doing or suffering.

The application of the maxim, "Might is Right," to a theory of government
is obvious; the strongest government must be the best, _i.e._ that in
which Power, in the last resort supreme, is concentrated in the hands of
a single ruler; the weakest, that in which it is most widely diffused,
is the worst. Carlyle in his Address to the Edinburgh students commends
Machiavelli for insight in attributing the preservation of Rome to
the institution of the Dictatorship. In his _Friedrich_ this view is
developed in the lessons he directs the reader to draw from Prussian
history. The following conveys his final comparative estimate of an
absolute and a limited monarchy:--

  This is the first triumph of the constitutional Principle
  which has since gone to such sublime heights among
  us--heights which we begin at last to suspect may be depths
  leading down, all men now ask whitherwards. A much-admired
  invention in its time, that of letting go the rudder or
  setting a wooden figure expensively to take care of it, and
  discovering that the ship would sail of itself so much the
  more easily. Of all things a nation needs first to be
  drilled, and a nation that has not been governed by
  so-called tyrants never came to much in the world.

Among the currents of thought contending in our age, two are
conspicuously opposed. The one says: Liberty is an end not a mere means
in itself; apart from practical results the crown of life. Freedom of
thought and its expression, and freedom of action, bounded only by
the equal claim of our fellows, are desirable for their own sakes as
constituting national vitality: and even when, as is sometimes the case,
Liberty sets itself against improvements for a time, it ultimately
accomplishes more than any reforms could accomplish without it. The fewer
restraints that are imposed from without on human beings the better: the
province of law is only to restrain men from violently or fraudulently
invading the province of other men. This view is maintained and in great
measure sustained by J.S. Mill in his _Liberty_, the _Areopagitica_ of
the nineteenth century, and more elaborately if not more philosophically
set forth in the comprehensive treatise of Wilhelm von Humboldt on _The
Sphere and Duties of Government_. These writers are followed with various
reserves by Grote, Buckle, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and by Mr. Lecky. Mill
writes:--

  The idea of rational Democracy is not that the people
  themselves govern; but that they have security for good
  government. This security they can only have by retaining in
  their own hands the ultimate control. The people ought to be
  masters employing servants more skilful than themselves.

  [Footnote: It should be noted that Mill lays as great
  stress on Individualism as Carlyle does, and a more
  practical stress. He has the same belief in the essential
  mediocrity of the masses of men whose "think ing is done for
  them ... through the newspapers," and the same scorn for
  "the present low state of society." He writes, "The
  initiation of all wise and noble things comes and must come
  from individuals: generally at first from some one
  individual"; but adds, "I am not countenancing the sort of
  'hero-worship' which applauds the strong man of genius for
  forcibly seizing on the government of the world.... All he
  can claim is freedom to point out the way."]

To this Carlyle, with at least the general assent of Mr. Froude, Mr.
Ruskin, and Sir James Stephen, substantially replies:--

  In freedom for itself there is nothing to raise a man above
  a fly; the value of a human life is that of its work done;
  the prime province of law is to get from its subjects the
  most of the best work. The first duty of a people is to
  find--which means to accept--their chief; their second and
  last to obey him. We see to what men have been brought by
  "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," by the dreams of
  idealogues, and the purchase of votes.

This, the main drift of Carlyle's political teaching, rests on his
absolute belief in strength (which always grows by concentration), on his
unqualified admiration of order, and on his utter disbelief in what his
adverse friend Mazzini was wont, with over-confidence, to appeal to as
"collective wisdom." Theoretically there is much to be said for this
view: but, in practice, it involves another idealism as aerial as that of
any "idealogue" on the side of Liberty. It points to the establishment of
an Absolutism which must continue to exist, whether wisdom survives in
the absolute rulers or ceases to survive. [Greek: Kratein d' esti kai mae
dikios.] The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have been beneficent in
times of revolution; but their right to rule is apt to pass before their
power, and when the latter descends by inheritance, as from M. Aurelius
to Commodus, it commonly degenerates. It is well to learn, from a safe
distance, the amount of good that may be associated with despotism: its
worst evil is lawlessness, it not only suffocates freedom and induces
inertia, but it renders wholly uncertain the life of those under its
control. Most men would rather endure the "slings and arrows" of an
irresponsible press, the bustle and jargon of many elections, the delay
of many reforms, the narrowness of many streets, than have lived from
1814 to 1840, with the noose around all necks, in Paraguay, or even
precariously prospered under the paternal shield of the great Fritz's
extraordinary father, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia.

Carlyle's doctrine of the ultimate identity of "might and right" never
leads, with him, to its worst consequence, a fatalistic or indolent
repose; the withdrawal from the world's affairs of the soul "holding no
form of creed but contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent
optimist nor a consistent pessimist is apparent from his faith in man's
partial ability to mould his fate. Not "belief, belief," but "action,
action," is his working motto. On the title-page of the _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_ he quotes from Rushworth on a colloquy of Sir David Ramsay and
Lord Reay in 1638: "Then said his Lordship, 'Well, God mend all!'--'Nay,
by God, Donald; we must help Him to mend it,' said the other."

"I am not a Tory," he exclaimed, after the clamour on the publication of
_Chartism_, "no, but one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest of
Radicals." With the Toryism which merely says "stand to your guns" and,
for the rest, "let well alone," he had no sympathy. There was nothing
selfish in his theories. He felt for and was willing to fight for
mankind, though he could not trust them; even his "king" he defines to
be a minister or servant of the State. "The love of power," he says, "if
thou understand what to the manful heart power signifies, is a very noble
and indispensable love"; that is, the power to raise men above the "Pig
Philosophy," the worship of clothes, the acquiescence in wrong. "The
world is not here for me, but I for it." "Thou shalt is written upon life
in characters as terrible as thou shalt not"; are protests against the
mere negative virtues which religionists are wont unduly to exalt.

Carlyle's so-called Mysticism is a part of his German poetry; in the
sphere of common life and politics he made use of plain prose, and often
proved himself as shrewd as any of his northern race. An excessively
"good hater," his pet antipathies are generally bad things. In the
abstract they are always so; but about the abstract there is no
dispute. Every one dislikes or professes to dislike shams, hypocrisies,
phantoms,--by whatever tiresomely reiterated epithet he may be pleased to
address things that are not what they pretend to be. Diogenes's toil with
the lantern alone distinguished the cynic Greek, in admiration of an
honest man. Similarly the genuine zeal of his successor appears in
painstaking search; his discrimination in the detection, his eloquence in
his handling of humbugs. Occasional blunders in the choice of objects
of contempt and of worship--between which extremes he seldom
halts,--demonstrate his fallibility, but outside the sphere of literary
and purely personal criticism he seldom attacks any one, or anything,
without a show of reason. To all gospels there are two sides; and a great
teacher who, by reason of the very fire that makes him great, disdains to
halt and hesitate and consider the _juste milieu,_ seldom guards himself
against misinterpretation or excess. Mazzini writes, "He weaves and
unweaves his web like Penelope, preaches by turns life and nothingness,
and wearies out the patience of his readers by continually carrying them
from heaven to hell." Carlyle, like Ruskin, keeps himself right not by
caveats but by contradictions of himself, and sometimes in a way least to
be expected. Much of his writing is a blast of war, or a protest against
the philanthropy that sets charity before justice. Yet in a letter to the
London Peace Congress of 1851, dated 18th July, we find:--

  I altogether approve of your object. Clearly the less war
  and cutting of throats we have among us, it will be the
  better for us all. As men no longer wear swords in the
  streets, so neither by and by will nations.... How many
  meetings would one expedition to Russia cover the cost of?

He denounced the Americans, in apparent ignorance of their
"Constitution," for having no Government; and yet admitted that what he
called their anarchy had done perhaps more than anything else could have
done to subdue the wilderness. He spoke with scorn of the "rights of
women," their demand for the suffrage, and the _cohue_ of female authors,
expressing himself in terms of ridiculous disparagement of writers so
eminent as George Sand and George Eliot; but he strenuously advocated
the claim of women to a recognised medical education. He reviled "Model
Prisons" as pampering institutes of "a universal sluggard and scoundrel
amalgamation society," and yet seldom passed on the streets one of the
"Devil's elect" without giving him a penny. He set himself against every
law or custom that tended to make harder the hard life of the poor: there
was no more consistent advocate of the abolition of the "Game Laws."
Emerson says of the mediaeval architects, "they builded better than they
knew." Carlyle felt more softly than he said, and could not have been
trusted to execute one of his own Rhadamanthine decrees.

[Footnote: _Vide_ a remarkable instance of this in the best short _Life of
Carlyle_, that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147.]

Scratch the skin of the Tartar and you find beneath the despised
humanitarian. Everything that he has written on "The Condition of England
Question" has a practical bearing, and many of his suggestions have found
a place on our code, vindicating the assertion of the _Times_ of the day
after his death, that "the novelties and paradoxes of 1846 are to a large
extent nothing but the good sense of 1881." Such are:--his insistence on
affording every facility for merit to rise from the ranks, embodied in
measures against promotion by Purchase; his advocacy of State-aided
Emigration, of administrative and civil service Reform,--the abolition of
"the circumlocution office" in Downing Street,--of the institution of a
Minister of Education; his dwelling on the duties as well as the rights
of landowners,--the theme of so many Land Acts; his enlarging on the
superintendence of labour,--made practical in Factory and Limited Hours
Bills--on care of the really destitute, on the better housing of the
poor, on the regulation of weights and measures; his general contention
for fixing more exactly the province of the legislative and the executive
bodies. Carlyle's view that we should find a way to public life for
men of eminence who will not cringe to mobs, has made a step towards
realisation in further enfranchisement of Universities. Other of his
proposals, as the employment of our army and navy in time of peace, and
the forcing of able-bodied paupers into "industrial regiments," have
become matter of debate which may pave the way to legislation. One of
his desiderata, a practical veto on "puffing," it has not yet been found
feasible, by the passing of an almost prohibitive duty on advertisements,
to realise.

