It is now for about half a century that the world has had all that is
most masterly in the work of Thomas Carlyle. And a time has arrived
when we may very fairly seek to weigh the sum total of influence which
he left on his own and on subsequent generations. We are now far
enough off, neither to be dazzled by his eloquence nor irritated by his
eccentricities. The men whom he derided and who shook their heads at
him are gone: fresh problems, new hopes, other heroes and prophets whom
he knew not, have arisen. Our world is in no sense his world. And it
has become a very fair question to ask--What is the residuum of
permanent effect from these great books of his, which have been
permeating English thought for half a century and more?
It is a rare honour for any writer--at least for one who is neither
poet nor novelist--to have his productions live beyond two generations,
and to continue to be a great literary force, when fifty years have
altered all the conditions in which he wrote and the purposes and ideas
which he treated. It cannot be said that Carlyle's effective influence
is less now than it was a generation ago. It has lived through the
Utilitarian and Evolution movements and has not been extinguished by
them. And Thomas Carlyle bids fair to enter into that sacred band
whose names outlive their own century and give some special tone to
their national literature.
The survival of certain books and names from generation to generation
does not depend on merit alone. Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ is
immortal: though we do not rank "Bozzy" as a hero or a genius. Hume's
_History of England_ is a classic: though it can hardly be said to be
an adequate account of our country. Few books have ever exercised so
amazing an influence as Rousseau's _Social Contract_; yet the loosest
mind of to-day can perceive its sophistry. Burke's diatribes on the
French Revolution affected the history of Europe; though no one denies
that they were inspired by passion and deformed by panic. Hobbes has
very few readers to-day; but the _Leviathan_ may last as long as More's
_Utopia_, which has hardly more readers in our age. Books which exert
a paramount influence over their contemporaries may die down and be
known only in the history of literature. And books, again, of very
moderate value, written by men of one-sided intellect or founded on
somewhat shallow theories, may, by virtue of some special quality, or
as embodying some potent idea, attain to a permanent place in the world
of letters. Many a great book ceases very early to command readers:
and many books continue to be read although they are far from great.
The first question that arises is this:--Do the chief works of Carlyle
belong to that class of books which attain an enduring and increasing
power, or to that class which effect great things for one or two
generations and then become practically obsolete? It would not be safe
to put his masterpieces in any exclusive sense into either of these
categories; but we may infer that they will ultimately tend to the
second class rather than the first. Books which attain to an enduring
and increasing power are such books as the _Ethics_, the _Politics_,
and the _Republic_, the _Thoughts_ of Marcus Aurelius and of
Vauvenargues, the _Essays_ of Bacon and of Hume, Plutarch's _Lives_ and
Gibbon's _Rome_. In these we have a mass of pregnant and ever-fertile
thought in a form that is perennially luminous and inspiring. It can
hardly be said that even the masterpieces of Carlyle--no! not the
_Revolution_, _Cromwell_, or the _Heroes_--reach this point of immortal
wisdom clothed with consummate art. The "personal equation" of
Teufelsdröckhian humour, its whimsies, and conundrums, its wild
outbursts of hate and scorn, not a few false judgments, and perverse
likes and dislikes--all this is too common and too glaring in the
Carlylean cycle, to permit its master to pass into the portals where
dwell the wise, serene, just, and immortal spirits. Not of such is the
Kingdom of the literary Immortals.
On the other hand, if these masterpieces of sixty years ago are not
quite amongst the great books of the world, it would be preposterous to
regard them as obsolete, or such as now interest only the historian of
literature. They are read to-day practically as much as ever, and are
certain to be read for a generation or two to come. But they are not
read to-day with the passionate delight in the wonderful originality,
nor have they the commanding authority they seemed to possess for the
faithful disciples of the forties and the fifties. Nor can any one
suppose that the next century will continue to read them, except with
an open and unbiassed mind, and a willingness to admit that even here
there is much dead wood, gross error, and pitiable exaggeration. When
we begin to read in that spirit, however splendid be the imagination,
and however keen the logic, we are no longer under the spell of a
master: we are reading a memorable book, with a primary desire to learn
how former generations looked upon things.
