that generation,--partially opened, for the general æsthetic ear is
not fully opened yet,--to a hollowness which was musical to the many:
"Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if _in vacuo_;
the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much
for Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result
of this, for certain generalizations which philosophy termed men." And
in the paper on Goethe, he calls Gray's poetry, "a laborious mosaic,
through the hard, stiff lineaments of which, little life or true grace
could be expected to look." Thus choicely endowed was Mr. Carlyle to
be, what is the critic's noblest office, an interpreter between new
poets and the public. Such an interpreter England grievously needed,
to help and teach her educated and scholarly classes to prize the
treasures just lavished upon them by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and
Shelley, and Keats. The interpreter was there, but he spoke not.
Better than any man in England Mr. Carlyle could, if he would,
have taught the generation that was growing up with him, whose ear he
had already gained, what truth and fresh beauty and deep humanity
there was in the strains of this composite chorus of superlative
singers. Of such teaching, that generation stood in especial need, to
disabuse its ear of the hollowness which had been mistaken for
harmony; to refresh, with clear streams from "the divine fountain,"
hearts that were fevered by the stimulus of Byronic "strong waters;"
to wave before half-awakened eyes the torch which lights the way to
that higher plane where breathe great poets, whose incomparable
function it is, to impart to their fellow-men some of the enlargement
and the purification of consciousness in which themselves exult
through the influx of fresh ideas and the upspringing of prolific
sentiment. The gifted interpreter was dumb. Nay, he made diversions
into Scotland and Germany, to bring Burns and Scott more distinctly
before Englishmen, and to make Schiller and Goethe and Richter better
known to them. And it pleased him to write about "Corn-law rhymes."
That he did these tasks so well, proves how well he could have done,
by the side of them, the then more urgent task. In 1828, Mr.
Carlyle wrote for one of the quarterly reviews an exposition of
"Goethe's Helena," which is a kind of episode in the second part of
"Faust," and was first published as a fragment. This takes up more
than sixty pages in the first volume of the "Miscellanies," about the
half being translations from "Helena," which by no means stands in the
front rank of Goethe's poetic creations, which is indeed rather a high
artistic composition than a creation. At that time there lay, almost
uncalled for, on the publisher's shelf, where it had lain for five
years, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas,
flushed with a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than any
in English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out of
Shakespeare,--a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender,
deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards of
feeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, are
gathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue with
excess of light,--or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanza
rising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bed
of Nature's most precious perfumes, each shedding a new and
a richer fragrance; I mean the "Adonais" of Shelley. For this
glittering masterpiece,--a congenial commentary on which would have
illuminated the literary atmosphere of England,--Mr. Carlyle had no
word; no word for Shelley, no word for Coleridge, no word for
Wordsworth. For Keats he had a word in the paper on Burns, and here it
is: "Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole
consists in a weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility and a certain vague,
random timefulness of nature, is no separate faculty." A parenthesis,
short and contemptuous, is all he gives to one of whom it has been
truly said, that of no poet who has lived, not of Shakespeare, is the
poetry written before the twenty-fifth year so good as his; and of
whom it may as truly be said, that his best poems need no apology in
the youthfulness of their author; but that for originality, power,
variety, feeling, thoughtfulness, melody, they take rank in the first
class of the poetry of the world. Is not Thomas Carlyle justly
chargeable with having committed a high literary misdemeanor? Nay,
considering his gift of poetic insight, and with it his persistent
ignoring of the great English poets of his age, considering the warm
solicitation on the one side, and the duty on the other, his
offense may be termed a literary crime. He knew better.
Mr. Carlyle somewhere contrasts his age with that of Elizabeth, after
this fashion; "For Raleighs and Shakespeares we have Beau Brummell and
Sheridan Knowles." Only on the surmise that Mr. Carlyle owed poor
Knowles some desperate grudge, can such an outburst be accounted for.