Besides these specific recommendations, three ideas are dominant in
Carlyle's political treatises. _First_--a vehement protest against
the doctrine of _Laissez faire_; which, he says, "on the part of the
governing classes will, we repeat again and again, have to cease; pacific
mutual divisions of the spoil and a would-let-well-alone will no longer
suffice":--a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the Trades Union
wars, of which he failed to see the issue. He is so strongly in favour of
_Free-trade_ between nations that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared
to make it _compulsory_. "All men," he writes in _Past and Present_,
"trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do
it. Our friends of China, who refused to trade, had we not to argue with,
them, in cannon-shot at last?" But in Free-trade between class and class,
man and man, within the bounds of the same kingdom, he has no trust: he
will not leave "supply and demand" to adjust their relations. The
result of doing so is, he holds, the scramble between Capital for larger
interest and Labour for higher wage, in which the rich if unchecked will
grind the poor to starvation, or drive them to revolt.

_Second_.--As a corollary to the abolition of _Laissez faire_, he
advocates the _Organisation of Labour_, "the problem of the whole future
to all who will pretend to govern men." The phrase from its vagueness
has naturally provoked much discussion. Carlyle's bigoted dislike of
Political Economists withheld him from studying their works; and he seems
ignorant of the advances that have been made by the "dismal science,"
or of what it has proved and disproved. Consequently, while brought in
evidence by most of our modern Social idealists, Comtists and Communists
alike, all they can say is that he has given to their protest against the
existing state of the commercial world a more eloquent expression than
their own. He has no compact scheme,--as that of St. Simon or Fourier, or
Owen--few such definite proposals as those of Karl Marx, Bellamy, Hertzka
or Gronlund, or even William Morris. He seems to share with Mill the view
that "the restraints of communism are weak in comparison with those of
capitalists," and with Morris to look far forward to some golden age; he
has given emphatic support to a copartnership of employers and employed,
in which the profits of labour shall be apportioned by some rule of
equity, and insisted on the duty of the State to employ those who are out
of work in public undertakings.

  Enlist, stand drill, and become from banditti soldiers of
  industry. I will lead you to the Irish bogs ... English
  foxcovers ... New Forest, Salisbury Plains, and Scotch
  hill-sides which as yet feed only sheep ... thousands of
  square miles ... destined yet to grow green crops and fresh
  butter and milk and beef without limit:--

an estimate with the usual exaggeration. But Carlyle's later work
generally advances on his earlier, in its higher appreciation of
Industrialism. He looks forward to the boon of "one big railway right
across America," a prophecy since three times fulfilled; and admits that
"the new omnipotence of the steam engine is hewing aside quite other
mountains than the physical," _i.e._ bridging the gulf between races
and binding men to men. He had found, since writing _Sartor_, that dear
cotton and slow trains do not help one nearer to God, freedom, and
immortality.

Carlyle's _third_ practical point is his advocacy of _Emigration,_ or
rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy for Over-population.
He writes of "Malthusianism" with his constant contempt of convictions
other than his own:--

  A full formed man is worth more than a horse.... One
  man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him
  earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded
  indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and
  delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your
  population in the Pampas and Savannahs--in the Curragh of
  Kildare?  Let there be an _Emigration Service,_ ... so
  that every honest willing workman who found England too
  strait, and the organisation of labour incomplete, might
  find a bridge to carry him to western lands.... Our little
  isle has grown too narrow for us, but the world
  is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.... If
  this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not
  everywhere  else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to
  us "Come and till me, come and reap me"?

On this follows an eloquent passage about our friendly Colonies,
"overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas." Carlyle
would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans,
and Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; but the
problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines
to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to
overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps.

In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is
ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of
Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite
tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's
leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public
life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive
to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day
demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of
_laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to
become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one,
of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule
for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample
without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common
good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's
blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many
respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits
of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity with an
eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with equal force put to scorn the
superstition of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts,
some of which may find a mark the archer little meant.

[Footnote: _Vide passim_ the chapter in _Liberty_ entitled "Limits to the
Authority of Society over the Individual," where Mill denounces the idea
of "the majority of operatives in many branches of industry ... that bad
workmen ought to receive the same wages as good."]




CHAPTER X

CARLYLE'S RELIGION AND ETHICS--RELATION TO PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE

The same advance or retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is
traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages
of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the
widest sense--faith in some supreme Power above us yet acting for us--was
the great factor of his inner life. But when we further question his
Creed, he is either bewilderingly inconsistent or designedly vague. The
answer he gives is that of Schiller: "Welche der Religionen? Keine
von allen. Warum? Aus Religion." In 1870 he writes: "I begin to think
religion again possible for whoever will piously struggle upwards and
sacredly refuse to tell lies: which indeed will mostly mean refusal to
speak at all on that topic." This and other implied protests against
intrusive inquisition are valid in the case of those who keep their own
secrets: it is impertinence to peer and "interview" among the sanctuaries
of a poet or politician or historian who does not himself open their
doors. But Carlyle has done this in all his books. A reticent writer may
veil his convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. An
avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interrogation as to his text.

With all the evidence before us--his collected works, his friendly
confidences, his journals, his fragmentary papers, as the interesting
series of jottings entitled "Spiritual Optics," and the partial accounts
to Emerson and others of the design of the "Exodus from Hounds-ditch"--it
remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We know that he
abandoned the ministry, for which he was destined, because, at an early
date, he found himself at irreconcilable variance, not on matters of
detail but on essentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism.
We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; that he went, as
continuously as possible for a mind so liable to fits and starts, further
and further from the faith of his fathers; but that he remained to the
last so much affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early
associations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist without
dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a Puritan who had lost
his creed." We know that he revered the character of Christ, and
theoretically accepted the ideal of self-sacrifice: the injunction
to return good for evil he never professed to accept; and vicarious
sacrifice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught that every
man must "dree his weird." We know that he not only believed in God as
revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but
that he threatened, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point
to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in
free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the
greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we
desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of
exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did _not_ believe.
This process is simplified by the fact that he assailed all convictions
other than his own.

Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all
forms of _Materialism_ and _Hedonism,_ which he brands as "worships of
Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may
lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain.
Similarly he denounces _Atheism,_ never more vehemently than in his
Journals of 1868-1869:--

  Had no God made this world it were an insupportable place. Laws without
  a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. All that is good,
  generous, wise, right ... who or what could by any possibility have
  given it to me, but One who first had it to give! This is not logic, it
  is axiom.... Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic specialities."...
  Canst _thou_ by searching find out God? I am not surprised thou canst
  not, vain fool. If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered
  hearts, there will be seen such a world as few are dreaming of.

Carlyle calls evidence from all quarters, appealing to Napoleon's
question, "Who made all that?" and to Friedrich's belief that intellect
"could not have been put into him by an entity that had none of its own,"
in support of what he calls the Eternal Fact of Facts, to which he clings
as to the Rock of Ages, the sole foundation of hope and of morality to
one having at root little confidence in his fellow-men.

If people are only driven upon virtuous conduct ... by association of
ideas, and there is no "Infinite Nature of Duty," the world, I should
say, had better count its spoons to begin with, and look out for
hurricanes and earthquakes to end with.

Carlyle hazardously confessed that as regards the foundations of his
faith and morals, with Napoleon and Friedrich II. on his side, he had
against him the advancing tide of modern _Science._ He did not attempt
to disprove its facts, or, as Emerson, to sublimate them into a new
idealism; he scoffed at and made light of them, _e.g._--

  Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very
  sublime achievement either. I often think ... it is pretty
  much all that science in this age has done. ... Protoplasm
  (unpleasant doctrine that we are all, soul and body, made of
  a kind of blubber, found in nettles among other organisms)
  appears to be delightful to many.... Yesterday there came a
  pamphlet published at Lewes, a hallelujah on the advent of
  Atheism.... The real joy of Julian (the author) was what
  surprised me, like the shout of a hyaena on finding that the
  whole universe was actually carrion. In about seven minutes
  my great Julian was torn in two and lying in the place fit
  for him.... Descended from Gorillas! Then where is the place
  for a Creator? Man is only a little higher than the tadpoles,
  says our new Evangelist.... Nobody need argue with these
  people. Logic never will decide the matter, or will seem to
  decide it their way. He who traces nothing of God in his own
  soul, will never find God in the world of matter--mere
  circlings of force there, of iron regulation, of universal
  death and merciless indifference.... Matter itself is either
  Nothing or else a product due to man's _mind_. ... The
  fast-increasing flood of Atheism on me takes no hold--does
  not even wet the soles of my feet.

  [Footnote: Cf. Othello, "Not a jot, not a jot." Carlyle writes
  on this question  with the agitation of one himself not quite at
  ease, with none of the calmness of a faith perfectly secure.]