Thomas Carlyle, like all other voluminous writers, wrote very much that
cannot be called equal to his best: and it cannot be denied that the
inferior pieces hold a rather large proportion of the whole. Nothing
is less fatal to true criticism than the popular habit of blindly
overvaluing the inferior work of men of genius, unless it be the habit
of undervaluing them by looking at their worst instead of at their
best. Great men are to be judged by their highest; and it is not of
very great consequence if this highest forms a moderate part of the
total product. Now, what are the masterpieces of Thomas Carlyle? In
the order of their production they are _Sartor Resartus_, 1831; _French
Revolution_, 1837; _Hero-Worship_, 1840; _Past and Present_, 1843;
_Cromwell_, 1845. We need not be alarmed if this list forms but a
third of the thirty volumes (not including translations); and if it
omits such potent outbursts as _Chartism_, 1839; and _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_, 1850; or such a wonderful piece of history as _Friedrich
the Second_, 1858-1865. _Chartism_ and the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ are
full of eloquence, insight, indignation, and pity, and they exerted a
great and wholesome effect on the generation whom they smote as with
the rebuke and warning of a prophet. But, as we look back on them
after forty or fifty years of experience, we find in them too much of
passionate exaggeration, at times a ferocious wrong-headedness, and
everywhere so little practical guidance or fruitful suggestion, that we
cannot reckon these magnificent Jeremiads as permanent masterpieces.
As to _Friedrich_, it is not a book at all, but an encyclopaedia of
German biographies in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Who
reads every word of these ten volumes? Who cares to know how big was
the belly of some court chamberlain, or who were the lovers of some
unendurable Frau? What a welter of dull garbage! In what dust-heaps
dost thou not smother us, Teufelsdröckh! O, Thomas, Thomas, what
Titania has bewitched thee with the head of Dryasdust on thy noble
shoulders? Compare _Friedrich_ with _Cromwell_. In the Life of the
Puritan hero we have a great purpose, a prolonged homily, a magnificent
appeal against an unjust sentence passed two hundred years before by
ignorance, bigotry, and passion. The literary interest never
overpowers the social and political, the moral and the religious
purpose. Twenty years later, when he takes up the German _Friedrich_,
the literary interest overpowers the historical. Half of the ten
volumes of _Friedrich_ are taken up with tiresome anecdotes about the
ordinary appendages of a German court. Even the true greatness of
Frederick--his organisation of a model civil administration--is
completely obscured in the deluge of court gossip and _Potsdamiana_.
_Friedrich_ is a wonderful work, highly valuable to the student, a
memorable result of Teufelsdröckhian industry and humour--but it is not
a masterpiece: judged by the standard of Carlyle's own masterpieces, it
is really a failure. _Cromwell_ is the life of a hero and a statesman;
_Friedrich_ consists of miscellaneous memoirs of the court and camp of
the greatest of modern rulers.
On the whole, we may count the _Cromwell_ as the greatest of Carlyle's
effective products. With his own right hand, alone and by a single
stroke, he completely reversed the judgment of the English nation about
their greatest man. The whole weight of Church, monarchy, aristocracy,
fashion, literature, and wit had for two centuries combined to falsify
history and distort the character of the noblest of English statesmen.
And a simple man of letters, by one book, at once and for ever reversed
this sentence, silenced the allied forces of calumny and rancour, and
placed Oliver for all future time as the greatest hero of the
Protestant movement. There are few examples in the history of
literature of so great and so sudden a triumph of truth and justice.
At the same time, it is well to remember that the _Cromwell_ is not a
literary masterpiece, in the sense of being an organic work of high
art. It is not the "Life" of Cromwell: it was not so designed, and was
never so worked out. It is his "Letters and Speeches," illustrated by
notes. A work so planned cannot possibly be a work of art, or a
perfect piece of biography. The constant passage from text to
commentary, from small print to large, from Oliver's Puritan
sermonising to Carlyle's Sartorian eccentricities, destroys the
artistic harmony of the book as an organic work of art. The "Life" of
Cromwell was in fact never written by Carlyle; and has yet to be
written. Never yet was such splendid material for a "Life" prepared by
a great historian.
