[From _London and Westminster Review_ October, 1839]
All countries at all times require, and England perhaps at the present
not less than others, men having a faith at once distinct and large, the
expression of what is best in their times, and having also the courage
to proclaim it, and take their stand upon it....
But in our day such visionaries are less and less possible. The spread
of shallow but clear knowledge, like the cold snow-water issuing from
the glaciers, daily chills and disenchants the hearts of millions once
credulous. Daily, therefore, does it become more probable that millions
will follow in the track of those who are called their betters. Thus
will they find in the world nothing but an epicurean stye, to be
managed, with less dirt and better food, by patent steam-machinery; but
still a place for swine, though the swine may be washed, and their
victuals more equally divided.
Is it not then strange that in such a world, in such a country, and
among those light-hearted Edinburgh Reviewers, a man should rise and
proclaim a creed; not a new and more ingenious form of words, but a
truth to be embraced with the whole heart, and in which the heart shall
find as he has found, strength for all combats, and consolation, though
stern not festal, under all sorrows? Amid the masses of English printing
sent forth every day, part designed for the most trivial entertainment,
part black with the narrowest and most lifeless sectarian dogmatism,
part, and perhaps the best, exhibiting only facts and theories in
physical science, and part filled with the vulgarest economical projects
and details, which would turn all life into a process of cookery,
culinary, political, or sentimental--how few writings are there that
contain like these a distinct doctrine as to the position and calling of
man, capable of affording nourishment to the heart, and support to the
will, and in harmony at the same time with the social state of the
world, and with the most enlarged and brightened insight which human
wisdom has yet attained to?
We have been so little prepared to look for such an appearance that it
is difficult for us to realize the conception of a genuine coherent view
of life thus presented to us in a book of our day, which shall be
neither a slight compendium of a few moral truisms, flavoured with a few
immoral refinements and paradoxes, such as constitute the floating
ethics and religion of the time; nor a fierce and gloomy distortion of
some eternal idea torn from its pure sphere of celestial light to be
raved about by the ignorant whom it has half-enlightened, and half made
frantic. But here, in our judgment--that is, in the judgment of one man
who speaks considerately what he fixedly believes--we have the thought
of a wide, and above all, of a deep soul, which has expressed in fitting
words, the fruits of patient reflection, of piercing observation, of
knowledge many-sided and conscientious, of devoutest awe and
faithfullest love....
The clearness of the eye to see whatever is permanent and substantial,
and the fervour and strength of heart to love it as the sole good of
life, are, in our view, Mr. Carlyle's pre-eminent characteristics, as
those of every man entitled to the fame of the most generous order of
greatness. Not to paint the good which he sees and loves, or see it
painted, and enjoy the sight; not to understand it, and exult in the
knowledge of it; but to take his position upon it, and for it alone to
breathe, to move, to fight, to mourn, and die--this is the destination
which he has chosen for himself. His avowal of it and exhortation to do
the like is the object of all his writings. And, reasonably considered,
it is no small service to which he is thus bound. For the real, the
germinal truth of nature, is not a dead series of physical phenomena
into the like of which all phenomena are cunningly to be explained away.
This pulseless, rigid iron frame-work, on which the soft soil of human
life is placed, and above which its aërial flowers and foliage rise,
does not pass with him for the essential and innermost principle of all.
It is rather that which, being itself poorest, the poorest of faculties
can apprehend. As physical mechanism, it is that which is most palpable,
and undeniable by any, because it is that which lies nearest the
nothingness whence it has been hardly rescued, and is therefore, most
akin to minds in whose meanness of structure or culture, even human
existence might seem scarce better than nothingness. He knows, few in
our nation so well, that of a world of new machinery, the highest king
and priest would be the neatest clockwork figure. And in such a world, a
being feeling ever towards or somewhat beyond what he can weigh and
measure, and looking up to find above himself that which is too high for
him to understand, would be an anomaly as lawless and incredible as the
wildest fabled monster, the Minotaur or the Chimera, the Titan--the
Sphynx itself--nay a more delirious riddle than any that in dreams it
proposes to us.
On the other hand, neither is for him the solid, abiding, inexhaustible,
that merely which is received as such by the popular acquiescence. It
must needs be a truth which the spirit, cleared and strengthened by
manifold knowledge and experience, and above all by steadfast endeavour,
can rest in and say: This I mean; not because it is told me, were my
informants all the schools of Rabbins or a hierarchy of angels; but
because I have looked into it, tried it, found it healthful and
sufficient, and thus know that it will stand the stress of life. We may
be right or wrong in our estimate of Mr. Carlyle, but we cannot be
mistaken in supposing that on this kind of anvil have all truly great
men been fashioned, and of metal thus honest and enduring.