"Carlyle," says one of his intimates, "speaks as if Darwin wished to rob
or to insult him." _Scepticism_ proper fares as hardly in his hands as
definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in
the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as
intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole
soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal
to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace
of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of life as "a
most melancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean Paul,
"heaven becomes a gas, God a force, and the second world a grave." He
fails to see that all such appeals are beside the question; and deserts
the ground of his answer to John Sterling's expostulation, "that is
downright Pantheism": "What if it were Pot-theism if it is _true_?" It is
the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sympathy for suffering
to override his Stoic theories; but it vitiated his reasoning, and made
it impossible for him to appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional,
religiosity of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called
_Orthodoxy_--whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High or Low; he
abhorred Puseyism, Jesuitry, spoke of the "Free Kirk and other rubbish,"
and recorded his definite disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation
and in Miracles. "It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing has
ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation of God's will and
justice, and the stars in their courses are a perpetual miracle, is
his refrain. _This is not what Orthodoxy means_, and no one was more
intolerant than Carlyle of all shifts and devices to slur the difference
between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his own "Exodus from
Houndsditch" might only open the way to the wilderness, he would allow
no one else to take in hand his uncompleted task; and disliked Strauss
and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. "He spoke to me once," says
Mr. Froude, "with loathing of the _Vie de Jésus_." I asked if a true life
could be written. He said, "Yes, certainly, if it were right to do so;
but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to Emerson:--

  You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom
  I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen
  were all a kind of half-way-house characters, who I thought
  should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in
  unbelief, in faint possible _Theism_; which I like
  considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel,
  deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed
  among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat.

What then is left for Carlyle's Creed? Logically little, emotionally
much. If it must be defined, it was that of a Theist with a difference. A
spirit of flame from the empyrean, he found no food in the cold _Deism_
of the eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image from its
pedestal, as by the music of the "Winter's Tale," to live among men and
inspire them. He inherited and _coûte que coûte_ determined to persist in
the belief that there was a personal God--"a Maker, voiceless, formless,
within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, "My belief in a
special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable"; and
later, "Some strange belief in a special Providence was always in me at
intervals." Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as good
as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days.

"To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew
prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the God
on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is
He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's God is not a mere
"tendency that makes for righteousness"; He is a guardian and a guide, to
be addressed in the words of Pope's _Universal Prayer_, which he adopted
as his own. A personal God does not mean a great Figure Head of the
Universe,--Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before he became "a
knight" of the Holy Ghost,--it means a Supreme Power, Love, or Justice
having relations to the individual man: in this sense Carlyle believed in
Him, though more as Justice, exacting "the terriblest penalties," than
as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives. He never entered into
controversies about the efficacy of prayer; but, far from deriding, he
recommended it as "a turning of one's soul to the Highest." In 1869 he
writes:--

  I occasionally feel able to wish, with my whole softened
  heart--it is my only form of prayer--"Great Father, oh, if
  Thou canst, have pity on her and on me and on all such!" In
  this at least there is no harm.

And about the same date to Erskine:--

  "Our Father;" in my sleepless tossings, these words, that
  brief and grand prayer, came strangely into my mind with an
  altogether  new emphasis; as if written and shining for me
  in mild pure splendour on the black bosom of the night there;
  when I as it were read them word by word, with a sudden
  check to my imperfect wanderings, with a sudden softness of
  composure which was much unexpected. Not for perhaps thirty
  or forty years had I once formally repeated that prayer: nay,
  I never felt before how intensely the voice of man's soul it
  is, the inmost inspiration of all that is high and pious in
  poor human nature, right worthy to be recommended with an
  "After this manner pray ye."

Carlyle holds that if we do our duty--the best work we can--and
faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, God will do the best
for us in this life. As regards the next we have seen that he ended with
Goethe's hope. At an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his
father's death (_Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 65) he wrote:--

  Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told:
  yet under time does there not lie eternity? ... Perhaps my
  father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near
  me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so
  please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one
  another, recognise one another. ... The possibility, nay (in
  some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows
  plainer to me.

On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife: "We shall yet go to her.
God is great. God is good": and earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the
loss of his brother:--

  "What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead.

  Your brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both
  you and I are.... Perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and
  the tears be wiped from all eyes. One thing is no perhaps:
  surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of
  us. If it be not His will, then is it not better so?"

After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immortality came
uppermost in his mind; but his conclusions are, like those of Burns,
never dogmatic:--

  The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us.
  "In my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are
  God you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do
  you know more than I, or any of us?

And later--

  What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor
  mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted
  to go farther"?

To Emerson in 1867 he writes:--

  I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily
  serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final
  chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and
  Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to
  discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their
  sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring
  nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger
  to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my
  door against.

There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's conviction that
he had to make war on credulity and to assail the pretences of a _formal
Belief_ (which he regards as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple
with real Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, the
Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the miracle of miracles;
sight and knowledge leave us no "less forlorn," and beneath all the
soundings of science there is a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind
that qualified him to be the exponent of the religious epochs in history.
"By this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, "he has done so much to vindicate
and bring to light the Augustan age of Christianity in England," adding
that it is the secret also of the great writer's appreciation of the
higher Teutonic literature. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of
"God in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to constrain
unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good and evil are absolute
opposites, are his links with the Puritans, whom he habitually exalts in
variations of the following strain:--

  The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest
  purpose awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts.
  Not the body of heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to
  die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been,
  and yet shall be immortal, has, for the present, passed away.

Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he regarded with a feeling
akin to worship, was in all essentials the reverse of a Puritan.

To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, may be applied
the phrase made use of in reference to the greatest of all the series of
ancient books--

  Hic liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata quaerit,
  Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua.

From passages like those above quoted--his complaints of the falling
off of old Scotch faith; his references to the kingdom of a God who has
written "in plain letters on the human conscience a Law that all may
read"; his insistence that the great soul of the world is just; his
belief in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the divine
depths of sorrow--from all these many of his Scotch disciples persist in
maintaining that their master was to the end essentially a Christian. The
question between them and other critics who assert that "he had renounced
Christianity" is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomenclature; it
is hard exactly to decide it in the case of a man who so constantly found
again in feeling what he had abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was
to the last an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's and
of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies; he attempts in vain to tear
off the husk that cannot be separated from its kernel. He believes in no
historical Resurrection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts
for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the
Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is
withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards
of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives
way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out,"
and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity
Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Masson says that "Carlyle had
abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its
Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain on the other side:
but the _Metaphysic_ of Calvinism is precisely what he retained; the
alleged _Facts_ of Revelation he discarded; of the _Ethic_ of the Gospels
he accepted perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard
the teaching of Christ as final.

[Footnote: A passage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life and Letters of Robert
Browning_, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic for
general quotation.]

His doctrine of Renunciation (suggested by the Three Reverences in
_Wilhelm Meister's Travels_) is Carlyle's transmutation, if not
transfiguration, of Puritanism; but it took neither in him nor in Goethe
any very consistent form, save that it meant Temperance, keeping the
body well under the control of the head, the will strong, and striving,
through all the lures of sense, to attain to some ideal life.

Both write of Christianity as "a thing of beauty," a perennial power,
a spreading tree, a fountain of youth; but Goethe was too much of a
Greek--though, as has been said, "a very German Greek"--to be, in any
proper sense of the word, a Christian; Carlyle too much of a Goth. His
Mythology is Norse; his Ethics, despite his prejudice against the race,
are largely Jewish. He proclaimed his code with the thunders of Sinai,
not in the reconciling voice of the Beatitudes. He gives or forces on us
world-old truths splendidly set, with a leaning to strength and endurance
rather than to advancing thought. He did not, says a fine critic of
morals, recognise that "morality also has passed through the straits." He
did not really believe in Content, which has been called the Catholic,
nor in Progress, more questionably styled the Protestant virtue. His
often excellent practical rule to "do the duty nearest to hand" may be
used to gag the intellect in its search after the goal; so that even his
Everlasting Yea, as a predetermined affirmation, may ultimately result in
a deeper negation.

[Footnote: _Vide_ Professor Jones's _Browning as a Philosophical and
Religious, Teacher_, pp. 66-90.]

"Duty," to him as to Wordsworth, "stern daughter of the voice of God,"
has two aspects, on each of which he dwells with a persistent iteration.
The _first_ is _Surrender_ to something higher and wider than ourselves.
That he has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the
self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly means that correct
theories of our complex life are impossible; but Matthew Arnold's
criticism, that his Ethics "are made paradoxical by his attack on
Happiness, which he should rather have referred to as the result of
Labour and of Truth," can only be rebutted by the assertion that the
pursuit of pleasure as an end defeats itself. The _second_ aspect of his
"Duty" is _Work_. His master Goethe is to him as Apollo to Hercules, as
Shakespeare to Luther; the one entire as the chrysolite, the other like
the Schreckhorn rent and riven; the words of the former are oracles, of
the latter battles; the one contemplates and beautifies truth, the other
wrestles and fights for it. Carlyle has a limited love of abstract truth;
of action his love is unlimited. His lyre is not that of Orpheus, but
that of Amphion which built the walls of Thebes. _Laborare est orare._ He
alone is honourable who does his day's work by sword or plough or pen.
Strength is the crown of toil. Action converts the ring of necessity that
girds us into a ring of duty, frees us from dreams, and makes us men.

  The midnight phantoms feel the spell,
  The shadows sweep away.

There are few grander passages in literature than some of those litanies
of labour. They have the roll of music that makes armies march, and if
they have been made so familiar as to cease to seem new, it is largely
owing to the power of the writer which has compelled them to become
common property.