_Sartor Resartus_ (1831), the earliest of his greater works, is
unquestionably the most original, the most characteristic, the deepest
and most lyrical of his productions. Here is the Sage of
Craigenputtock at his best, at his grimmest, and, we must add, in his
most incoherent mood. To make men think, to rouse men out of the
slough of the conventional, the sensual, the mechanical, to make men
feel, by sheer force of poetry, pathos, and humour, the religious
mystery of life and the "wretchlessness of unclean living"--(as our
Church article hath it)--nothing could be more trumpet-tongued than
_Sartor_. The Gospel according to Teufelsdröckh is, however, a
somewhat Apocalyptic dispensation, and few there be who can "rehearse
the articles of his belief" with anything like precision. Another and
a more serious difficulty is this. How many a "general reader"
steadily reads through _Sartor_ from cover to cover? And of such, how
many entirely understand the inner Philosophy of Clothes, and follow
all the allusions, quips, and nicknames of Sartorian subjectivity. It
would be a fine subject for some Self-Improvement Circle of readers to
write examination papers upon questions as to the exact meaning of all
the inward musings of Teufelsdröckh. The first class of successful
candidates, one fears, would be small. A book--not of science or of
pure philosophy, or any technical art whatever--but a book addressed to
the general reader, and designed for the education of the public, and
which can be intelligently digested and assimilated by so very few of
the public, can hardly be counted as an unqualified success. And the
adepts who have mastered the inwardness of _Sartor_ are rare and few.
The _French Revolution_, however, is far more distinctly a work of art
than _Cromwell_, and far more accessible to the great public than
_Sartor_. Indeed the _French Revolution_ is usually, and very
properly, spoken of and thought of, as a prose poem, if prose poem
there can be. It has the essential character of an epic, short of
rhythm and versification. Its "argument" and its "books"; its
contrasts and "episodes"; its grouping of characters and
_dénoûment_--are as carefully elaborated as the _Gerusalemme_ of Tasso,
or the _Aeneid_ of Virgil. And it produces on the mind the effect of a
poem with an epic or dramatic plot. It is only a reader thoroughly at
home in the history of the time, who can resist the poet's spell when,
at the end of Part III., Book VII., he is told that the Revolution is
"ended," and the curtain falls. As a matter of real history, this is
an arbitrary invention. For the street fight on the day named in the
Revolutionary Calendar--13 _Vendémiaire, An 4_ (5th October 1795), is
merely a casual point in a long movement, at which the poet finds it
artistic to stop. But the French Revolution does not stop there, nor
did the "Whiff of Grapeshot" end it in any but an arbitrary sense.
When the poet tells us that, upon Napoleon's defeating the sections
around the Convention, "the hour had come and the Man," and that the
thing called the French Revolution was thereby "blown into space,"
nothing more silly, mendacious, and "phantasmic" was ever stated by
sober historian. The Convention was itself the living embodiment and
product of the Revolution, and Bonaparte's smart feat in protecting it,
increased its authority and confidence. If Carlyle's _French
Revolution_ be trusted as real history, it lands us in as futile a _non
sequitur_ as ever historian committed.
Viewed as an historical poem, the _French Revolution_ is a splendid
creation. Its passion, energy, colour, and vast prodigality of
ineffaceable pictures place it undoubtedly at the head of all the
pictorial histories of modern times. And the dramatic rapidity of its
action, and the inexhaustible contrasts of its scenes and
tableaux--things which so fatally pervert its truthfulness as authentic
history--immensely heighten the effect of the poem on the reader's
mind. Not that Carlyle was capable of deliberately manufacturing an
historical romance in the mendacious way of Thiers and Lamartine. But,
having resolved to cast the cataclysm of 1789 and the few years before
and after it into a dramatic poem, he inevitably, and no doubt
unconsciously, treated certain incidents and certain men with a poet's
license or with a distorted vision. This too is more apparent toward
the close of his work, when he begins to show signs of fatigue and
exhaustion. Nay, it is to be feared that we are still suffering from
the outrage committed on Victorian literature by Mr. Mill's incendiary
housemaid. We may yet note marks of arson in the restored volume. At
the same time, there are large parts of his work which are as true
historically as they are poetically brilliant. Part I.--"The
Bastille"--is almost perfect. The whole description of Versailles, its
court, and government, of the effervescence of Paris--from the death of
Louis XV. to the capture of Versailles--is both powerful and true.