Otherwise it is sheer fatuity, or an impotent explosion of literary
spite. For the breadth and brilliancy of the poetic day shed upon it,
no period in the history of any nation, not that of Pericles or of
Elizabeth, is more resplendent than that which had not yet faded for
England when Mr. Carlyle began his career; nor in the field of public
action can the most prolific era of Greece or of England hold up, for
the admiration of the world and the pride of fellow-countrymen, two
agents more deservedly crowned with honor and gratitude than Nelson
and Wellington. Here are two leaders, who, besides exhibiting rare
personal prowess and quick-eyed military genius on fields of vast
breadth, and in performances of unwonted magnitude and momentousness,
were, moreover, by their great, brave deeds, most palpably
saving England, saving Europe, from the grasp of an inexorable despot.
Surely these were heroes of a stature to have strained to its utmost
the reverence and the love of a genuine hero-worshipper. On the ten
thousand luminous pages of Mr. Carlyle they find no place. Not only
are their doings not celebrated, that they lived is scarce
acknowledged.
Even when its objects are the loftiest and the most honored, jealousy
is not a noble form of
"The last infirmity of noble mind."
Does Mr. Carlyle feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley,
Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill
him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or
even notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness of
Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and
Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a pen
which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things,
should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men of
genius who illustrate his era, is a fact so monstrous, that one is
driven to monstrous devices to divulge its motive. In such a case it
is impossible to premise to what clouds of self-delusion an
imaginative man will not rise.
Writing of Thomas Carlyle, the last words must not be censorious
comments on a weakness; we all owe too much to his strength; he is too
large a benefactor. Despite over-fondness for Frederick and the like,
and what may be termed a pathological drift towards political
despotism, how many quickening chapters has he not added to the
"gospel of freedom"? Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses,
with delicate sympathies. From many a page what cordialities step
forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon;
what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what
bursts of splendor through nebulous mutterings. Much has he helped the
enfranchisement of the spirit. Well do I remember the thirst
wherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly "Frazer,"
to drink of the spiritual waters of "Sartor Resartus." Here was a new
spring; with what stimulating, exhilarating, purifying draughts, did
it bubble and sparkle! That picture, in the beginning, of the "doing
and driving (_Thun und Treiben_)" of a city as beheld by
Professor Teufelsdroeckh from his attic--would one have been surprised
to read that on a page of Shakespeare?
A marvelous faculty of speech has Mr. Carlyle; a gift of saying what
he has to say with a ring in the words that makes the thought tingle
through your ears. His diction surrounds itself with a magnetic
_aura_, which seems to float it, to part it from the paper, it
stands out in such transparent chiar-oscuro. Common phrases he
refreshes by making them the vehicle for new meanings, and in the
ordering of words he has command of a magical logic. The marrowy vigor
in his mind it is that lends such expressiveness, such nimbleness,
such accent to his sentences, to his style.
Mr. Carlyle's power comes mainly from his sensibilities. Through them
he is poetical; through them there is so much light in his pages. More
often from his than from any others, except those of the major poets,
breaks the sudden, joyful beam that flames around a thought when it
knows itself embraced by a feeling. Of humor and of wit, what an added
fund does our language now possess through his pen. The body of
criticism, inclosed in the five volumes of Miscellanies, were
enough to give their author a lasting name. When one of these papers
appeared in the Edinburgh, or other review, it shone, amid the
contributions of the Jeffreys and Broughams, like a guinea in a
handful of shillings.
The masterpiece of Mr. Carlyle, and the masterpiece of English prose
literature, is his "French Revolution," a rhythmic Epic without verse.
To write those three volumes a man needs have in him a big, glowing
heart, thus to flood with passionate life all the men and scenes of a
momentous volcanic epoch; a lively, strong, intellectual vision he
must have, to grasp in their full reality the multitudinous and
diverse facts and incidents so swiftly begotten under the pulsation of
millions of contentious brains; he needs a literary faculty finely
artistic, creatively imaginative, to enrank the figures of such vast
tumultuous scenes, to depict the actors in each, to present vividly in
clear relief the rapid succession of eventful convulsions. Outside of
the choice achievements of verse, is there a literary task of breadth
and difficulty that has been done so well? A theme of unusual grandeur
and significance is here greatly treated.