Carlyle's practical Ethics, though too little indulgent to the light and
play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the
relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his
conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical
imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in
flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite
above and around, but not _in_ the finite. He insisted on the community
of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am I my brother's
keeper?"

  All things, the minutest that man does, influence all men,
  the very look of his face blesses or curses.... It is a
  mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my
  hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and so failed to
attain to the Optimism after which he often strove. He held, with
Browning, that "God's in His heaven," but not that "All's right with the
world." His view was the Zoroastrian _*athanatos machae*_, "in God's
world presided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a "divine
infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who said "The world is a
lie, but God is truth," landed him in an _impasse_; he could not answer
the obvious retort,--Did then God make and love a lie, or make it hating
it? There must have been some other power _to eteron_, or, as Mill in
his Apologia for _Theism_ puts it, a limit to the assumed Omnipotence.
Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, inconsequently halts between them;
and his prevailing view of mankind adds to his dilemma.

[Footnote: Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist
Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer,"
ejaculated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er Remit nicht diese
verdarnmte Basse."]

He imposes an "infinite duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an
infinite punishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind sets
its hardest tasks to itself; or that, as Emerson declares, "the assertion
of our weakness and deficiency is the fine innuendo by which the soul
makes its enormous claim." Hence, according to Mazzini, "He stands between
the individual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes the
human being by comparing him with God. From, his lips, so daring, we seem
to hear every instant the cry of the Breton mariner, 'My God, protect me;
my bark is so small and Thy ocean so vast.'" Similarly, the critic of
Browning above referred to concludes of the great prose writer, whom he
has called the poet's twin:

"He has let loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight of the
future: he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there and was
denied the view from Pisgah."

Carlyle's Theism is defective because it is not sufficiently Pantheistic;
but, in his view of the succession of events in the "roaring loom of
time," of the diorama of majesty girt by mystery, he has found a
cosmic Pantheism and given expression to it in a passage which is the
culmination of the English prose eloquence, as surely as Wordsworth's
great Ode is the high-tide [A phrase applied by Emerson to the
Ode.] mark of the English verse, of this century:--

  Are we not sprite shaped into a body, into an Appearance;
  and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is
  no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of
  Nothingness,  take figure, and are Apparitions; round us as
  round the veriest spectre is Eternity, and to Eternity
  minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love
  and Faith as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of
  beatified Souls? And again do we not squeak and gibber and
  glide, bodeful and feeble and fearful, and revel in our mad
  dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the morning air
  summons  us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake
  and Day?  Where now is Alexander of Macedon; does the steel
  host that  yelled in fierce battle shouts at Issus and
  Arbela remain  behind him; or have they all vanished utterly,
  even as  perturbed goblins must? Napoleon, too, with his
  Moscow  retreats and Austerlitz campaigns, was it all other
  than the  veriest spectre hunt; which has now with its
  howling tumult  that made night hideous flitted away?
  Ghosts! There are nigh  a thousand million  walking the
  earth openly at noontide; some half hundred have vanished
  from it, some half hundred have  arisen in it, ere thy watch
  ticks once. O Heaven, it is  mysterious, it is awful to consider
  that we not only carry each a future ghost within him, but are
  in very deed ghosts.

  [Footnote: _Cf._ "Tempest," "We are such stuff as dreams are
  made of."]

  These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-
  blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow; a
  shadow system gathered round our _me_, wherein through some
  moments or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the
  Flesh. So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the
  end. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a
  body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night on Heaven's mission
  appears. What force and fire there is in each he expends, one
  grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the
  giddy Alpine heights of science; one madly dashed in pieces on
  the rocks of Strife in war with his fellow, and then the heaven-
  sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even
  to sense becomes a vanished shadow. Thus, like some wild naming,
  wild thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this
  mysterious Mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick-
  succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God-
  created fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge from the Inane,
  haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again
  into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas
  filled up. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is
  stamped; the rear of the host read traces of the earliest van.
  But whence, O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not. Faith knows not;
  only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.

Volumes might be written on Carlyle's relations, of sentiment, belief,
opinion, method of thought, and manner of expression, to other thinkers.
His fierce independence, and sense of his own prophetic mission to the
exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often
unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who
impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to
acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been
wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which
exercised so marked an influence on his New England disciples. He never
realised the part played by the philosophers of Greece in moulding the
speculations of modern Europe. He knew Plato mainly through the Socratic
dialogues. There is, however, a passage in a letter to Emerson (March 13th
1853) which indicates that he had read, comparatively late in life, some
portions of _The Republic_. "I was much struck with Plato last year, and
his notions about Democracy--mere _Latter-Day Pamphlets, saxa et faces_
... refined into empyrean radiance and the lightning of the gods." The
tribute conveyed in the comparison is just; for there is nothing but
community of political view between the bitter acorns dropped from the
gnarled border oak and the rich fruit of the finest olive in Athene's
garden. But the coincidences of opinion between the ancient and the modern
writer are among the most remarkable in literary history. We can only
refer, without comments, to a few of the points of contact in this strange
conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both
possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they
attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:--_Laissez faire_; the growth
of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music,
education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian
spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy,
which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of
the ages and circumstances admit. They propose the same remedies:--
a return to simpler manners, and stricter laws, with the best men in the
State to regulate and administer them. Philosophers, says Plato, are to be
made guardians, and they are to govern, not for gain or glory, but for the
common weal. They need not be happy in the ordinary sense, for there is a
higher than selfish happiness, the love of the good. To this love they
must be _systematically educated_ till they are fit to be kings and
priests in the ideal state; if they refuse they _must_, when their turn
comes, be _made to govern_. Compare the following declarations of
Carlyle:--

  Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teaching
  class--these two sometimes combined in one, a Pontiff
  King--there  did not society exist without those two vital
  elements, there will none exist. Whenever there are born
  Kings of men you had better seek them out and _breed them
  to the work_.... The few wise will have to take command
  of the innumerable foolish, they _must be got to do it_.

The Ancient and the Modern, the Greek and the Teuton, are further
curiously at one:--in their dislike of physical or mental
Valetudinarianism (cf. _Rep._ Bs. ii. and iii. and _Characteristics_);
in their protests against the morality of consequences, of rewards and
punishments as motives for the highest life (the just man, says Plato,
crucified is better than the unjust man crowned); in their contempt for
the excesses of philanthropy and the pampering of criminals (cf.
_Rep._ B. viii.); in their strange conjunctions of free-thinking and
intolerance. Plato in the Laws enacts that he who speaks against the gods
shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and at last, if he persists in his
impiety, put to death; yet he had as little belief in the national
religion as Carlyle.

[Footnote: Rousseau, in the "Contrat Social," also assumes this position;
allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows
disrespect to the State Religion.]

They both accept Destiny,--the Parcae or the Norns spin the threads of
life,--and yet both admit a sphere of human choice. In the Republic the
souls select their lots: with Carlyle man can modify his fate. The
juxtaposition in each of Humour and Pathos (cf. Plato's account of the
dogs in a Democracy, and Carlyle's "Nigger gone masterless among the
pumpkins," and, for pathos, the image of the soul encrusted by the world
as the marine Glaucus, or the Vision of Er and Natural Supernaturalism) is
another contact. Both held that philosophers and heroes were few, and yet
both leant to a sort of Socialism, under State control; they both assail
Poetry and deride the Stage (cf. _Rep._ B. ii. and B. x. with Carlyle on
"The Opera"), while each is the greatest prose poet of his race; they are
united in hatred of orators, who "would circumvent the gods," and in
exalting action and character over "the most sweet voices"--the one
enforcing his thesis in the "language of the gods," the other preaching
silence in forty volumes of eloquent English speech.

Carlyle seems to have known little of Aristotle. His Stoicism was
indigenous; but he always alludes with deference to the teaching of the
Porch. Marcus Aurelius, the nearest type of the Philosophic King, must
have riveted his regard as an instance of the combination of thought and
action; and some interesting parallels have been drawn between their
views of life as an arena on which there is much to be done and little
to be known, a passage from time to a vague eternity. They have the same
mystical vein, alongside of similar precepts of self-forgetfulness,
abnegation, and the waiving of desire, the same confidence in the power
of the spirit to defy or disdain vicissitudes, ideas which brought both
in touch with the ethical side of Christianity; but their tempers and
manner are as far as possible apart. Carlyle speaks of no one with more
admiration than of Dante, recognising in the Italian his own intensity
of love and hate and his own tenacity; but beyond this there is little
evidence of the "Divina Commedia" having seriously attuned his thought:
nor does he seem to have been much affected by any of the elder English
poets. He scarcely refers to Chaucer; he alludes to Spenser here and
there with some homage, but hardly ever, excepting Shakespeare, to the
Elizabethan dramatists.

Among writers of the seventeenth century, he may have found in Hobbes
some support of his advocacy of a strong government; but his views on
this theme came rather from a study of the history of that age. Milton
he appreciates inadequately. To Dryden and Swift he is just; the latter,
whether consciously to Carlyle or not, was in some respects his English
master, and the points of resemblance in their characters suggest
detailed examination. Their styles are utterly opposed, that of the one
resting almost wholly on its Saxon base, that of the other being a
coat of many colours; but both are, in the front rank of masters of
prose-satire, inspired by the same audacity of "noble rage." Swift's
humour has a subtler touch and yet more scathing scorn; his contempt of
mankind was more real; his pathos equally genuine but more withdrawn;
and if a worse foe he was a better friend. The comparisons already
made between Johnson and Carlyle have exhausted the theme; they remain
associated by their similar struggle and final victory, and sometimes by
their tyrannous use of power; they are dissociated by the divergence of
their intellectual and in some respects even their moral natures; both
were forces of character rather than discoverers, both rulers of debate;
but the one was of sense, the other of imagination, "all compact." The
one blew "the blast of doom" of the old patronage; the other, against
heavier odds, contended against the later tyranny of uninformed and
insolent popular opinion. Carlyle did not escape wholly from the
influence of the most infectious, if the most morbid, of French writers,
J.J. Rousseau. They are alike in setting Emotion over Reason: in
referring to the Past as a model; in subordinating mere criticism to
ethical, religious or irreligious purpose; in being avowed propagandists;
in their "deep unrest"; and in the diverse conclusions that have been
drawn from their teaching.