Part II.--"The Constitution"--is the weakest part of the whole from the
point of view of accurate history. And Part III.--"The Terror"--is
only trustworthy in separate pictures and episodes, however splendid
its dramatic power.
It would need an essay, or rather a volume, on the French Revolution to
enumerate all the wrong judgments and fallacies of Carlyle's book, if
we bring it to the bar of sober and authentic history. First and
foremost comes his fundamental misconception that the Revolution was an
anarchical outburst against corruption and oppression, instead of
being, as it was, the systematic foundation of a new order of society.
Again, he takes it to be a purely French, local, and political
movement, instead of seeing that it was an European, social, spiritual
movement toward a more humane civilisation. And next, he regards the
Revolution as taking place in the six years between the taking of the
Bastille and the defeat of the Sections by Bonaparte; whereas the
Revolution was preparing from the time of Louis XIV., and is not yet
ended in the time of President Faure. Next to the capital mistake of
misconceiving the entire character and result of the Revolution, comes
the insolence which treats the public men of France during a whole
generation as mere subjects for ribaldry and caricature. From this
uniform mockery, Mirabeau and Bonaparte, two of the least worthy of
them, are almost alone exempted. This is a blunder in art, as well as
a moral and historical offence. Men like Gondorcet, Danton, Hoche,
Carnot, not to name a score of other old Conventionels, soldiers, and
leaders were pure, enlightened, and valorous patriots--with a breadth
of soul and social sympathies and hopes that tower far above the
insular prejudices and Hebrew traditions of a Scotch Cameronian
_littérateur_--poet, genius, and moralist though he also was himself.
But though the _French Revolution_ is not to be accepted as
historical authority, it is profoundly stimulating and instructive,
when we look on it as a lyrical apologue. It is an historical
phantasmagoria--which, though hardly more literally true than
Aristophanes' _Knights_ or _Clouds_, may almost be placed beside these
immortal satires for its imagination, wisdom, and insight. The
personages and the events of the French Revolution in fact succeeded
each other with such startling rapidity and such bewildering variety,
that it is difficult for any but the most patient student to keep the
men and the phases steadily before the eye without confusion and in
distinct form. This Carlyle has done far better than any other
historian of the period, perhaps even better than any historian
whatever. That so many Englishmen are more familiar with the scenes
and the men and women of the French Revolution than they are with the
scenes and the men and women of their own history, is very largely the
work of Carlyle. And as to the vices and weakness of the Old Régime,
the electric contagion of the people of Paris, the indomitable
elasticity of the French spirit, the magnetic power of the French
genius, the famous _furia francese_, and the terrible rage into which
it can be lashed--all this Carlyle has told with a truth and insight
that has not been surpassed by any modern historian.
It being then clearly understood that Carlyle did not leave us the
trustworthy history of the French Revolution, in the way in which
Thucydides gave us the authentic annals of the Peloponnesian war, or
Caesar the official despatches of the Conquest of Gaul, we must
willingly admit that Carlyle's history is one of the most fruitful
products of the nineteenth century. No one else certainly has written
the authentic story of the French Revolution at large, or of more than
certain aspects and incidents of it. In spite of misconceptions, and
such mistaken estimates as those of Mirabeau and Bonaparte, such
insolent mockery of good and able men, such ridiculous caricatures as
that of the "Feast of Pikes" and the trial of the King, such ribald
horse-play as "Grilled Herrings" and "Lion Sprawling," in spite of
blots and blunders in every chapter--the _French Revolution_ is
destined to live long and to stand forth to posterity as the typical
work of the master. It cannot be said to have done such work as the
_Cromwell_; for it is far less true and sound as history, and it is
only one out of scores of interpreters of the Revolution, whereas in
the Cromwell Carlyle worked single-handed. But being far more organic,
far more imaginative, indeed more powerful than the _Cromwell_ in
literary art, the _French Revolution_--produced, we may remember,
exactly in the middle of the author's life--will remain the enduring
monument of Carlyle's great spirit and splendid brain.
