A feeling of comical sadness is likely to come over the mind of any
middle-aged man who sets himself to recollecting the names of different
authors that have been famous, and the number of contemporary
immortalities whose end he has seen since coming to manhood. Many a
light, hailed by too careless observers as a fixed star, has proved to
be only a short-lived lantern at the tail of a newspaper kite. That
literary heaven which our youth saw dotted thick with rival glories, we
find now to have been a stage-sky merely, artificially enkindled from
behind; and the cynical daylight which is sure to follow all theatrical
enthusiasms shows us ragged holes where once were luminaries, sheer
vacancy instead of lustre. Our earthly reputations, says a great poet,
are the color of grass, and the same sun that makes the green bleaches
it out again. But next morning is not the time to criticise the
scene-painter’s firmament, nor is it quite fair to examine coldly a part
of some general illusion in the absence of that sympathetic enthusiasm,
that self-surrender of the fancy, which made it what it was. It would
not be safe for all neglected authors to comfort themselves in
Wordsworth’s fashion, inferring genius in an inverse proportion to
public favor, and a high and solitary merit from the world’s
indifference. On the contrary, it would be more just to argue from
popularity a certain amount of real value, though it may not be of that
permanent quality which insures enduring fame. The contemporary world
and Wordsworth were both half right. He undoubtedly owned and worked the
richest vein of his period; but he offered to his contemporaries a heap
of gold-bearing quartz where the baser mineral made the greater show,
and the purchaser must do his own crushing and smelting, with no
guaranty but the bare word of the miner. It was not enough that certain
bolder adventurers should now and then show a nugget in proof of the
success of their venture. The gold of the poet must be refined, moulded,
stamped with the image and superscription of his time, but with a beauty
of design and finish that are of no time. The work must surpass the
material. Wordsworth was wholly void of that shaping imagination which
is the highest criterion of a poet.
Immediate popularity and lasting fame, then, would seem to be the result
of different qualities, and not of mere difference in degree. It is safe
to prophesy a certain durability of recognition for any author who gives
evidence of intellectual force, in whatever kind, above the average
amount. There are names in literary history which are only names; and
the works associated with them, like acts of Congress already agreed on
in debate, are read by their titles and passed. What is it that insures
what may be called living fame, so that a book shall be at once famous
and read? What is it that relegates divine Cowley to that remote,
uncivil Pontus of the “British Poets,” and keeps garrulous Pepys within
the cheery circle of the evening lamp and fire? Originality, eloquence,
sense, imagination, not one of them is enough by itself, but only in
some happy mixture and proportion. Imagination seems to possess in
itself more of the antiseptic property than any other single quality;
but, without less showy and more substantial allies, it can at best
give only deathlessness, without the perpetual youth that makes it other
than dreary. It were easy to find examples of this Tithonus immortality,
setting its victims apart from both gods and men; helpless duration,
undying, to be sure, but sapless and voiceless also, and long ago
deserted by the fickle Hemera. And yet chance could confer that gift on
Glaucus, which love and the consent of Zeus failed to secure for the
darling of the Dawn. Is it mere luck, then? Luck may, and often does,
have some share in ephemeral successes, as in a gambler’s winnings spent
as soon as got, but not in any lasting triumph over time. Solid success
must be based on solid qualities and the honest culture of them.
The first element of contemporary popularity is undoubtedly the power of
entertaining. If a man have anything to tell, the world cannot be
expected to listen to him unless he have perfected himself in the best
way of telling it. People are not to be argued into a pleasurable
sensation, nor is taste to be compelled by any syllogism, however
stringent. An author may make himself very popular, however, and even
justly so, by appealing to the passion of the moment, without having
anything in him that shall outlast the public whim which he satisfies.
Churchill is a remarkable example of this. He had a surprising
extemporary vigor of mind; his phrase carries great weight of blow; he
undoubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as Cowper says of him, in a
certain rude and earth-born vigor; but his verse is dust and ashes now,
solemnly inurned, of course, in the Chalmers columbarium, and without
danger of violation. His brawn and muscle are fading traditions, while
the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is still a good life on the
books of the Critical Insurance Office. “Is it not, then, loftiness of
mind that puts one by the side of Virgil?” cries poor old Cavalcanti at
his wits’ end. Certainly not altogether that. There must be also the
great Mantuan’s art; his power, not only of being strong in parts, but
of making those parts coherent in an harmonious whole, and tributary to
it. Gray, if we may believe the commentators, has not an idea, scarcely
an epithet, that he can call his own; and yet he is, in the best sense,
one of the classics of English literature. He had exquisite felicity of
choice; his dictionary had no vulgar word in it, no harsh one, but all
culled from the luckiest moods of poets, and with a faint but delicious
aroma of association; he had a perfect sense of sound, and one idea
without which all the poetic outfit (_si absit prudentia_) is of little
avail,--that of combination and arrangement, in short, of art. The poets
from whom he helped himself have no more claim to any of his poems as
wholes, than the various beauties of Greece (if the old story were true)
to the Venus of the artist.