Carlyle's enthusiasm for the leaders of the new German literature was, in
some measure, inspired by the pride in a treasure-trove, the regard of a
foster-father or _chaperon_ who first substantially took it by the hand
and introduced it to English society: but it was also due to the feeling
that he had found in it the fullest expression of his own perplexities,
and at least their partial solution. His choice of its representatives is
easily explained. In Schiller he found intellectually a younger brother,
who had fought a part of his own fight and was animated by his own
aspirations; in dealing with his career and works there is a shade
of patronage. Goethe, on the other hand, he recognised across many
divergencies as his master. The attachment of the belated Scotch Puritan
to the greater German has provoked endless comment; but the former has
himself solved the riddle. The contrasts between the teacher and pupil
remain, but they have been exaggerated by those who only knew Goethe as
one who had attained, and ignored the struggle of his hot youth on the
way to attainment. Carlyle justly commends him, not for his artistic
mastery alone, but for his sense of the reality and earnestness of life,
which lifts him to a higher grade among the rulers of human thought
than such more perfect artists and more passionate lyrists as Heine. He
admires above all his conquest over the world, without concession to it,
saying:--

  With him Anarchy has now become Peace ... the once
  perturbed spirit is serene and rich in good fruits....
  Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been
  attained by a surrender to Necessity, or any compact with
  Delusion--a seeming  blessing, such as years and dispiritment
  will of themselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no
  blessing, since ever-continued  battle is better than
  captivity. Many gird on the harness, few bear it
  warrior-like, still fewer put it off with triumph. Euphorion
  still asserts, "To die in strife is the end of life."

Goethe ceased to fight only when he had won; his want of sympathy with
the so-called Apostles of Freedom, the stump orators of his day, was
genuine and shared by

Carlyle. In the apologue of the _Three Reverences_ in _Meister_ the
master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike his pupil, verges
on sentimental paradox, declaring through the lips of the Chief in that
imaginary pedagogic province--which here and there closely recalls the
_New Atlantis_--that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery and
despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine--nay, even on sin and crime to
look not as hindrances, but to honour them, as furtherances of what is
holy." In answer to Emerson's Puritanic criticisms Carlyle replies:--

  Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than
  I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John
  Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable
  _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty
  was infinite,--Knox would have passed on wondering, not
  reproaching.  But I will tell you in a word why I like
  Goethe. His is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent,
  that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it
  was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold
  even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean  generation, when
  all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that
  man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you
  love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is
  not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse
  to bear than bad, and on the whole whether the glorious
  serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane--as
  Light, the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning.

Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in accord with Carlyle
was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of sayings--as "There is but one temple
in the universe, and that is the body of man," "Who touches a human hand
touches God"--that especially commended themselves to his commentator.
Among philosophers proper, Fichte, in his assertion of the Will as a
greater factor of human life and a nearer indication of personality than
pure Thought, was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The _Vocation of the Scholar_
and _The Way to a Blessed Life_ anticipated and probably suggested much
of the more speculative part of _Sartor_. But to show their relation
would involve a course of Metaphysics.

We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life
and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man
with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter--_Jean Paul
der einzige_, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted
on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of
humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a
lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have
influenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of queer
titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, and endless
digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream in the first _Flower Piece_
from the life of Siebenkäs, and that on _New Year's Eve_, are like
pre-visions of _Sartor_, and we find in the fantasies of both authors
much of the same machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of
_Schmelzle's Journey to Flätz_ might pass current for Carlyle's own; and
it is evident that the latter was saturated with _Quintus Fixlein_. The
following can hardly be a mere coincidence. Richter writes of a dead
brother, "For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself
among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him,
melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sank his heart of fire
amid the ice and waves"; while in _Cui Bono_ we have--

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

Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of _Fixlein_, especially the
passage, "Then begun the Æolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest
pathos of _Sartor_. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common
"reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness,
and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the _Foreign
Quarterly_ of 1830 might be taken for a criticism of himself.

Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magnanimity in estimating
his English contemporaries; but the deliberate judgments of his essays
were often more genial than those of his letters and conversation; and
perhaps his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew round
him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful than his severity; it is
good for no man to live with satellites. His practical severance from
Mazzini was mainly a personal loss: the widening of the gulf between
him and Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been better
qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other. Carlyle was the
greater genius; but the question which was the greater mind must be
decided by the conflict between logic and emotion. They were related
proximately as Plato to Aristotle, the one saw what the other missed, and
their hold on the future has been divided. Mill had "the dry light," and
his meaning is always clear; he is occasionally open to the charge
of being a formalist, allowing too little for the "infusion of the
affections," save when touched, as Carlyle was, by a personal loss; yet
the critical range indicated by his essay on "Coleridge" on the one side,
that on "Bentham" on the other, is as wide as that of his friend; and
while neither said anything base, Mill alone is clear from the charge of
having ever said anything absurd. His influence, though more indirect,
may prove, save artistically, more lasting. The two teachers, in their
assaults on _laissez faire,_ curiously combine in giving sometimes
undesigned support to social movements with which the elder at least had
no sympathy.

Carlyle's best, because his most independent, friend lived beyond the
sea. He has been almost to weariness compared with Emerson, initial
pupil later ally, but their contrasts are more instructive than their
resemblances. They have both at heart a revolutionary spirit, marked
originality, uncompromising aversion to illusions, disdain of traditional
methods of thought and stereotyped modes of expression; but in Carlyle
this is tempered by greater veneration for the past, in which he holds
out models for our imitation; while Emerson sees in it only fingerposts
for the future, and exhorts his readers to stay at home lest they should
wander from themselves. The one loves detail, hates abstraction, delights
to dwell on the minutiæ of biography, and waxes eloquent even on dates.
The other, a brilliant though not always a profound generaliser, tells
us that we must "leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and
study the sentiment as it appeared in hope not in history ... with the
ideal is the rose of joy. But grief cleaves to names and persons, and
the partial interests of to-day and yesterday." The one is bent under a
burden, and pores over the riddle of the earth, till, when he looks up at
the firmament of the unanswering stars, he can but exclaim, "It is a sad
sight." The other is blown upon by the fresh breezes of the new world;
his vision ranges over her clear horizons, and he leaps up elastic under
her light atmosphere, exclaiming, "Give me health and a day and I will
make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a half-Germanised
Scotchman, living near the roar of the metropolis, with thoughts of
Weimar and reminiscences of the Covenanting hills. Emerson studies
Swedenborg and reads the _Phædo_ in his garden, far enough from the din
of cities to enable him in calm weather to forget them. "Boston, London,
are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke; so is society, so is the world."
The one is strong where the other is weak. Carlyle keeps his abode in
the murk of clouds illumined by bolts of fire; he has never seen the sun
unveiled. Emerson's "Threnody" shows that he has known the shadow; but he
has fought with no Apollyons, reached the Celestial City without crossing
the dark river, and won the immortal garland "without the dust and heat."
Self-sacrifice, inconsistently maintained, is the watchword of the one:
self-reliance, more consistently, of the other. The art of the two
writers is in strong contrast. The charm of Emerson's style is its
precision; his sentences are like medals each hung on its own string; the
fields of his thought are combed rather than ploughed: he draws outlines,
as Flaxman, clear and colourless. Carlyle's paragraphs are like streams
from Pactolus, that roll nuggets from their source on their turbid way.
His expressions are often grotesque, but rarely offensive. Both writers
are essentially ascetic,--though the one swallows Mirabeau, and the other
says that Jane Eyre should have accepted Eochester and "left the world in
a minority." But Emerson is never coarse, which Carlyle occasionally is;
and Carlyle is never flippant, as Emerson often is. In condemning the
hurry and noise of mobs the American keeps his temper, and insists on
justice without vindictiveness: wars and revolutions take nothing from
his tranquillity, and he sets Hafiz and Shakespeare against Luther and
Knox. Careless of formal consistency--"the hobgoblin of little minds"--he
balances his aristocratic reserve with a belief in democracy, in
progression by antagonism, and in collective wisdom as a limit to
collective folly. Leaving his intellectual throne as the spokesman of a
practical liberty, Emerson's wisdom was justified by the fact that he was
always at first on the unpopular, and ultimately on the winning, side.
Casting his rote for the diffusion of popular literature, a wide
suffrage, a mild penal code, he yet endorsed the saying of an old
American author, "A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will
sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is
a raft that will never sink, but then your feet are always in water."

[Footnote: Carlyle, on the other hand, holds "that," as has been said, "we
are entitled to deal with criminals as relics of barbarism in the midst of
civilisation." His protest, though exuberated, against leniency in dealing
with atrocities, emphatically requisite in an age apt to ignore the rigour
of justice, has been so far salutary, and may be more so.]