The book entitled _Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History_
(1840), to give it its full and original title, comes next in order of
time, and perhaps of abiding value. It is a book rather difficult for
us now to estimate after more than half a century, for so very much has
been done in the interval to build upon these foundations, to enlarge
our knowledge of these very heroes, and the estimates of Carlyle in the
first half of this century are for the most part so completely the
commonplaces of the English-speaking world at the close of the century,
that when we open the _Heroes_ again it is apt to seem obvious,
_connu_, the emphatic assertion of a truism that no one disputes. How
infinitely better do we now, in 1895, know Dante and Shakespeare,
Cromwell and Napoleon, than did our grandfathers in 1840! Who,
nowadays, imagines Mahomet to have been an impostor, or Burns to have
been a mere tipsy song-writer? What a copious literature has the last
half-century given us on Dante, on Islam and its spirit, on Rousseau,
on Burns, on the English and the French revolutions! But in 1840 the
true nature of these men was very faintly understood. Few people but
soldiers had the least chance of being called "heroes," and the "heroic
in history" was certainly not thought to include either poets,
preachers, or men of letters. _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, like the
_Cromwell_, has, in fact, done its work so completely that we find it a
little too familiar to need any constant reading or careful study.
To judge fairly all that Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must
put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the
days of Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and
Coleridge. None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology,
or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the
_Divina Commedia_ as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this
Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a
voice which has since been accepted as conclusive. How far deeper is
the view of Carlyle about some familiar personality like Johnson than
is that of Macaulay, how much farther does Carlyle see into the
Shakesperean firmament than even Coleridge! How far better does he
understand Rousseau and Burns than did Southey, laureate and critic as
he was hailed in his time. The book is a collection of Lectures, and
we now know how entirely Carlyle loathed that kind of utterance, how
much he felt the restraints and limits it involved. And for that
reason, the book is the simplest and most easily legible of his works,
with the least of his mannerism and the largest concessions to the
written language of sublunary mortals. Nearly all the judgments he
passes are not only sound, but now almost universally accepted. To
deal with the heroic in history, he needed, as he said, six months
rather than six days. It was intended, he told his hearers, "to break
ground," to clear up misunderstandings. It has done this: and a rich
crop has resulted from his ploughshare.
Nothing but a few sketches could be compressed into six hours. But it
is curious how many things seem omitted in this survey of the heroic.
At the age of forty-five Carlyle had not recognised Friedrich at all,
for he does not figure in the "Hero as King." Napoleon takes his
place, though Bonaparte was a "hero" only in the bad sense of hero
which Carlyle was seeking to explode. It is well that, since he
finished the _French Revolution_, Carlyle seems to have found out that
Bonaparte "parted with Reality," and had become a charlatan, a sham.
Still for all that, he remains "our last great man." Mazzini was
present at the delivery of these lectures: and when he had listened to
this last, he went up to Carlyle and told him that he had undone his
Hero-Worship and had fallen from the truth; and from that hour Mazzini
would hold no terms with the gospel of One-Man. To make Hero-Worship
close with the installation of Napoleon as "our last great man," was to
expose the inherent weakness of the Sartorian creed--that humanity
exists for the sake of its great men. The other strange delusion is
the entire omission from the "Hero as Priest" of any Catholic hero.
Not only are St. Bernard, and St. Francis, Becket and Lanfranc--all the
martyrs and missionaries of Catholicism--consigned to oblivion:--but
not a word is said of Alfred, Godfrey, St. Louis, St. Ferdinand, and
St. Stephen. In a single volume there must be selection of types. But
the whole idea of Hero-Worship was perverted in a plan which had no
room for a single Catholic chief or priest.