Imagination, as we have said, has more virtue to keep a book alive than
any other single faculty. Burke is rescued from the usual doom of
orators, because his learning, his experience, his sagacity are rimmed
with a halo by this bewitching light behind the intellectual eye from
the highest heaven of the brain. Shakespeare has impregnated his common
sense with the steady glow of it, and answers the mood of youth and age,
of high and low, immortal as that dateless substance of the soul he
wrought in. To have any chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, not
merely some fleeting fancy of the day, but a constant longing and hunger
of human nature; and it needs only a superficial study of literature to
be convinced that real fame depends rather on the sum of an author’s
powers than on any brilliancy of special parts. There must be wisdom as
well as wit, sense no less than imagination, judgment in equal measure
with fancy, and the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the poor wooden
stick that gives it guidance if it would mount and draw all eyes. There
are some who think that the brooding patience which a great work calls
for belonged exclusively to an earlier period than ours. Others lay the
blame on our fashion of periodical publication, which necessitates a
sensation and a crisis in every number, and forces the writer to strive
for startling effects, instead of that general lowness of tone which is
the last achievement of the artist. The simplicity of antique passion,
the homeliness of antique pathos, seem not merely to be gone out of
fashion, but out of being as well. Modern poets appear rather to tease
their words into a fury, than to infuse them with the deliberate heats
of their matured conception, and strive to replace the rapture of the
mind with a fervid intensity of phrase. Our reaction from the decorous
platitudes of the last century has no doubt led us to excuse this, and
to be thankful for something like real fire, though of stubble; but our
prevailing style of criticism, which regards parts rather than wholes,
which dwells on the beauty of passages, and, above all, must have its
languid nerves pricked with the expected sensation at whatever cost, has
done all it could to confirm us in our evil way. Passages are good when
they lead to something, when they are necessary parts of the building,
but they are not good to dwell in. This taste for the startling reminds
us of something which happened once at the burning of a country
meeting-house. The building stood on a hill, and, apart from any other
considerations, the fire was as picturesque as could be desired. When
all was a black heap, licking itself here and there with tongues of
fire, there rushed up a farmer gasping anxiously, “Hez the bell fell
yit?” An ordinary fire was no more to him than that on his hearthstone;
even the burning of a meeting-house, in itself a vulcanic rarity, (so
long as he was of another parish,) could not tickle his outworn palate;
but he had hoped for a certain _tang_ in the downcome of the bell that
might recall the boyish flavor of conflagration. There was something
dramatic, no doubt, in this surprise of the brazen sentinel at his post,
but the breathless rustic has always seemed to us a type of the
prevailing delusion in æsthetics. Alas! if the bell must fall in every
stanza or every monthly number, how shall an author contrive to stir us
at last, unless with whole Moscows, crowned with the tintinnabulary
crash of the Kremlin? For ourselves, we are glad to feel that we are
still able to find contentment in the more conversational and domestic
tone of our old-fashioned wood-fire. No doubt a great part of our
pleasure in reading is unexpectedness, whether in turn of thought or of
phrase; but an emphasis out of place, an intensity of expression not
founded on sincerity of moral or intellectual conviction, reminds one of
the underscorings in young ladies’ letters, a wonder even to themselves
under the colder north-light of matronage. It is the part of the critic,
however, to keep cool under whatever circumstances, and to reckon that
the excesses of an author will be at first more attractive to the many
than that average power which shall win him attention with a new
generation of men. It is seldom found out by the majority, till after a
considerable interval, that he was the original man who contrived to be
simply natural,--the hardest lesson in the school of art and the latest
learned, if, indeed, it be a thing capable of acquisition at all. The
most winsome and wayward of brooks draws now and then some lover’s foot
to its intimate reserve, while the spirt of a bursting water-pipe
gathers a gaping crowd forthwith.
Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been so long before the world, that
we may feel toward him something of the unprejudice of posterity. It has
long been evident that he had no more ideas to bestow upon us, and that
no new turn of his kaleidoscope would give us anything but some
variation of arrangement in the brilliant colors of his style. It is
perhaps possible, then, to arrive at some not wholly inadequate estimate
of his place as a writer, and especially of the value of the ideas whose
advocate he makes himself, with a bitterness and violence that increase,
as it seems to us, in proportion as his inward conviction of their truth
diminishes.
The leading characteristics of an author who is in any sense original,
that is to say, who does not merely reproduce, but modifies the
influence of tradition, culture, and contemporary thought upon himself
by some admixture of his own, may commonly be traced more or less
clearly in his earliest works. This is more strictly true, no doubt, of
poets, because the imagination is a fixed quantity, not to be increased
by any amount of study and reflection. Skill, wisdom, and even wit are
cumulative; but that diviner faculty, which is the spiritual eye, though
it may be trained and sharpened, cannot be added to by taking thought.
This has always been something innate, unaccountable, to be laid to a
happy conjunction of the stars. Goethe, the last of the _great_ poets,
accordingly takes pains to tell us under what planets he was born; and
in him it is curious how uniform the imaginative quality is from the
beginning to the end of his long literary activity. His early poems show
maturity, his mature ones a youthful freshness. The apple already lies
potentially in the blossom, as that may be traced also in the ripened
fruit. With a mere change of emphasis, Goethe might be called an old boy
at both ends of his career.
In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we find some not obscure hints
of the future man. Nearly fifty years ago he contributed a few literary
and critical articles to the Edinburgh Encyclopædia. The outward fashion
of them is that of the period; but they are distinguished by a certain
security of judgment remarkable at any time, remarkable especially in
one so young. British criticism has been always more or less parochial;
has never, indeed, quite freed itself from sectarian cant, and planted
itself honestly on the æsthetic point of view. It cannot quite persuade
itself that truth is of immortal essence, totally independent of all
assistance from quarterly journals or the British army and navy.
Carlyle, in these first essays, already shows the influence of his
master, Goethe, the most widely receptive of critics. In a compact
notice of Montaigne, there is not a word as to his religious scepticism.
The character is looked at purely from its human and literary sides. As
illustrating the bent of the author’s mind, the following passage is
most to our purpose: “A modern reader will not easily cavil at the
patient and good-natured, though exuberant egotism which brings back to
our view ‘the form and pressure’ of a time long past. _The habits and
humors, the mode of acting and thinking, which characterized a Gascon
gentleman in the sixteenth century, cannot fail to amuse an inquirer of
the nineteenth; while the faithful delineation of human feelings, in all
their strength and weakness, will serve as a mirror to every mind
capable of self-examination._” We find here no uncertain indication of
that eye for the moral picturesque, and that sympathetic appreciation of
character, which within the next few years were to make Carlyle the
first in insight of English critics and the most vivid of English
historians. In all his earlier writing he never loses sight of his
master’s great rule, _Den Gegenstand fest zu halten_. He accordingly
gave to Englishmen the first humanly possible likeness of Voltaire,
Diderot, Mirabeau, and others, who had hitherto been measured by the
usual British standard of their respect for the geognosy of Moses and
the historic credibility of the Books of Chronicles. What was the real
meaning of this phenomenon? what the amount of this man’s honest
performance in the world? and in what does he show that family-likeness,
common to all the sons of Adam, which gives us a fair hope of being able
to comprehend him? These were the questions which Carlyle seems to have
set himself honestly to answer in the critical writings which fill the
first period of his life as a man of letters. In this mood he rescued
poor Boswell from the unmerited obloquy of an ungrateful generation, and
taught us to see something half-comically beautiful in the poor, weak
creature, with his pathetic instinct of reverence for what was nobler,
wiser, and stronger than himself. Everything that Mr. Carlyle wrote
during this first period thrills with the purest appreciation of
whatever is brave and beautiful in human nature, with the most vehement
scorn of cowardly compromise with things base; and yet, immitigable as
his demand for the highest in us seems to be, there is always something
reassuring in the humorous sympathy with mortal frailty which softens
condemnation and consoles for shortcoming. The remarkable feature of Mr.