Maintaining that the State exists for its members, he holds that the
enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular
governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law
need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men,
"to educate whom the State exists"; but he regards them as inspired
mouthpieces rather than controlling forces: their prime mission is to
"fortify our hopes," their indirect services are their best. The career
of a great man should rouse us to a like assertion of ourselves. We ought
not to obey, but to follow, sometimes by not obeying, him. "It is the
imbecility not the wisdom of men that is always inviting the impudence of
power."

It is obvious that many of these views are in essential opposition to the
teaching of Carlyle; and it is remarkable that two conspicuous men so
differing and expressing their differences with perfect candour should
have lived so long on such good terms. Their correspondence, ranging
over thirty-eight years (begun in 1834, after Emerson's visit to
Craigenputtock, and ending in 1872, before his final trip to England),
is on the whole one of the most edifying in literary history. The
fundamental accord, unshaken by the ruffle of the visit in 1847, is a
testimony to the fact that the common preservation of high sentiments
amid the irksome discharge of ordinary duties may survive and override
the most distinct antagonisms of opinion. Matthew Arnold has gone so far
as to say that he "would not wonder if Carlyle lived in the long run by
such an invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson
and not by his works." This is paradoxical; but the volumes containing
it are in some respects more interesting than the letters of Goethe and
Schiller, as being records of "two noble kinsmen" of nearer intellectual
claims. The practical part of the relationship on the part of Emerson is
very beautiful; he is the more unselfish, and on the whole appears the
better man, especially in the almost unlimited tolerance that passes with
a smile even such violences as the "Ilias in nuce"; but Carlyle shows
himself to be the stronger. Their mutual criticisms were of real benefit.
Emerson succeeded in convincing his friend that so-called anarchy might
be more effective in subduing the wilderness than any despotism; while
the advice to descend from "Himalaya peaks and indigo skies" to concrete
life is accepted and adopted in the later works of the American, _Society
and Solitude_ and the _Conduct of Life,_ which Carlyle praises without
stint. Keeping their poles apart they often meet half-way; and in matters
of style as well as judgment tinge and tend to be transfused into each
other, so that in some pages we have to look to the signature to be sure
of the writer. Towards the close of the correspondence Carlyle in this
instance admits his debt.

  I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can
  speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him.
  Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes
  to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world
  there were still but this one voice that responded
  intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all
  hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive.
  My blessings on you, good Ralph Waldo.

Emerson answers in 1872, on receipt of the completed edition of his
friend's work: "You shall wear the crown at the Pan-Saxon games, with no
competitor in sight ... well earned by genius and exhaustive labour, and
with nations for your pupils and praisers."

The general verdict on Carlyle's literary career assigns to him the first
place among the British authors of his time. No writer of our generation,
in England, has combined such abundance with such power. Regarding his
rank as a writer there is little or no dispute: it is admitted that the
irregularities and eccentricities of his style are bound up with its
richness. In estimating the value of his thought we must discriminate
between instruction and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has
taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answer must be,
"few." This is a perhaps inevitable result of the manner of his writing,
or rather of the nature of his mind. Aside from political parties, he
helped to check their exaggerations by his own; seeing deeply into the
under-current evils of the time, even when vague in his remedies he
was of use in his protest against leaving these evils to adjust
themselves--what has been called "the policy of drifting"--or of dealing
with them only by catchwords. No one set a more incisive brand on the
meanness that often marks the unrestrained competition of great cities;
no one was more effective in his insistence that the mere accumulation
of wealth may mean the ruin of true prosperity; no one has assailed with
such force the mammon-worship and the frivolity of his age. Everything he
writes comes home to the individual conscience: his claim to be regarded
as a moral exemplar has been diminished, his hold on us as an ethical
teacher remains unrelaxed. It has been justly observed that he helped
to modify "the thought rather than the opinion of two generations." His
message, as that of Emerson, was that "life must be pitched on a higher
plane." Goethe said to Eckermann in 1827 that Carlyle was a moral force
so great that he could not tell what he might produce. His influence has
been, though not continuously progressive, more marked than that of any
of his compeers, among whom he was, if not the greatest, certainly the
most imposing personality. It had two culminations; shortly after the
appearance of _The French Revolution,_ and again towards the close of the
seventh decade of the author's life. To the enthusiastic reception of his
works in the Universities, Mr. Froude has borne eloquent testimony, and
the more reserved Matthew Arnold admits that "the voice of Carlyle,
overstrained and misused since, sounded then in Oxford fresh and
comparatively sound," though, he adds, "The friends of one's youth cannot
always support a return to them." In the striking article in the _St.
James' Gazette_ of the date of the great author's death we read: "One who
had seen much of the world and knew a large proportion of the remarkable
men of the last thirty years declared that Mr. Carlyle was by far the
most impressive person he had ever known, the man who conveyed most
forcibly to those who approached him [best on resistance principles]
that general impression of genius and force of character which it is
impossible either to mistake or to define." Thackeray, as well as Ruskin
and Froude, acknowledged him as, beyond the range of his own _métier_,
his master, and the American Lowell, penitent for past disparagement,
confesses that "all modern Literature has felt his influence in the right
direction"; while the Emersonian hermit Thoreau, a man of more
intense though more restricted genius than the poet politician,
declares--"Carlyle alone with his wide humanity has, since Coleridge,
kept to us the promise of England. His wisdom provokes rather than
informs. He blows down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light,
like the Jöthuns, to throw the old woman Time; in his work there is too
much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay-making under the sun. He
makes us act rather than think: he does not say, know thyself, which is
impossible, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, no clear
goal, but an endless Atlantic horizon. He exaggerates. Yes; but he makes
the hour great, the picture bright, the reverence and admiration strong;
while mere precise fact is a coil of lead." Our leading journal on the
morning after Carlyle's death wrote of him in a tone of well-tempered
appreciation: "We have had no such individuality since Johnson. Whether
men agreed or not, he was a touchstone to which truth and falsehood were
brought to be tried. A preacher of Doric thought, always in his pulpit
and audible, he denounced wealth without sympathy, equality without
respect, mobs without leaders, and life without aim." To this we may add
the testimony of another high authority in English letters, politically
at the opposite pole: "Carlyle's influence in kindling enthusiasm for
virtues worthy of it, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one
hand and the unreality on the other, of all that men can do and suffer,
has not been surpassed by any teacher now living. Whatever later teachers
may have done in definitely shaping opinion ... here is the friendly
fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark; here the prophet who
first smote the rock." Carlyle, writes one of his oldest friends, "may
be likened to a fugleman; he stood up in the front of Life's Battle and
showed in word and action his notion of the proper attitude and action of
men. He was, in truth, a prophet, and he has left his gospels." To those
who contest that these gospels are for the most part negative, we may
reply that to be taught what not to do is to be far advanced on the way
to do.

In nothing is the generation after him so prone to be unjust to a fresh
thinker as with regard to his originality. A physical discovery, as
Newton's, remains to ninety-nine out of a hundred a mental miracle; but a
great moral teacher "labours to make himself forgotten." When he begins
to speak he is suspected of insanity; when he has won his way he receives
a Royal Commission to appoint the judges; as a veteran he is shelved for
platitude. So Horace is regarded as a mere jewelry store of the Latin,
Bacon in his _Essays_, of the English, wisdom, which they each in
fact helped to create. Carlyle's paradoxes have been exaggerated, his
partialities intensified, in his followers; his critical readers, not his
disciples, have learnt most from him; he has helped across the Slough of
Despond only those who have also helped themselves. When all is said of
his dogmatism, his petulance, his "evil behaviour," he remains the master
spirit of his time, its Censor, as Macaulay is its Panegyrist, and
Tennyson its Mirror. He has saturated his nation with a wholesome tonic,
and the practice of any one of his precepts for the conduct of life is
ennobling. More intense than Wordsworth, more intelligible than Browning,
more fervid than Mill, he has indicated the pitfalls in our civilisation.
His works have done much to mould the best thinkers in two continents,
in both of which he has been the Greatheart to many pilgrims. Not a
few could speak in the words of the friend whose memory he has so
affectionately preserved, "Towards me it is still more true than towards
England that no one has been and done like you." A champion of ancient
virtue, he appeared in his own phrase applied to Fichte, as "a Cato Major
among degenerate men." Carlyle had more than the shortcomings of a Cato;
he had all the inconsistent vehemence of an imperfectly balanced mind;
but he had a far wider range and deeper sympathies. The message of the
modern preacher transcended all mere applications of the text _delenda
est._ He denounced, but at the same time nobly exhorted, his age. A
storm-tossed spirit, "tempest-buffeted," he was "citadel-crowned" in his
unflinching purpose and the might of an invincible will.




APPENDIX

CARLYLE'S RELIGION

The _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11, 1881, writes:--

"It is obvious that from an early age he entirely ceased to believe, in
its only true sense, the creed he had been taught. He never affected
to believe it in any other sense, for he was far too manly and
simple-hearted to care to frame any of those semi-honest transmutations
of the old doctrines into new-fangled mysticism which had so great a
charm for many of his weaker contemporaries. On the other hand, it is
equally true that he never plainly avowed his unbelief. The line he took
up was that Christianity, though not true in fact, had a right to be
regarded as the noblest aspiration after a theory of the Universe and of
human life ever formed: and that the Calvinistic version of Christianity
was on the whole the best it ever assumed; and the one which represented
the largest proportion of truth and the least amount of error. He also
thought that the truths which Calvinism tried to express, and succeeded
in expressing in an imperfect or partially mistaken manner, were the
ultimate governing principles of morals and politics, of whose systematic
neglect in this age nothing but evil could come.