This perverse exaggeration of Puritan religion, and the still more
unjust hatred of Catholic religion, unfortunately runs through all
Carlyle's work, and perhaps nowhere breaks out in so repulsive a form
as in the piece called "Jesuitism" (1850), in the _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_ (No. VIII.). Discarding the creed, the practice, and the
language of Puritanism, Carlyle still retained its narrowness, its
self-righteousness, its intolerance, and its savagery. The moralist,
to whom John Knox was a hero, but St. Bernard was not, but only a
follower of the "three-hatted Papa," and an apostle of "Pig's-wash,"
was hardly the man to exhaust the heroic in history. In the "Hero as
Man-of-Letters," Carlyle was at home. If ever pure letters produced a
hero, the sage of Chelsea was one. With Johnson, with Rousseau, he is
perfectly rational, and the mass of literature which has accumulated
round the names of these two, only tends to confirm the essential
justice of Carlyle's estimate. Nor need we dispute his estimate of the
vigour and manliness of Burns. It is only when Carlyle describes him
as "the most gifted British soul" in the eighteenth century--the
century of Hume, Adam Smith, Fielding, and Burke--that we begin to
smile. Burns was a noble-hearted fellow, as well as a born poet. But
perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so
futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with
France entrusted their destinies to a phantasmic Pitt, instead of to
"the Thunder-god, Robert Burns." Napoleon would no doubt have welcomed
such a change of ministry. It is incoherences of this sort which undo
so much of the splendid service that Carlyle gave to his age.
But we are not willing to let the defects of Carlyle's philosophy drive
out of mind the permanent and beautiful things in his literary work.
_Past and Present_ (1843) is certainly a success--a happy and true
thought, full of originality, worked out with art and power. The idea
of embedding a living and pathetic picture of monastic life in the
twelfth century, and a minute study of the labours of enlightened
churchmen in the early struggles of civilisation--the idea of embedding
this tale, as if it were the remains of some disinterred saint, in the
midst of a series of essays on the vices and weaknesses of modern
society--was a highly original and instructive device, only to be
worked to success by a master. And the master brought it to a
delightful success. In all his writings of thirty volumes there are
few pages more attractive than the story of Jocelin of Brakelond, Abbot
Hugo, Abbot Samson, and the festival of St. Edmund, which all pass away
as in a vision leaving "a mutilated black ruin amidst green
expanses"--as we so often see in our England to-day after the trampling
of seven centuries over the graves of the early monks.
And then, when the preacher passes suddenly from the twelfth century to
the nineteenth, from toiling and ascetic monks to cotton spinners and
platform orators--the effect is electric--as though some old
Benedictine rose from the dead and began to preach in the crowded
streets of a city of factories. Have we yet, after fifty years of this
time of tepid hankering after Socialism and Theophilanthropic
experiments, got much farther than Thomas Carlyle in his preaching in
Book IV. on "Aristocracies," "Captains of Industry," "The Landed," "The
Gifted"? What truth, what force in the aphorism:--"To predict the
Future, to manage the Present, would not be so impossible, had not the
Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled; effaced, and what is worse,
defaced!"--"Of all Bibles, the frightfulest to disbelieve in is this
'Bible of Universal History'"--"The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is
ever to be led, are virtually the Captains of the World." What new
meaning that phrase has acquired in these fifty years! "Men of letters
may become a 'chivalry,' an actual instead of a virtual Priesthood."
Well! not men of letters exactly: but perhaps philosophers, with an
adequate moral and scientific training. Here, as so often, Carlyle
just missed a grand truth to which his insight and nobility of soul had
led him, through his perverse inability to accept any systematic
philosophy, and through his habit to listen to the whispering of his
own heart as if it were equivalent to scientific certainty. But the
whole book, _Past and Present_, is a splendid piece and has done much
to mould the thought of our time. It would impress us much more than
it does, were it not already become the very basis of all sincere
thought about social problems and the future conditions of industry.