Carlyle’s criticism (see, for example, his analysis and exposition of
Goethe’s “Helena”) is the sleuth-hound instinct with which he presses on
to the _matter_ of his theme,--never turned aside by a false scent,
regardless of the outward beauty of form, sometimes almost contemptuous
of it, in his hunger after the intellectual nourishment which it may
hide. The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts
which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from
sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush remorselessly to come
at the marrow of meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to the
ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint conception of their
possible unity.
By degrees the humorous element in his nature gains ground, till it
overmasters all the rest. Becoming always more boisterous and obtrusive,
it ends at last, as such humor must, in cynicism. In “Sartor Resartus”
it is still kindly, still infused with sentiment; and the book, with its
mixture of indignation and farce, strikes one as might the prophecies of
Jeremiah, if the marginal comments of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his wildest
mood had by some accident been incorporated with the text. In “Sartor”
the marked influence of Jean Paul is undeniable, both in matter and
manner. It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of
national literatures on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne
and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with
a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as
the case may be, to the English mind. Unhappily the bit of _mother_ from
Swift’s vinegar-barrel has had strength enough to sour all the rest. The
whimsicality of “Tristram Shandy,” which, even in the original, has too
often the effect of forethought, becomes a deliberate artifice in
Richter, and at last a mere mannerism in Carlyle.
Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the advantage of a well-defined
theme, and of limits both in the subject and in the space allowed for
its treatment, which kept his natural extravagance within bounds, and
compelled some sort of discretion and compactness. The great merit of
these essays lay in a criticism based on wide and various study, which,
careless of tradition, applied its standard to the real and not the
contemporary worth of the literary or other performance to be judged,
and in an unerring eye for that fleeting expression of the moral
features of character, a perception of which alone makes the drawing of
a coherent likeness possible. Their defect was a tendency, gaining
strength with years, to confound the moral with the æsthetic standard,
and to make the value of an author’s work dependent on the general force
of his nature rather than on its special fitness for a given task. In
proportion as his humor gradually overbalanced the other qualities of
his mind, his taste for the eccentric, amorphous, and violent in men
became excessive, disturbing more and more his perception of the more
commonplace attributes which give consistency to portraiture. His
“French Revolution” is a series of lurid pictures, unmatched for
vehement power, in which the figures of such sons of earth as Mirabeau
and Danton loom gigantic and terrible as in the glare of an eruption,
their shadows swaying far and wide grotesquely awful. But all is painted
by eruption-flashes in violent light and shade. There are no half-tints,
no gradations, and we find it impossible to account for the continuance
in power of less Titanic actors in the tragedy like Robespierre, on any
theory whether of human nature or of individual character supplied by
Mr. Carlyle. Of his success, however, in accomplishing what he aimed at,
which was to haunt the mind with memories of a horrible political
nightmare, there can be no doubt.
Goethe says, apparently thinking of Richter, “The worthy Germans have
persuaded themselves that the essence of true humor is formlessness.”
Heine had not yet shown that a German might combine the most airy humor
with a sense of form as delicate as Goethe’s own, and that there was no
need to borrow the bow of Philoctetes for all kinds of game. Mr.
Carlyle’s own tendency was toward the lawless, and the attraction of
Jean Paul made it an overmastering one. Goethe, we think, might have
gone farther, and affirmed that nothing but the highest artistic sense
can prevent humor from degenerating into the grotesque, and thence
downwards to utter anarchy. Rabelais is a striking example of it. The
moral purpose of his book cannot give it that unity which the instinct
and forethought of art only can bring forth. Perhaps we owe the
masterpiece of humorous literature to the fact that Cervantes had been
trained to authorship in a school where form predominated over
substance, and the most convincing proof of the supremacy of art at the
highest period of Greek literature is to be found in Aristophanes. Mr.
Carlyle has no artistic sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of proportion.
Accordingly he looks on verse with contempt as something barbarous,--a
savage ornament which a higher refinement will abolish, as it has
tattooing and nose-rings. With a conceptive imagination vigorous beyond
any in his generation, with a mastery of language equalled only by the
greatest poets, he wants altogether the plastic imagination, the shaping
faculty, which would have made him a poet in the highest sense. He is a
preacher and a prophet,--anything you will,--but an artist he is not,
and never can be. It is always the knots and gnarls of the oak that he
admires, never the perfect and balanced tree.
It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful for what we owe an author,
than to blame him for what he cannot give us. But it is sometimes the
business of a critic to trace faults of style and of thought to their
root in character and temperament,--to show their necessary relation to,
and dependence on, each other,--and to find some more trustworthy
explanation than mere wantonness of will for the moral obliquities of a
man so largely moulded and gifted as Mr. Carlyle. So long as he was
merely an exhorter or dehorter, we were thankful for such eloquence,
such humor, such vivid or grotesque images, and such splendor of
illustration as only he could give; but when he assumes to be a teacher
of moral and political philosophy, when he himself takes to compounding
the social panaceas he has made us laugh at so often, and advertises
none as genuine but his own, we begin to inquire into his qualifications
and his defects, and to ask ourselves whether his patent pill differs
from others except in the larger amount of aloes, or has any better
recommendation than the superior advertising powers of a mountebank of
genius. Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and æsthetic defects
are more nearly related than is commonly supposed. Had Mr. Carlyle been
fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he would have had an ideal
in his work which would have lifted his mind away from the muddier part
of him, and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the harmony
rather than the discord and contradiction of things. His innate love of
the picturesque, (which is only another form of the sentimentalism he so
scoffs at, perhaps as feeling it a weakness in himself,) once turned in
the direction of character, and finding its chief satisfaction there,
led him to look for that ideal of human nature in individual men which
is but fragmentarily represented in the entire race, and is rather
divined from the aspiration, forever disenchanted to be forever renewed,
of the immortal part in us, than found in any example of actual
achievement. A wiser temper would have found something more consoling
than disheartening in the continual failure of men eminently endowed to
reach the standard of this spiritual requirement, would perhaps have
found in it an inspiring hint that it is mankind, and not special men,
that are to be shaped at last into the image of God, and that the
endless life of the generations may hope to come nearer that goal of
which the short-breathed threescore years and ten fall too unhappily
short.
But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, and all who recommend any
other method, or see any hope of healing elsewhere, are either quacks
and charlatans or their victims. His lively imagination conjures up the
image of an impossible he, as contradictorily endowed as the chief
personage in a modern sentimental novel, and who, at all hazards, must
not lead mankind like a shepherd, but bark, bite, and otherwise worry
them toward the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. If Mr. Carlyle would
only now and then recollect that men are men, and not sheep,--nay, that
the farther they are from being such, the more well grounded our hope of
one day making something better of them! It is indeed strange that one
who values Will so highly in the greatest, should be blind to its
infinite worth in the least of men; nay, that he should so often seem to
confound it with its irritable and purposeless counterfeit, Wilfulness.