The foremost literary gift,--nay, the test whereby to try
whether there be any genuine literary gift,--is the power in a writer
to impart so much of himself, that his subject shall stand invested,
or rather, imbued, with a life which renews it; it becomes warmed with
a fire from the writer's soul. Of this, the most perfect exhibition is
in poetry, wherein, by the intensity and fullness of inflammation, of
passion, is born a something new, which, through the strong
creativeness of the poet, has henceforth a rounded being of its own.
With this power Mr. Carlyle is highly endowed. Not only, as already
said, does his page quiver with himself; through the warmth and
healthiness of his sympathies, and his intellectual mastery, he makes
each scene and person in his gorgeous representation of the French
Revolution to shine with its own life, the more brilliantly and truly
that this life has been lighted up by his. Where in history is there a
picture greater than that of the execution of Louis XVI.? With a few
strokes how many a vivid portrait does he paint, and each one vivid
chiefly from its faithfulness to personality and to history. And then
his full-length, more elaborated likenesses, of the king, of the
queen, of the Duke of Orleans, of Lafayette, of Camille
Desmoulins, of Danton, of Robespierre: it seems now that only on his
throbbing page do these personages live and move and have their true
being. The giant Mirabeau, 'twas thought at first he had drawn too
gigantic. But intimate documents, historical and biographical, that
have come to light since, confirm the insight of Mr. Carlyle, and
swell his hero out to the large proportions he has given him.
For a conclusion we will let Mr. Carlyle depict himself. Making
allowance for some humorous play in describing a fellow-man so
eccentric as his friend, Professor Teufelsdroeckh, this we think he
does consciously and designedly in the fourth chapter of "Sartor
Resartus," wherein, under the head of "Characteristics," he comments
on the professor's Work on Clothes, and its effect on himself. From
this chapter we extract some of the most pertinent sentences. It opens
thus:--
"It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothes
entirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, like
the very sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work of
genius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amid
its effulgence,--a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dullness'
double-vision, and even utter blindness.
"Without committing ourselves to those enthusiastic praises and
prophesyings of the "Weissnichtwo'sche Anzeiger," we admitted that the
book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the
best effect of any book; that it had even operated changes in our way
of thought; nay, that it promised to prove, as it were, the opening of
a new mine-shaft, wherein the whole world of _Speculation_ might
henceforth dig to unknown depths. More especially it may now be
declared that Professor Teufelsdroeckh's acquirements, patience of
research, philosophic, and even poetic vigor, are here made
indisputably manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity and
tortuosity and manifold inaptitude....
"Many a deep glance, and often with unspeakable precision, has he cast
into mysterious Nature, and the still more mysterious Life of man.
Wonderful it is with what cutting words, now and then, he severs
asunder the confusion; sheers down, were it furlongs deep, into the
true center of the matter; and there not only hits the nail on the
head, but with crushing force smites it home and buries it....
"Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigor, a
true inspiration; his burning thoughts step forth in fit burning
words, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and
splendor from Jove's head; a rich idiomatic diction, picturesque
allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy twins; all the
graces and terrors of a wild imagination, wedded to the clearest
intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer
sleeping and soporific passages, circumlocutions, repetitions, touches
even of pure doting jargon so often intervene.... A wild tone pervades
the whole utterance of the man, like its key-note and regulator; now
screwing itself aloft as into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrill
mockery of fiends; now sinking in cadences, not without melodious
heartiness, though sometimes abrupt enough, into the common pitch,
when we hear it only as a monotonous hum; of which hum the true
character is extremely difficult to fix....
"Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse,
do we still lie with regard to the professor's moral feeling. Gleams
of an ethereal love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite
pity; he could clasp the whole universe into his bosom, and
keep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a
very seraph. Then, again, he is so sly, and still so imperturbably
saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness, towards all that
men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter,
sardonic humor, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,--that you
look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate
Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round,
after all, were but some huge foolish whirligig, where kings and
beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were
chaotically whirled, in which only children could take interest."
VII.
ERRATA.[7]
[7] From Lippincott's Magazine, 1870.