"Unwilling to take up the position of a rebel or revolutionist by stating
his views plainly--indeed if he had done so sixty years ago he might have
starved--the only resource left to him was that of approaching all the
great subjects of life from the point of view of grim humour, irony, and
pathos. This was the real origin of his unique style; though no doubt its
special peculiarities were due to the wonderful power of his imagination,
and to some extent--to a less extent we think than has been usually
supposed--to his familiarity with German.

"What then was his creed? What were the doctrines which in his view
Calvinism shadowed forth and which were so infinitely true, so ennobling
to human life? First, he believed in God; secondly, he believed in an
absolute opposition between good and evil; thirdly, he believed that
all men do, in fact, take sides more or less decisively in this great
struggle, and ultimately turn out to be either good or bad; fourthly, he
believed that good is stronger than evil, and by infinitely slow degrees
gets the better of it, but that this process is so slow as to be
continually obscured and thrown back by evil influences of various
kinds--one of which he believed to be specially powerful in the present
day.

"God in his view was not indeed a personal Being, like the Christian
God--still less was He in any sense identified with Jesus Christ; who,
though always spoken of with rather conventional reverence in his
writings, does not appear to have specially influenced him. The God in
which Mr. Carlyle believed is, as far as can be ascertained, a
Being possessing in some sense or other will and consciousness, and
personifying the elementary principles of morals--Justice, Benevolence
(towards good people), Fortitude, and Temperance--to such a pitch that
they may be regarded, so to speak, as forming collectively the will of
God.... That there is some one who--whether by the earthquake, or
the fire, or the still small voice--is continually saying to
mankind--'_Discite justitiam moniti'_; and that this Being is the
ultimate fact at which we can arrive ... is what Mr. Carlyle seems to
have meant by believing in God. And if any one will take the trouble to
refer to the first few sentences of the Westminster Confession, and to
divest them of their references to Christianity and to the Bible, he will
find that between the God of Calvin and of Carlyle there is the closest
possible similarity.... The great fact about each particular man is the
relation, whether of friendship or enmity, in which he stands to God. In
the one case he is on the side which must ultimately prevail, ... in the
other ... he will, in due time, be crushed and destroyed.... Our relation
to the universe can be ascertained only by experiment. We all have to
live out our lives.... One man is a Cromwell, another a Frederick, a
third a Goethe, a fourth a Louis XV. God hates Louis XV. and loves
Cromwell. Why, if so, He made Louis XV., and indeed whether He made him
or not, are idle questions which cannot be answered and should not be
asked. There are good men and bad men, all pass alike through this
mysterious hall of doom called life: most show themselves in their true
colours under pressure. The good are blessed here and hereafter; the bad
are accursed. Let us bring out as far as may be possible such good as a
man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the
hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr.
Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and
morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in
either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might
regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the
inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival of
the fittest has much in common with the doctrine of election, and
philosophical necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution,
comes practically to much the same result as predestination."



  INDEX

  Aberdour
  Addiscombe
  Addison
  Æschylus
  Ailsa Craig
  Airy (the astronomer)
  Aitken, James
  Aitken, Mary
  Aitken, Mrs.
  Aix-la-Chapelle
  Albert, Prince
  Alison
  Alma
  America
  Annan
  Annandale
  Annual Register
  Antoinette, Marie
  Aristotle
  Arndt
  Arnold, Dr.
  Arnold, Matthew
  Ashburton, Lord and Lady
  Assaye
  Atheism
  _Athenæum_
  Augustenburg
  Austerlitz
  Austin
  Austin, Mrs.
  Azeglio

  Bacon
  Badams
  Badcort
  Balaclava
  Balzac
  Bamford, Samuel
  Barbarossa
  Baring, see Ashburton
  Bassompierre
  Beaconsfield, Lord
  Beaumarchais
  Beethoven
  Belgium
  Bellamy
  Bentham
  Berkeley
  Berlin
  Bernstoff, Count
  Biography (by Froude)
  Birmingham
  Bismarck
  _Blackwood,_
  Boehm
  Bohemia
  Bolingbroke
  Bonn
  Boston
  Boswell
  Breslau
  Brewster, Sir David
  Bright
  Brocken, spectre of the
  Bromley, Miss
  Bronte, Emily
  Brougham
  Brown, Prof.
  Browne, Sir Thomas
  Browning
  Bryant _note_
  Buckle
  Buller, Charles
  Buller, Mrs.
  Bunsen
  Burke
  Burness, William
  Burns
  Byron

  Caesar
  _Cagliostro, Count_
  Cairnes
  Calderon
  Calvin
  Campbell, Macleod
  Campbell, Thomas
  Carleton
  Carlyle (family)
  Carlyle, Alexander
  Carlyle, James (brother)
  Carlyle, James (father)
  Carlyle, John, Dr.
  Carlyle, Margaret (mother)
  Carlyle, Margaret (sister)
  Carlyle, Mrs. (Jane Welsh)(wife)
  Carlyle, Thomas (grandfather)
  Carlyle, Thomas,
   birth;
   education;
   studies German;
   lives in Edinburgh and takes pupils;
   studies law;
   tutor to the Bullers;
   goes to London;
   at Hoddam Hill;
   marriage;
   Edinburgh life;
   married life;
   life at Craigenputtock;
   second visit to London;
   publishes _Sartor_;
   takes house in Chelsea;
   life and work in London;
   loss of first volume of _French Revolution_;
   rewrites first volume of _French Revolution_;
   lectures;
   founds London Library;
   publishes _Chartism_;
   writes _Past and Present_;
   writes _Life of Cromwell_;
   visits Ireland;
   visits Paris;
   writes _History of Friedrich II._;
   excursions to Germany;
   nominated Lord Rector of Glasgow;
   success of _Friedrich II._;
   Lord Rector of Edinburgh;
   death of his wife;
   writes his _Reminiscences_;
   defends Governor Eyre;
   writes on Franco-German War;
   writes on Russo-Turkish War;
   honours;
   declining years;
   death;
   Appreciation of;
   authorities for his life;
   complaints;
   contemporary history;
   conversation;
   critic, as;
   descriptive passages;
   domestic troubles;
   dreams;
   dyspepsia;
   elements of his character;
   estimates (his) of contemporaries;
   ethics;
   financial affairs;
   friends;
   genius; historian, as;
   ignorance;
   influence;
   journal;
   jury, serves on a;
   letters;
   literary artist
   mission
   nicknaming
   mania
   noises
   opinions
   paradoxes
   polities
   popularity and praise
   preacher, as,
   rank as a writer
   relations to other thinkers
   religion
   routine
   scepticism
   sound-proof room,
   style
   teaching
   translations
   travels, and visits
   truth
   verses
   views, change of
   walks
   worker, as
  Cassel
  Castlebar
  Cato
  Cavaignac, General
  Cervantes
  Chalmers, Dr.
  Changarnier, General
  _Characteristics,_
  Charlemagne
  _Chartism,_
  Chatham
  Chaucer
  Chelsea
  Cheyne Row
  China
  Chotusitz
  Christianity
  Church, English
  Cicero
  Cid, the
  Civil War
  Civil War (American)
  Clare, Lady
  Clarendon
  Clerkenwell explosions
  Clough, Arthur
  Cobden
  Coblenz
  Cockburn
  Colenso, Bishop
  Coleridge
  Colonies
  Columbus
  Comte
  Conservatism
  Conway, Moncure
  Cooper, Thomas
  Cornelius
  _Correspondence,_
  Cortes
  Cousin
  Craigcrook
  Craigenputtock
  Crimean War
  Cromwell
  _Cromwell, Life and Letters of,_
  Crystal Palace Exhibition
  Cushman, Miss
  Cüstrin
  Cuvier
  Czars, the

  Dante
  Danton
  Dardanelles
  Darwin
  David II.
  _Deism,_
  Democracy,
  De Morgan
  Demosthenes
  De Quincey
  Derby, Countess of
  Desmoulins
  _Dial, The,_
  _Diamond Necklace,_
  Dickens
  Diderot
  Diogenes
  Disraeli.  _See_ Beaconsfield
  Dobell
  _Don Quixote,_
  Döring, Herr
  Dresden
  Drogheda
  Drumclog
  Dryden
  Duffy, Sir C. Gavan
  Dumfries
  Dunbar
  Dunbar (poet)
  Duty

  Ecclefechan
  Eckermann
  Edinburgh
  _Edinburgh Encyclopaedia_
  _Edinburgh Review_
  Education
  Eisenach
  Eldin, Lord
  Eliot, George
  Emerson
  _Emigration_
  Ems
  England
  _English Traits_ (Emerson's)
  Erasmus
  Erfurt
  Erskine
  _Essay on Proportion_
  _Essays_ (Carlyle's)
  Everett, Alexander
  _Examiner,_
  "Exodus from Houndsditch,"
  Eyre, Governor
  Eyre, Jane

  Faber
  Factory Acts
  Faust
  Fawcett
  Fergusson, Dr. John
  Fichte
  FitzGerald, Edward
  Flaxman
  _Foreign Quarterly Preview_
  _Foreign Review_
  Förster
  Forster, John
  Forster, W.E.
  Fouqué
  Fourier
  Foxton, Mr.
  France
  Franchise
  Francia, Dr.
  Frankenstein
  Frankfort
  _Fraser_
  Free Trade
  French Directory
  French literature
  _French Revolution_
  Friedrich II.
  _Friedrich II., History of_
  Fritz. _See_ Friedrich
  Fritz (Carlyle's horse)
  Froude, Mr.
  Fryston
  Fuchs, Reinecke