Of the _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_ (1845) we have already spoken,
as the greatest of our author's effective products, inasmuch as it
produced the most definite practical result in moulding opinion, and a
result of the highest importance. But it is not, as we have seen, a
work of art, or even an organic work at all, and it cannot compare in
literary charm with some other of the author's works. We do not turn
to the _Cromwell_ again and again, as we do to the _French Revolution_,
or to _Sartor_, which we can take up from time to time as we do a poem
or a romance. Many of the great books of the world are not read and
re-read by the public, just as none but special students continually
resort to the _Novum Organum_, or the _Wealth of Nations_. For similar
reasons, the _Cromwell_ will never be a favourite book with the next
century, as it cannot be said to have been with ours. It has done its
work with masterly power; and its work will endure. And some day
perhaps, from out these materials, and those collected by Mr. Gardiner,
and by [Transcriber's note: next two words transliterated from Greek]
_oi peri_ Gardiner, a _Life of Cromwell_ may be finally composed.
It is true that Carlyle's determination to force Oliver upon us as
perfect saint and infallible hero is irritating and sometimes
laughable; it is true that his zeal to be-dwarf every one but Cromwell
himself is unjust and untrue; and the depreciation of every man who
declines to play into Oliver's hands is too often manifest. But, on
the whole, the judgments are so sound, the supporting authorities are
so overwhelming, the work of verification is so thorough, so
scrupulous, so perfectly borne out by all subsequent research--that the
future will no doubt look on the _Cromwell_, not only as the most
extraordinary, but the most satisfactory and effective of all Carlyle's
work; although for the reasons stated, it can never have the largest
measure of his literary charm or possess the full afflatus of his
poetic and mystical genius.
By the time that _Cromwell_ was published, Thomas Carlyle was turned of
fifty, and had produced nearly two-thirds of his total work. It may be
doubted if any later book will be permanently counted amongst his
masterpieces. _Friedrich_, for reasons set forth, was an attempt in
late life to repeat the feat of the _Cromwell_: it was a much less
urgent task: and it was not so well performed. The _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_ (1850) do not add much that is new to _Past and Present_
(1843) or to _Sartor_ (1831); and little of what they add is either
needful or true. The world had been fully enlightened about Wind-bags,
Shams, the approach to Tophet, Stump-orators, Palaver-Parliaments,
Phantasm-Captains, and the rest of the Sartorian puppet-pantomime.
There was a profound truth in all of these invectives, warnings, and
prophecies. But the prophet's voice at last got so shrieky and
monotonous, that instead of warning and inspiring a second generation,
these terrific maledictions began to pall upon a practical world. An
ardent admirer of the prophet has said that, when he first heard
Carlyle speak face to face, he could hardly resist the impression that
he was listening to an actor personating the Sage of Chelsea, and
mimicking the stock phrases of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Certainly
no man of sense can find any serious guidance on any definite social
problem from these "Pamphlets" of his morbid decline. Carlyle at last
sat eating his heart out, like Napoleon on St. Helena. His true
friends will hasten to throw such a decent covering as Japhet and Shem
threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes,
Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of
Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in "the collected
and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery
advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men labouring to
reform ancient abuses.
It is perilous for any man, however consummate be his genius, to place
himself on a solitary rock apart from all living men and defiant of all
before him, as the sole source of truth out of his own inner
consciousness. It is fatal to any man, however noble his own spirit,
to look upon this earth as "one fuliginous dust-heap," and the whole
human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place
into the sea. Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety entrusted
to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own
hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnigenous writer of books.
Carlyle was a true and pure "man of letters," looking at things and
speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed
paper. All that a "man of letters," of great genius and lofty spirit,
could do by consuming and producing mere printed paper, he did. And as
the "supreme man of letters" of his time he will ever be honoured and
long continue to be read. He deliberately cultivated a form of speech
which made him unreadable to all except English-speaking readers, and
intelligible only to a select and cultivated body even amongst them.
He wrote in what, for practical purposes, is a local, or rather
personal, dialect. And thus he deprived himself of that world-wide and
European influence which belongs to such men as Hume, Gibbon, Scott,
Byron--even to Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and Spencer. But
his name will stand beside theirs in the history of British thought in
the nineteenth century; and a devoted band of chosen readers, wherever
the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard, will for generations to come continue
to drink inspiration from the two or three masterpieces of the
Annandale peasant-poet.