The natural impatience of an imaginative temperament, which conceives so
vividly the beauty and desirableness of a nobler manhood and a diviner
political order, makes him fret at the slow moral processes by which the
All-Wise brings about his ends, and turns the very foolishness of men to
his praise and glory. Mr. Carlyle is for calling down fire from Heaven
whenever he cannot readily lay his hand on the match-box. No doubt it is
somewhat provoking that it should be so easy to build castles in the
air, and so hard to find tenants for them. It is a singular intellectual
phenomenon to see a man, who earlier in life so thoroughly appreciated
the innate weakness and futile tendency of the “storm and thrust” period
of German literature, constantly assimilating, as he grows older, more
and more nearly to its principles and practice. It is no longer the
sagacious and moderate Goethe who is his type of what is highest in
human nature, but far rather some Götz of the Iron Hand, some assertor
of the divine legitimacy of _Faustrecht_. It is odd to conceive the fate
of Mr. Carlyle under the sway of any of his heroes,--how Cromwell would
have scorned him as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne, but less
clear and practical,--how Friedrich would have scoffed at his tirades as
_dummes Zeug_ not to be compared with the romances of Crébillon _fils_,
or possibly have clapped him in a marching regiment as a fit subject for
the cane of the sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr. Carlyle’s
irritability is to be laid to the account of his early schoolmastership
at Ecclefechan. This great booby World is such a dull boy, and will not
learn the lesson we have taken such pains in expounding for the fiftieth
time. Well, then, if eloquence, if example, if the awful warning of
other little boys who neglected their accidence and came to the gallows,
if none of these avail, the birch at least is left, and we will try
that. The dominie spirit has become every year more obtrusive and
intolerant in Mr. Carlyle’s writing, and the rod, instead of being kept
in its place as a resource for desperate cases, has become the alpha and
omega of all successful training, the one divinely-appointed means of
human enlightenment and progress,--in short, the final hope of that
absurd animal who fancies himself a little lower than the angels. Have
we feebly taken it for granted that the distinction of man was reason?
Never was there a more fatal misconception. It is in the gift of
unreason that we are unenviably distinguished from the brutes, whose
nobler privilege of instinct saves them from our blunders and our
crimes.
But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed with the hallucination that
he is head-master of this huge boys’ school which we call the world, his
pedagogic birch has grown to the taller proportions and more ominous
aspect of a gallows. His article on Dr. Francia was a panegyric of the
halter, in which the gratitude of mankind is invoked for the
self-appointed dictator who had discovered in Paraguay a tree more
beneficent than that which produced the Jesuits’ bark. Mr. Carlyle seems
to be in the condition of a man who uses stimulants, and must increase
his dose from day to day as the senses become dulled under the spur. He
began by admiring strength of character and purpose, and the manly
self-denial which makes a humble fortune great by steadfast loyalty to
duty. He has gone on till mere strength has become such washy weakness
that there is no longer any titillation in it; and nothing short of
downright violence will rouse his nerves now to the needed excitement.
At first he made out very well with remarkable men; then, lessening the
water and increasing the spirit, he took to Heroes: and now he must have
downright _in_humanity, or the draught has no savor;--so he gets on at
last to Kings, types of remorseless Force, who maintain the political
views of Berserkers by the legal principles of Lynch. Constitutional
monarchy is a failure, representative government is a gabble, democracy
a birth of the bottomless pit; there is no hope for mankind except in
getting themselves under a good driver who shall not spare the lash. And
yet, unhappily for us, these drivers are providential births not to be
contrived by any cunning of ours, and Friedrich II. is hitherto the last
of them. Meanwhile the world’s wheels have got fairly stalled in mire
and other matter of every vilest consistency and most disgustful smell.
What are we to do? Mr. Carlyle will not let us make a lever with a rail
from the next fence, or call in the neighbors. That would be too
commonplace and cowardly, too anarchical. No; he would have us sit down
beside him in the slough, and shout lustily for Hercules. If that
indispensable demigod will not or cannot come, we can find a useful and
instructive solace, during the intervals of shouting, in a hearty abuse
of human nature, which, at the long last, is always to blame.
Since “Sartor Resartus” Mr. Carlyle has done little but repeat himself
with increasing emphasis and heightened shrillness. Warning has steadily
heated toward denunciation, and remonstrance soured toward scolding. The
image of the Tartar prayer-mill, which he borrowed from Richter and
turned to such humorous purpose, might be applied to himself. The same
phrase comes round and round, only the machine, being a little crankier,
rattles more, and the performer is called on for a more visible
exertion. If there be not something very like cant in Mr. Carlyle’s
later writings, then cant is not the repetition of a creed after it has
become a phrase by the cooling of that white-hot conviction which once
made it both the light and warmth of the soul. We do not mean
intentional and deliberate cant, but neither is that which Mr. Carlyle
denounces so energetically in his fellow-men of that conscious kind. We
do not mean to blame him for it, but mention it rather as an interesting
phenomenon of human nature. The stock of ideas which mankind has to work
with is very limited, like the alphabet, and can at best have an air of
freshness given it by new arrangements and combinations, or by
application to new times and circumstances. Montaigne is but
Ecclesiastes writing in the sixteenth century, Voltaire but Lucian in
the eighteenth. Yet both are original, and so certainly is Mr. Carlyle,
whose borrowing is mainly from his own former works. But he does this so
often and so openly, that we may at least be sure that he ceased
growing a number of years ago, and is a remarkable example of arrested
development.
The cynicism, however, which has now become the prevailing temper of his
mind, has gone on expanding with unhappy vigor. In Mr. Carlyle it is
not, certainly, as in Swift, the result of personal disappointment, and
of the fatal eye of an accomplice for the mean qualities by which power
could be attained that it might be used for purposes as mean. It seems
rather the natural corruption of his exuberant humor. Humor in its first
analysis is a perception of the incongruous, and in its highest
development, of the incongruity between the actual and the ideal in men
and life. With so keen a sense of the ludicrous contrast between what
men might be, nay, wish to be, and what they are, and with a vehement
nature that demands the instant realization of his vision of a world
altogether heroic, it is no wonder that Mr. Carlyle, always hoping for a
thing and always disappointed, should become bitter. Perhaps if he
expected less he would find more. Saul seeking his father’s asses found
himself turned suddenly into a king; but Mr. Carlyle, on the lookout for
a king, always seems to find the other sort of animal. He sees nothing
on any side of him but a procession of the Lord of Misrule, in gloomier
moments, a Dance of Death, where everything is either a parody of
whatever is noble, or an aimless jig that stumbles at last into the
annihilation of the grave, and so passes from one nothing to another. Is
a world, then, which buys and reads Mr. Carlyle’s works distinguished
only for its “fair, large ears”? If he who has read and remembered so
much would only now and then call to mind the old proverb, _Nec deus,
nec lupus, sed homo_! If he would only recollect that, from the days of
the first grandfather, everybody has remembered a golden age behind
him!