Further it must be said that, true as is his devotion to the truth, so
flaming and cordial is his hatred of the false, in whatever shapes and
names delusions may show themselves. Affectations, quackeries, tricks,
frauds, swindlings, commercial or literary, baseless speculations, loud
ear-catching rhetoric, melodramatic sentiment, moral drawlings and
hyperboles, religious cant, clever political shifts, and conscious or
half-conscious fallacies, all in his view, come under the same hangman's
rubric,--proceed from the same offal heart. However plausible, popular,
and successful, however dignified by golden and purple names, they are
lies against ourselves, against whatever in us is not altogether
reprobate and infernal. His great argument, theme of his song, spirit of
his language, lies in this, that there is a work for man worth doing,
which is to be done with the whole of his heart, not the half or any
other fraction. Therefore, if any reserve be made, any corner kept for
something unconnected with this true work and sincere purpose, the whole
is thereby vitiated and accurst. So far as his arm reaches he is undoing
whatever in nature is holy: ruining whatever is the real creation of the
great worker of all. This truth of purpose is to the soul what life is
to the body of man; that which unites and organises the mass, keeping
all the parts in due proportion and concord, and restraining them from
sudden corruption into worthless dust....
Anyone who should take up the writings themselves with no other
preconception than that which we have attempted to give him, would
doubtless be startled at the strangeness of the style which prevails
more or less throughout them. They are not careless, headstrong,
passionate, confused; but they bear a constant look of oddity which
seems at first mere wilful wantonness, and which we only afterwards find
to be the discriminating stamp of original and strong feeling. This--
this feeling, rooted in profound susceptibility and matured into a
central vivifying power--is, we should say, the author's most
extraordinary distinction. For it is not the ostentatious, impetuous
sentiment, which calls, a sufficient audience being by, on heaven and
earth for sympathy, and would wish for that of Tartarus too, as an
additional acknowledgment of its sublime sincerity. Here, on the
contrary, the feeling is not that which the man is proud of, and would
fain exhibit. He shrinks from the profession, nay from the sense of it;
even painfully labours to trifle, and be at ease, that he may hide from
others, and may for himself forget, the thorny fagot load of his own
emotions. Yet make them known he must; for they are not those of some
private personal grief or passion, from which he may escape into
literature or science, and leave his pains and longings behind him; but
his sensibilities are burning with a slow, immense fire, kindled by the
very theme on which he writes, and compelling him to write. The
greatness and weakness, the infinite hopes and unquenchable reality of
human life; the aching pressure of the body and its wants on the myriads
of millions in whom celestial force sleeps and dreams of hell; the sight
of follies, frauds, cruelties, and lascivious luxury in the midst of a
race then endowed and thus suffering; and the unconquerable will and
thought with which the few work out the highest calling of all men;
these it is, and not self-indulging distresses and theatrical
aspirations of his own, which boil and storm within. Therefore does he
speak with the solid strength and energy, which gives so serious and
rugged an aspect to his sentences; while, perpetually checking himself,
from a wise man's shame at excessive emotion, and from the knowledge
that others will but half sympathise with him, he adds to his most
weighty utterances a turn of irony which relieves the excessive
strain.... Add to this, that Mr. Carlyle's resolution to convey his
meaning at all hazards, makes him seize the most effectual and sudden
words in spite of usage and fashionable taste; and that, therefore, when
he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of some
strange--we must call it--Carlylism; English, Scotch, German, Greek,
Latin, French, Technical, Slang, American, or Lunar, or altogether
superlunar, transcendental, and drawn from the eternal nowhere--he uses
it with a courage which might blast an academy of lexicographers into a
Hades, void even of vocables....
Here must end our remarks on the admirable writings of a great man.
Could it be hoped, that by what has been said, any readers, and
especially any thinkers, will be led to give them the attention they
require, but also deserve, in this there would be ample repayment, even
were there not at all events a higher reward, for the labour, which is
not a slight one, of forming and assorting distinct opinions on a matter
so singular and so complex. For few bonds that unite human beings are
purer or happier than a common understanding and reverence of what is
truly wise and beautiful. This also is religion. Standing at the
threshold of these works, we may imitate the saying of the old
philosopher to the friends who visited him on their return from the
temples--Let us enter, for here too are gods.