Words are the counters of thought; speech is the vocalization of the
soul; style is the luminous incarnation of reason and emotion. Thence
it behooves scholars, the wardens of language, to keep over words a
watch as keen and sleepless as a dutiful guardian keeps over his
pupils. A prime office of this guardianship is to take care lest
language fall into loose ways; for words being the final elements into
which all speech resolves itself, if they grow weak by negligence or
abuse, speech loses its firmness, veracity, and expressiveness. Style
may be likened to a close Tyrian garment woven by poets and thinkers
out of words and phrases for the clothing and adornment of the mind;
and the strength and fineness of the tissue, together with its
beauties of color, depend on the purity and precision, the
transparency and directness of its threads, which are words.
A humble freeman of the guild of scholars would here use his
privilege to call attention to some abuses in words and
phrases,--abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken and
written speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, the
pages, even of good writers. These are not errors that betoken or lead
to general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race is
many centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to show
signs of that decadence which, visible at first in the waning moral
and intellectual energies of a people, soon spots its speech.
Nevertheless, as inaccuracies, laxities, vulgarisms--transgressions
more or less superficial--such errors take from the correctness, from
the efficacy, from the force as well as the grace, of written or
spoken speech.
The high level of strength, suppleness and beauty occupied by our
English tongue has been reached, and can only be maintained, by
strenuous, varied, and continuous mental action. Offenses against the
laws and proprieties of language--like so many other of our
lapses--are in most cases effects of the tendency in human nature to
relax its tone. None save the most resolute and rigorous but have
their moods of unwatchfulness, of indolence. Moreover, men are
prone to resist mental refinement and intellectual subdivisions.
Discrimination requires close attention and sustained effort; and
without habitual discrimination there can be no linguistic precision
or excellence. In this, as in other provinces, people like to take
things easily. Now, every capable man of business knows that to take
things easily is an easy way to ruin. Language is in a certain sense
every one's business; but it is especially the business, as their
appellation denotes, of men of letters; and a primary duty of their
high vocation is to be jealous of any careless or impertinent meddling
with, or mishandling of, those little glistening, marvelous tools
wherewith such amazing structures and temples have been built and are
ever a-building. Culture, demanding and creating diversity and
subtlety of mental processes, is at once a cause and an effect of
infinite multiplication in the relations the mind is capable of
establishing between itself and the objects of its action, and between
its own processes; and language, being a chief instrument of culture,
has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands,
Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of
its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness,
any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex
tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by
the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating
influence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr.
Whewell; "Language is often called an instrument of thought, but it is
also the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere on
which thought lives--a medium essential to the activity of our
speculative powers, although invisible and imperceptible in its
operation; and an element modifying, by its changes and qualities, the
growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds."
Our enumeration of _errata_ being made alphabetically, the first to be
cited is one of the chief of sinners--the particle.
As. The misuse of _as_ for _so_ is, in certain cases, almost
universal. If authority could justify error and convert the faulty
into the faultless, it were idle to expose a misuse in justification
of which can be cited most of the best names in recent English
literature.
"_As_ far as doth concern my single self,"
is a line in Wordsworth ("Prelude," p. 70) which, by a change
of the first _as_ into _so_, would gain not only in sound (which is
not our affair at present), but, likewise in grammar. The seventh line
of the twenty-first stanza in that most tender of elegies and most
beautiful of poems, Shelley's "Adonais," begins, "_As_ long as skies
are blue," where also there would be a double gain by writing "_So_
long as skies are blue." On page 242 of the first volume of De
Quincey's "Literary Remains" occurs this sentence; "Even by _as_
philosophic a politician _as_ Edmund Burke," in which the critical
blunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excuse
for the grammatical blunder. The rule (derived, like all good rules,
from principle) which determines the use of this small particle is, I
conceive, that the double _as_ should only be employed when there is
direct comparison. In the first part of the following sentence there
is no direct comparative relation--in the second, the negative
destroys it; "_So_ far as geographical measurement goes, Philadelphia
is not _so_ far from New York as from Baltimore." Five writers out of
six would commit the error of using _as_ in both members of the
sentence. The most prevalent misuse of _as_ is in connection with
_soon_; and this general misuse, having moreover the countenance of
good writers, is so inwoven into our speech that it will be hard to
unravel it. But principle is higher than the authority derived from
custom. Judges are bound to give sentence according to the statute;
and if the highest writers, whose influence is deservedly judicial,
violate the laws of language, their decisions ought to be, and will
be, reversed, or language will be undermined, and, slipping into
shallow, illogical habits, into anarchical conditions, will forfeit
much of its manliness, of its subtlety, of its truthfulness. Language
is a living organism, and to substitute authority, or even long usage,
for its innate genius and wisdom, and the requirements and practices
that result from these, were to strike at its life, and to expose it
to become subject to upstart usurpation, to deadening despotism.