The very qualities, it seems to us, which came so near making a great
poet of Mr. Carlyle, disqualify him for the office of historian. The
poet’s concern is with the appearances of things, with their harmony in
that whole which the imagination demands for its satisfaction, and their
truth to that ideal nature which is the proper object of poetry.
History, unfortunately, is very far from being ideal, still farther from
an exclusive interest in those heroic or typical figures which answer
all the wants of the epic and the drama and fill their utmost artistic
limits. Mr. Carlyle has an unequalled power and vividness in painting
detached scenes, in bringing out in their full relief the oddities or
peculiarities of character; but he has a far feebler sense of those
gradual changes of opinion, that strange communication of sympathy from
mind to mind, that subtile influence of very subordinate actors in
giving a direction to policy or action, which we are wont somewhat
vaguely to call the progress of events. His scheme of history is purely
an epical one, where only leading figures appear by name and are in any
strict sense operative. He has no conception of the people as anything
else than an element of mere brute force in political problems, and
would sniff scornfully at that unpicturesque common-sense of the many,
which comes slowly to its conclusions, no doubt, but compels obedience
even from rulers the most despotic when once its mind is made up. His
history of Frederick is, of course, a Fritziad; but next to his hero,
the cane of the drill-sergeant and iron ramrods appear to be the
conditions which to his mind satisfactorily account for the result of
the Seven Years War. It is our opinion, which subsequent events seem to
justify, that, had there not been in the Prussian people a strong
instinct of nationality, Protestant nationality too, and an intimate
conviction of its advantages, the war might have ended quite otherwise.
Frederick II. left the machine of war which he received from his father
even more perfect than he found it, yet within a few years of his death
it went to pieces before the shock of French armies animated by an idea.
Again a few years, and the Prussian soldiery, inspired once more by the
old national fervor, were victorious. Were it not for the purely
picturesque bias of Mr. Carlyle’s genius, for the necessity which his
epical treatment lays upon him of always having a protagonist, we should
be astonished that an idealist like him should have so little faith in
ideas and so much in matter.
Mr. Carlyle’s manner is not so well suited to the historian as to the
essayist. He is always great in single figures and striking episodes,
but there is neither gradation nor continuity. He has extraordinary
patience and conscientiousness in the gathering and sifting of his
material, but is scornful of commonplace facts and characters, impatient
of whatever will not serve for one of his clever sketches, or group well
in a more elaborate figure-piece. He sees history, as it were, by
flashes of lightning. A single scene, whether a landscape or an
interior, a single figure or a wild mob of men, whatever may be snatched
by the eye in that instant of intense illumination, is minutely
photographed upon the memory. Every tree and stone, almost every blade
of grass; every article of furniture in a room; the attitude or
expression, nay, the very buttons and shoe-ties of a principal figure;
the gestures of momentary passion in a wild throng,--everything leaps
into vision under that sudden glare with a painful distinctness that
leaves the retina quivering. The intervals are absolute darkness. Mr.
Carlyle makes us acquainted with the isolated spot where we happen to be
when the flash comes, as if by actual eyesight, but there is no
possibility of a comprehensive view. No other writer compares with him
for vividness. He is himself a witness, and makes us witnesses of
whatever he describes. This is genius beyond a question, and of a very
rare quality, but it is not history. He has not the cold-blooded
impartiality of the historian and while he entertains us, moves us to
tears or laughter, makes us the unconscious captives of his
ever-changeful mood, we find that he has taught us comparatively little.
His imagination is so powerful that it makes him the contemporary of his
characters, and thus his history seems to be the memoirs of a cynical
humorist, with hearty likes and dislikes, with something of acridity in
his partialities whether for or against, more keenly sensitive to the
grotesque than the simply natural, and who enters in his diary, even of
what comes within the range of his own observation, only so much as
amuses his fancy, is congenial with his humor, or feeds his prejudice.
Mr. Carlyle’s method is accordingly altogether pictorial, his hasty
temper making narrative wearisome to him. In his Friedrich, for example,
we get very little notion of the civil administration of Prussia; and
when he comes, in the last volume, to his hero’s dealings with civil
reforms, he confesses candidly that it would tire him too much to tell
us about it, even if he knew anything at all satisfactory himself.
Mr. Carlyle’s historical compositions are wonderful prose poems, full of
picture, incident, humor, and character, where we grow familiar with his
conception of certain leading personages, and even of subordinate ones,
if they are necessary to the scene, so that they come out living upon
the stage from the dreary limbo of names; but this is no more history
than the historical plays of Shakespeare. There is nothing in
imaginative literature superior in its own way to the episode of
Voltaire in the Fritziad. It is delicious in humor, masterly in minute
characterization. We feel as if the principal victim (for we cannot
help feeling all the while that he is so) of this mischievous genius had
been put upon the theatre before us by some perfect mimic like Foote,
who had studied his habitual gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought,
costume, trick of feature, and rendered them with the slight dash of
caricature needful to make the whole composition tell. It is in such
things that Mr. Carlyle is beyond all rivalry, and that we must go back
to Shakespeare for a comparison. But the mastery of Shakespeare is shown
perhaps more strikingly in his treatment of the ordinary than of the
exceptional. His is the gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr.
Carlyle’s gift is rather in the representation than in the evolution of
character; and it is a necessity of his art, therefore, to exaggerate
slightly his heroic, and to caricature in like manner his comic parts.