  Galileo
  Gallipoli
  Galway
  Game Laws
  Gavazzi, Father
  Georgel, Abbé
  German literature
  German worthies
  Germany
  Gibbon
  Gladstone, Sir T
  Gladstone, W. E.
  Glasgow
  _Glasgow Herald_
  Goethe
  Goldsmith
  Gordon, Margaret
  Gordon (quadroon preacher)
  Gotha
  Grant, J.
  Greek thought
  Grimm's law
  Gronlund
  Grote
  Guizot
  Gully, Dr.
  Gully, Miss
  Guntershausen

  Haddington
  Hafiz
  Hakluyt
  Hallam
  Hallam, Arthur
  Hamburg
  Hamilton, Sir William
  Hare, Archdeacon
  Harrison, Frederick
  _Harvard Discourse_ (Emerson's)
  Hawthorne
  Hayti
  Heath (royalist writer)
  Hedonism
  Hegel
  Heine, Heinrich
  _Helena_
  Helps
  Henry VIII.
  _Hero-Worship_ (and  _On Heroes_}
  Herrnhut
  Hertzka
  Heyne
  Hildebrand
  Hill, Lord George
  _Histories_ (Carlyle's)
  History, definition of
  _History_ review of
  Hobbes
  Hochkirk
  Hoddam Hill
  Hoffmann
  Holinshed
  Homburg
  Homer
  Home Rule
  Horace
  Home, E.H.
  Houghton, Lord
  Hudson (Railway King)
  Hughes, T.
  Hugo, Victor
  Humboldt
  Hume
  Hunef
  Hunt, Leigh
  Huxley, Professor

  "Ilias Americana in nuce"
  Immortality
  Inkermann
  _In Memoriam_ (Tennyson's)
  Inquisition
  Ireland
  Ireland, Mrs.
  Irish Question
  Irving, Edward

  Jamaica
  Jeffrey
  Jena
  Jerrold, Douglas
  Jewsbury, Geraldine
  _Jocelin de Brakelond_
  Johnson
  _Johnson_ Review of Boswell's
  Johnston, James
  Jomini
  Jonson, Ben
  Journalism, definition of
  Judengasse
  Junius
  Juvenal

  Kant
  Keats
  Keble
  Kingsley, Charles
  Kingsley, Henry
  Kinnaird
  Kirkcakly
  Knox
  Kolin
  Körner
  Kossuth
  Kunersdorf

  Lamb
  Landor
  Landshut
  Lanin, M.
  Laplace
  Larkin
  _Latter-Day Pamphlets_
  Law, Carlyle's study of
  Lawson, Mr., James Carlyle's estimate of
  _Lectures_
  Legendre
  Leibnitz
  Leipzig
  Leith
  Leslie, Prof.
  Leuthen
  Leyden
  "Liberal Association"
  Liberalism
  Liegnitz
  Literature as a profession
  Liverpool
  Livy
  Lobositz
  Locke
  "Locksley Hall"
  London
  London Library
  _London Magazine_
  London Peace Congress
  Longfellow
  Longmans (the publisher)
  Louis XIV.
  Louis XV.
  Louis XVIII.
  Louisa, Electress
  Lowell
  Lucilius
  Luichart, Loch
  "Luria"
  Luther

  Macaulay
  Macbeth
  Machiavelli
  Mackenzie, Miss Stuart
  Mahon, Lord
  Mainhill
  Mainz
  Malthusianism
  Malvern
  Marat
  Marburg
  Marcus Aurelius
  Marlborough
  _Marseillaise_
  Marshall
  Mavtineau, Miss H.
  Marx, Carl
  Massou, Prof.
  _Materialism_
  Mathematics
  Maurice, F. D.
  Mazzini
  M'Crie
  _Meister, Wilhelm_
  Melanchthen
  Mentone
  Meredith, George
  Mericourt
  Merimée, Prosper
  Metaphysics, Scotch
  Michelet
  Middle Ages
  Mill, J.S.
  Millais
  Milman
  Milton
  Mirabeau
  _Miscellanies_
  Mitchell, Robert
  Mitchell (Young Ireland leader)
  Model Prisons
  Mohammed
  Molesworth
  Molwitz
  Montague, Basil
  Montaigne
  Montgomery, Robert
  More, Sir Thomas
  Morris, William
  Motley
  Motte, Countess de la
  Muirkirk
  Murchison, Sir R.
  Murray (the publisher)
  Murray, Thomas
  Musæus

  Napier, Macvey
  Napoleon I.
  Napoleon III.
  Naseby
  Nassau
  Necker
  Negroes
  Nelson
  "Nero" (Mrs. Carlyle's dog)
  Neuberg
  New England
  Newman, Cardinal
  Newspapers
  Newton
  Nibelungen Lied
  Nicholas the Czar
  "Nigger Question"
  Noble (biographer of Cromwell)
  North, Christopher
  Norton, Charles E.
  _Norway, Early Kings of_
  Novalis

  O'Brien, Smith
  O'Connell
  Optimism
  Orsay, Count d'
  Orthodoxy vetoed
  Ossoli, Countess (Margaret Fuller)
  Owen
  Oxford
  Oxford, Bishop of

  Paraguay
  Pardubitz
  Paris
  _Past and Present_
  Paton, Noel
  Paulets, the
  Peel
  Pericles
  Peter the Hermit
  Philanthropy
  Philip of Hesse
  Plato
  Playfair
  Political economy
  Political philosophy
  Pope
  Popes
  Prague
  Prayer
  Prescott
  Preuss
  _Prinzenraub_
  Procter
  Procter, Mrs. Anne
  Puritanism
  Pusey
  Putbus

  _Quarterly Review_
  Queen Victoria

  Radicalism
  Railways
  Raleigh
  Ranke
  Ranch
  "Reading of Books"
  Redwood
  Reform Bills
  _Reminiscences_
  Renan
  Rennie, George
  Revolution years
  Rhine
  Ricardo
  Richter
  Riesen-Gebirge
  Riquetti
  Ritualism
  Robertson
  Robespierre
  Roland, Madame
  Rolandseck
  Romans
  Rome, cause of its preservation
  Romilly, Sir Samuel
  Rossbach
  Rossetti, Dante
  Rotterdam
  Rousseau
  Rugby
  Rügen
  Rushworth
  Ruskin
  Russell, Lord John
  Russell, Mrs., at Thornhill
  Russia
  Russo-Turkish War

  Sadowa
  St. Andrews
  St. Ives
  _St. James's Gazette_
  St. Simon
  Samson, Abbot
  Sand, George
  _Sartor Resartus_
  Saunders and Otley (publishers)
  Saxons
  Scepticism
  Schiller
  Schlosser
  Science
  Scotland
  Scotsbrig
  _Scotsman_ newspaper
  Scott, W.B.
  Scott, Sir Walter
  Sedan
  Sepoy rebellion
  Seven Years' War
  Shaftesbury, Lord
  Shakespeare
  Shelley
  _Shooting Niagara_
  Sidney, Sir Philip
  _Signs of the Times_
  Simon de Montfort
  Sinclair, Sir George
  Slavery
  Sloane, Sir Hans
  Smail, Tom
  Smith, Adam
  Smith, Goldwin
  Smith, Sydney
  Smollett
  Snowdon
  Socrates
  Sophocles
  Southey
  Spain
  Spedding
  Spencer, Herbert
  Spenser
  Stanley, Dean
  Stanley, Lady Augusta
  Stanleys (of Alderley)
  Steele
  Stein
  Stephen, Fitzjames
  Stephen, Sir James
  Sterling
  _Sterling, Life of_
  Sterne
  Stewart, Dugald
  Stodart, Miss Eliza
  Stonehenge
  Strachey, Mr.
  Strachey, Mrs.
  Stralsund
  Strauss
  Stuart, Mary
  Sturge
  _Sun,_ newspaper
  Swift
  Swinburne
  Switzerland

  Tacitus
  Taine, M.
  _Tale of a Tub_ (Swift's)
  Talleyrand
  Talma
  Taylor, Henry
  Taylor's _German  Literature_
  Taylor, Mrs.
  Tennyson
  Teufelsdröckh
  Thackeray
  Theism
  Thierry, M.
  Thiers
  Thirlwall, Bishop
  Thoreau
  Thucydides
  Tieck
  _Times,_ the
  Toplitz
  Torgau
  Trafalgar
  Turgot
  Turks
  Turner
  Tyndall

  _Unto this Last_ (Ruskin's)
  Usedom, Baron

  Varennes
  Vauvenargues
  Vehse
  Verses (Carlyle's)
  Verses (Mrs. Carlyle's)
  Virginia
  Voltaire

  _Wanderjahre_
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  Washington
  Waterloo
  Watts, G. F.
  Webster, Daniel
  Weimar
  Weissenfels
  Wellington (Duke of)
  Welsh, Jane. _See_ Mrs. Carlyle
  Welsh, Mrs.
  _Werner_
  _Werther_ (Goethe's)
  Westminster Abbey
  Westminster Confession
  _Westminster Review_
  Westport
  Wilberforce (Bishop)
  William the Conqueror
  William the Silent
  Willis's Rooms
  Wilson
  Wolseley
  Worcester
  Wordsworth
  _Work_
  Working classes
  _World_ (newspaper)
  _Wotton Reinfred_

  Yarmouth

  Zittau
  Zorndorf