Worcester quotes from the Psalms the phrase, "They go astray _as_ soon
as they be born." We ask, Were not the translators of the Bible as
liable to err in grammar as De Quincey, or Wordsworth, or Shelley? A
writer in the English "National Review" for January, 1862, in an
admirable paper on the "Italian Clergy and the Pope," begins a
sentence with the same phrase: "_As_ soon as the law was passed." And
we ourselves, sure though we be that the use of _as_ in this and every
similar position is an error, need to brace both pen and tongue
against running into it, so strong to overcome principle and
conviction is the habit of the senses, accustomed daily to see and to
hear the wrong.
AT THAT. We should not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the
pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into
bound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not be
italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a
phrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, of
American mintage, coined in one of those frolicksome exuberant moods,
when a young people, like a loosed horse full of youth and oats, kicks
up and scatters mud with the unharnessed license of his heels.
ANOTHER. Before passing to the letter B on our alphabetical docket, we
will call up a minor criminal in A, viz. _another_, often incorrectly
used for _other_; as in "on one ground or another," "from one
cause or another." Now, _another_, the prefix _an_ making it
singular,--embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contrary
to the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there are
but two grounds or causes. Write "on one ground or other," and the
words are in harmony with the meaning of the writer, the word _other_
implying several or many grounds.
BOQUET. The sensibility that gives the desire to preserve a present
sparkling so long as is possible with all the qualities that made it
materially acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something so
precious as a word; and when we receive one from another people,
gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift itself,
should make us watchful that it be not dimmed by the boorish breath of
ignorance or cacophanized by unmusical voices. We therefore protest
against a useful and tuneful noun-substantive, a native of France, the
word _bouquet_, being maimed into _boquet_, a corruption as dissonant
to the ear as were to the eye plucking a rose from a variegated
nosegay, and leaving only its thorny stem. _Boquet_ is heard at times
in well-upholstered drawing-rooms, and may even be seen in print.
Offensive in its mutilated shape, it smells sweet again when restored
to its native orthography.
BY NO MANNER OF MEANS. The most vigorous writers are liable, in
unguarded moments, to lapse into verbal weakness, and so you
meet with this vulgar pleonasm in Ruskin.
BY REASON OF. An ill-assorted, ugly phrase, used by accomplished
reviewers and others, who ought to set a purer example.
COME OFF. Were a harp to give out the nasal whine of the bagpipe, or
the throat of a nightingale to emit the caw of a raven, the æsthetic
sense would not be more startled and offended than to hear from
feminine lips, rosily wreathed by beauty and youth, issue the words,
"The concert will _come off_ on Wednesday." This vulgarism should
never be heard beyond the "ring" and the cock-pit, and should be
banished from resorts so respectable as an oyster-cellar.
CONSIDER. Neither weight of authority nor universality of use can
purify or justify a linguistic corruption, and make the intrinsically
wrong in language right; and therefore such phrases as, "I consider
him an honest man," "Do you consider the dispute settled?" will ever
be bad English, however generally sanctioned. In his dedication of the
"Diversions of Purley" to the University of Cambridge, Horne Tooke
uses it wrongly when he says, "who always _considers_ acts of
voluntary justice toward himself as favors." The original
signification and only proper use of _consider_ are in phrases like
these: "If you consider the matter carefully;" "Consider the lilies of
the field."
CONDUCT. It seems to us that it were as allowable to say of a man, "He
carries well," as "He conducts well." We say of a gun that it carries
well, and we might say of a pipe that it conducts well. The gun and
pipe are passive instruments, not living organisms, and thence the
verbs are used properly in the neuter form. Perhaps, strictly
speaking, even here _its charge_ and _water_ are understood.