His appreciation is less psychological than physical and external. Grimm
relates that Garrick, riding once with Préville, proposed to him that
they should counterfeit drunkenness. They rode through Passy
accordingly, deceiving all who saw them. When beyond the town Préville
asked how he had succeeded. “Excellently,” said Garrick, “as to your
body; but your legs were not tipsy.” Mr. Carlyle would be as exact in
his observation of nature as the great actor, and would make us _see_ a
drunken man as well; but we doubt whether he could have conceived that
unmatchable scene in Antony and Cleopatra, where the tipsiness of
Lepidus pervades the whole metaphysical no less than the physical part
of the triumvir. If his sympathies bore any proportion to his instinct
for catching those traits which are the expression of character, but not
character itself, we might have had a great historian in him instead of
a history-painter. But that which is a main element in Mr. Carlyle’s
talent, and does perhaps more than anything else to make it effective,
is a defect of his nature. The cynicism, which renders him so
entertaining precludes him from any just conception of men and their
motives, and from any sane estimate of the relative importance of the
events which concern them. We remember a picture of Hamon’s, where
before a Punch’s theatre are gathered the wisest of mankind in rapt
attention. Socrates sits on a front bench, absorbed in the spectacle,
and in the corner stands Dante making entries in his note-book. Mr.
Carlyle as an historian leaves us in somewhat such a mood. The world is
a puppet-show, and when we have watched the play out, we depart with a
half-comic consciousness of the futility of all human enterprise, and
the ludicrousness of all man’s action and passion on the stage of the
world. Simple, kindly, blundering Oliver Goldsmith was after all wiser,
and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and not less immortal, is a demonstration
of the perennial beauty and heroism of the homeliest human nature. The
cynical view is congenial to certain moods, and is so little
inconsistent with original nobleness of mind, that it is not seldom the
acetous fermentation of it; but it is the view of the satirist, not of
the historian, and takes in but a narrow arc in the circumference of
truth. Cynicism in itself is essentially disagreeable. It is the
intellectual analogue of the truffle; and though it may be very well in
giving a relish to thought for certain palates, it cannot supply the
substance of it. Mr. Carlyle’s cynicism is not that polished weariness
of the outsides of life which we find in Ecclesiastes. It goes much
deeper than that to the satisfactions, not of the body or the intellect,
but of the very soul itself. It vaunts itself; it is noisy and
aggressive. What the wise master puts into the mouth of desperate
ambition, thwarted of the fruit of its crime, as the fitting expression
of passionate sophistry, seems to have become an article of his creed.
With him
“Life _is_ a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
He goes about with his Diogenes dark-lantern, professing to seek a man,
but inwardly resolved to find a monkey. He loves to flash it suddenly on
poor human nature in some ridiculous or degrading posture. He admires
still, or keeps affirming that he admires, the doughty, silent,
hard-working men who, like Cromwell, go honestly about their business;
but when we come to his later examples, we find that it is not loyalty
to duty or to an inward ideal of high-mindedness that he finds admirable
in them, but a blind unquestioning vassalage to whomsoever it has
pleased him to set up for a hero. He would fain replace the old
feudalism with a spiritual counterpart, in which there shall be an
obligation to soul-service. He who once popularized the word _flunkey_
by ringing the vehement changes of his scorn upon it, is at last forced
to conceive an ideal flunkeyism to squire the hectoring Don Belianises
of his fancy about the world. Failing this, his latest theory of Divine
government seems to be the cudgel. Poets have sung all manner of
vegetable loves; Petrarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer the daisy,
and Wordsworth the gallows-tree; it remained for the ex-pedagogue of
Ecclefechan to become the volunteer laureate of the rod, and to imagine
a world created and directed by a divine Dr. Busby. We cannot help
thinking that Mr. Carlyle might have learned something to his advantage
by living a few years in the democracy which he scoffs at as heartily _a
priori_ as if it were the demagogism which Aristophanes derided from
experience. The Hero, as Mr. Carlyle understands him, was a makeshift of
the past; and the ideal of manhood is to be found hereafter in free
communities, where the state shall at length sum up and exemplify in
itself all those qualities which poets were forced to imagine and
typify because they could not find them in the actual world.
In the earlier part of his literary career, Mr. Carlyle was the
denouncer of shams, the preacher up of sincerity, manliness, and of a
living faith, instead of a droning ritual. He had intense convictions,
and he made disciples. With a compass of diction unequalled by any other
public performer of the time, ranging as it did from the unbooked
freshness of the Scottish peasant to the most far-sought phrase of
literary curiosity, with humor, pathos, and eloquence at will, it was no
wonder that he found eager listeners in a world longing for a sensation,
and forced to put up with the West-End gospel of “Pelham.” If not a
profound thinker, he had what was next best,--he felt profoundly, and
his cry came out of the depths. The stern Calvinism of his early
training was rekindled by his imagination to the old fervor of Wishart
and Brown, and became a new phenomenon as he reproduced it subtilized by
German transcendentalism and German culture. Imagination, if it lays
hold of a Scotchman, possesses him in the old demoniac sense of the
word, and that hard logical nature, if the Hebrew fire once gets fair
headway in it, burns unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But to
utilize these sacred heats, to employ them, as a literary man is always
tempted, to keep the domestic pot a-boiling,--is such a thing possible?
Only too possible, we fear; and Mr. Carlyle is an example of it. If the
languid public long for a sensation, the excitement of making one
becomes also a necessity of the successful author, as the intellectual
nerves grow duller and the old inspiration that came unbidden to the
bare garret grows shier and shier of the comfortable parlor. As he
himself said thirty years ago of Edward Irving, “Unconsciously, for the
most part in deep unconsciousness, there was now the impossibility to
live neglected,--to walk on the quiet paths where alone it is well with
us. Singularity must henceforth succeed singularity. O foulest Circean
draught, thou poison of Popular Applause! madness is in thee and death;
thy end is Bedlam and the grave.” Mr. Carlyle won his first successes as
a kind of preacher in print. His fervor, his oddity of manner, his
pugnacious paradox, drew the crowd; the truth, or, at any rate, the
faith that underlay them all, brought also the fitter audience, though
fewer. But the curse was upon him; he must attract, he must astonish.
Thenceforth he has done nothing but revamp his telling things; but the
oddity has become always odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. No very
large share of truth falls to the apprehension of any one man; let him
keep it sacred, and beware of repeating it till it turn to falsehood on
his lips by becoming ritual. Truth always has a bewitching savor of
newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original
sweetness to the tongue; but alas for him who would make the one a
substitute for the other! We seem to miss of late in Mr. Carlyle the old
sincerity. He has become the purely literary man, less concerned about
what he says than about how he shall say it to best advantage. The Muse
should be the companion, not the guide, says he whom Mr. Carlyle has
pronounced “the wisest of this generation.” What would be a virtue in
the poet is a vice of the most fatal kind in the teacher, and, alas that
we should say it! the very Draco of shams, whose code contained no
penalty milder than capital for the most harmless of them, has become at
last something very like a sham himself. Mr. Carlyle continues to be a
voice crying in the wilderness, but no longer a voice with any earnest
conviction behind it. Hearing him rebuke us for being humbugs and
impostors, we are inclined to answer, with the ambassador of Philip II.,
when his master reproached him with forgetting substance in ceremony,
“Your Majesty forgets that you are only a ceremony yourself.” And Mr.
Carlyle’s teaching, moreover,--if teaching we may call it,--belongs to
what the great German, whose disciple he is, condemned as the
“literature of despair.” An apostle to the gentiles might hope for some
fruit of his preaching; but of what avail an apostle who shouts his
message down the mouth of the pit to poor lost souls, whom he can
positively assure only that it is impossible to get out? Mr. Carlyle
lights up the lanterns of his Pharos after the ship is already rolling
between the tongue of the sea and the grinders of the reef. It is very
brilliant, and its revolving flashes touch the crests of the breakers
with an awful picturesqueness; but in so desperate a state of things,
even Dr. Syntax might be pardoned for being forgetful of the
picturesque. The Toryism of Scott sprang from love of the past; that of
Carlyle is far more dangerously infectious, for it is logically deduced
from a deep disdain of human nature.
Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an old king sitting at the
gate of his palace to judge his people in the calm sunshine of that past
which never existed outside a poet’s brain. It is the sweetest of waking
dreams, this of absolute power and perfect wisdom in one supreme ruler;
but it is as pure a creation of human want and weakness, as clear a
witness of mortal limitation and incompleteness, as the shoes of
swiftness, the cloak of darkness, the purse of Fortunatus, and the
_elixir vitæ_. It is the natural refuge of imaginative temperaments
impatient of our blunders and shortcomings, and, given a complete man,
all would submit to the divine right of his despotism. But alas! to
every the most fortunate human birth hobbles up that malign fairy who
has been forgotten, with her fatal gift of imperfection! So far as our
experience has gone, it has been the very opposite of Mr. Carlyle’s.
Instead of finding men disloyal to their natural leader, nothing has
ever seemed to us so touching as the gladness with which they follow
him, when they are sure they have found him at last. But a natural
leader of the ideal type is not to be looked for _nisi dignus vindice
nodus_. The Divine Forethought had been cruel in furnishing one for
every petty occasion, and thus thwarting in all inferior men that
priceless gift of reason, to develop which, and to make it one with
free-will, is the highest use of our experience on earth. Mr. Carlyle
was hard bestead and very far gone in his idolatry of mere _pluck_, when
he was driven to choose Friedrich as a hero. A poet--and Mr. Carlyle is
nothing else--is unwise who yokes Pegasus to a prosaic theme which no
force of wing can lift from the dull earth. Charlemagne would have been
a wiser choice, far enough in the past for ideal treatment, more
manifestly the Siegfried of Anarchy, and in his rude way the refounder
of that empire which is the ideal of despotism in the Western world.
Friedrich was doubtless a remarkable man, but surely very far below any
lofty standard of heroic greatness. He was the last of the European
kings who could look upon his kingdom as his private patrimony; and it
was this estate of his, this piece of property, which he so obstinately
and successfully defended. He had no idea of country as it was
understood by an ancient Greek or Roman, as it is understood by a modern
Englishman or American; and there is something almost pitiful in seeing
a man of genius like Mr. Carlyle fighting painfully over again those
battles of the last century which settled nothing but the continuance of
the Prussian monarchy, while he saw only the “burning of a dirty
chimney” in the war which a great people was waging under his very eyes
for the idea of nationality and orderly magistrature, and which fixed,
let us hope forever, a boundary-line on the map of history and man’s
advancement toward self-conscious and responsible freedom. The true
historical genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler
meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is he who detects
the divine in the casual; and we somewhat suspect the depth of his
insight into the past, who cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under
that disguise in which it always visits us. Shall we hint to Mr. Carlyle
that a man may look on an heroic age, as well as an heroic master, with
the eyes of a valet, as misappreciative certainly, though not so
ignoble?
What Goethe says of a great poet, that he must be a citizen of his age
as well as of his country, may be said inversely of a great king. He
should be a citizen of his country as well as of his age. Friedrich was
certainly the latter in its fullest sense; whether he was, or could have
been, the former, in any sense, may be doubted. The man who spoke and
wrote French in preference to his mother-tongue, who, dying when Goethe
was already drawing toward his fortieth year, Schiller toward his
thirtieth, and Lessing had been already five years in his grave, could
yet see nothing but barbarism in German literature, had little of the
old Teutonic fibre in his nature. The man who pronounced the Nibelungen
Lied not worth a pinch of priming, had little conception of the power of
heroic traditions in making heroic men, and especially in strengthening
that instinct made up of so many indistinguishable associations which we
call love of country. Charlemagne, when he caused the old songs of his
people to be gathered and written down, showed a truer sense of the
sources of national feeling and a deeper political insight. This want
of sympathy points to the somewhat narrow limits of Friedrich’s nature.
In spite of Mr. Carlyle’s adroit statement of the case, and the whole
book has an air of being the plea of a masterly advocate in mitigation
of sentence, we feel that his hero was essentially hard, narrow, and
selfish. His popularity will go for little with any one who has studied
the trifling and often fabulous elements that make up that singular
compound. A bluntness of speech, a shabby uniform, a frugal camp
equipage, a timely familiarity, may make a man the favorite of an army
or a nation,--above all, if he have the knack of success. Moreover,
popularity is much more easily won from above downward, and is bought at
a better bargain by kings and generals than by other men. We doubt if
Friedrich would have been liked as a private person, or even as an
unsuccessful king. He apparently attached very few people to himself,
fewer even than his brutal old Squire Western of a father. His sister
Wilhelmina is perhaps an exception. We say perhaps, for we do not know
how much the heroic part he was called on to play had to do with the
matter, and whether sisterly pride did not pass even with herself for
sisterly affection. Moreover she was far from him; and Mr. Carlyle waves
aside, in his generous fashion, some rather keen comments of hers on her
brother’s character when she visited Berlin after he had become king.
Indeed, he is apt to deal rather contemptuously with all adverse
criticism of his hero. We sympathize with his impulse in this respect,
agreeing heartily as we do in Chaucer’s scorn of those who “_gladlie_
demen to the baser end” in such matters. But we are not quite sure if
this be a safe method with the historian. He must doubtless be the
friend of his hero if he would understand him, but he must be more the
friend of truth if he would understand history. Mr. Carlyle’s passion
for truth is intense, as befits his temper, but it is that of a lover
for his mistress. He would have her all to himself, and has a lover’s
conviction that no one is able, or even fit, to appreciate her but
himself. He does well to despise the tittle-tattle of vulgar minds, but
surely should not ignore _all_ testimony on the other side. For
ourselves, we think it not unimportant that Goethe’s friend Knebel, a
man not incapable of admiration, and who had served a dozen years or so
as an officer of Friedrich’s guard, should have bluntly called him “the
tyrant.”
Mr. Carlyle’s history traces the family of his hero down from its
beginnings in the picturesque chiaro-scuro of the Middle Ages. It was an
able and above all a _canny_ house, a Scotch version of the word _able_,
which implies thrift and an eye to the main chance, the said main chance
or chief end of man being altogether of this world. Friedrich,
inheriting this family faculty in full measure, was driven, partly by
ambition, partly by necessity, to apply it to war. He did so, with the
success to be expected where a man of many expedients has the good luck
to be opposed by men with few. He adds another to the many proofs that
it is possible to be a great general without a spark of that divine fire
which we call genius, and that good fortune in war results from the same
prompt talent and unbending temper which lead to the same result in the
peaceful professions. Friedrich had certainly more of the temperament of
genius than Marlborough or Wellington; but not to go beyond modern
instances, he does not impress us with the massive breadth of Napoleon,
nor attract us with the climbing ardor of Turenne. To compare him with
Alexander or Cæsar were absurd. The kingship that was in him, and which
won Mr. Carlyle to be his biographer, is that of will merely, of rapid
and relentless command. For organization he had a masterly talent; but
he could not apply it to the arts of peace, both because he wanted
experience and because the rash decision of the battle-field will not
serve in matters which are governed by natural laws of growth. He seems,
indeed, to have had a coarse, soldier’s contempt for all civil
distinction, altogether unworthy of a wise king, or even of a prudent
one. He confers the title of Hofrath on the husband of a woman with whom
his General Walrave is living in what Mr. Carlyle justly calls “brutish
polygamy,” and this at Walrave’s request, on the ground that “a
general’s drab ought to have a handle to her name.” Mr. Carlyle murmurs
in a mild parenthesis that “we rather regret this”! (Vol. III. p. 559.)
This is his usual way of treating unpleasant matters, sidling by with a
deprecating shrug of the shoulders. Not that he ever wilfully suppresses
anything. On the contrary, there is no greater proof of his genius than
the way in which, while he seems to paint a character with all its
disagreeable traits, he contrives to win our sympathy for it, nay,
almost our liking. This is conspicuously true of his portrait of
Friedrich’s father; and that he does not succeed in making Friedrich
himself attractive is a strong argument with us that the fault is in the
subject and not the artist.
The book, we believe, has been comparatively unsuccessful as a literary
venture. Nor do we wonder at it. It is disproportionately long, and too
much made up of those descriptions of battles to read which seems even
more difficult than to have won the victory itself, more disheartening
than to have suffered the defeat. To an American, also, the warfare
seemed Liliputian in the presence of a conflict so much larger in its
proportions and significant in its results. The interest, moreover,
flags decidedly toward the close, where the reader cannot help feeling
that the author loses breath somewhat painfully under the effort of so
prolonged a course. Mr. Carlyle has evidently devoted to his task a
labor that may be justly called prodigious. Not only has he sifted all
the German histories and memoirs, but has visited every battle-field,
and describes them with an eye for country that is without rival among
historians. The book is evidently an abridgment of even more abundant
collections, and yet as it stands the matter overburdens the work. It is
a bundle of lively episodes rather than a continuous narrative. In this
respect it contrasts oddly with the concinnity of his own earlier Life
of Schiller. But the episodes _are_ lively, the humor and pathos spring
from a profound nature, the sketches of character are masterly, the
seizure of every picturesque incident infallible, and the literary
judgments those of a thorough scholar and critic. There is, of course,
the usual amusing objurgation of Dryasdust and his rubbish-heaps, the
usual assumption of omniscience, and the usual certainty of the lively
French lady of being always in the right; yet we cannot help thinking
that a little of Dryasdust’s plodding exactness would have saved Fouquet
eleven years of the imprisonment to which Mr. Carlyle condemns him,
would have referred us to St. Simon rather than to Voltaire for the
character of the brothers Belle-Ile, and would have kept clear of a
certain ludicrous etymology of the name Antwerp, not to mention some
other trifling slips of the like nature. In conclusion, after saying, as
honest critics must, that “The History of Friedrich II. called Frederick
the Great” is a book to be read in with more satisfaction than to be
read through, after declaring that it is open to all manner of
criticism, especially in point of moral purpose and tendency, we must
admit with thankfulness, that it has the one prime merit of being the
work of a man who has every quality of a great poet except that supreme
one of rhythm which shapes both matter and manner to harmonious
proportion, and that where it is good, it is good as only genius knows
how to be.
With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the greatest of epic
poets since Homer. Without it, to modulate and harmonize and bring parts
into their proper relation, he is the most amorphous of humorists, the
most shining avatar of whim the world has ever seen. Beginning with a
hearty contempt for shams, he has come at length to believe in brute
force as the only reality, and as little sense of justice as Thackeray
allowed to women. We say _brute force_ because, though the theory is
that this force should be directed by the supreme intellect for the time
being, yet all inferior wits are treated rather as obstacles to be
contemptuously shoved aside than as ancillary forces to be conciliated
through their reason. But, with all deductions, he remains the
profoundest critic and the most dramatic imagination of modern times.
Never was there a more striking example of that _ingenium perfervidum_
long ago said to be characteristic of his countrymen. His is one of the
natures, rare in these latter centuries, capable of rising to a white
heat; but once fairly kindled, he is like a three-decker on fire, and
his shotted guns go off, as the glow reaches them, alike dangerous to
friend or foe. Though he seems more and more to confound material with
moral success, yet there is always something wholesome in his unswerving
loyalty to reality, as he understands it. History, in the true sense, he
does not and cannot write, for he looks on mankind as a herd without
volition, and without moral force; but such vivid pictures of events,
such living conceptions of character, we find nowhere else in prose. The
figures of most historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose
whole substance runs out through any hole that criticism may tear in
them, but Carlyle’s are so real in comparison, that, if you prick them,
they bleed. He seems a little wearied, here and there, in his Friedrich,
with the multiplicity of detail, and does his filling-in rather
shabbily; but he still remains in his own way, like his hero, the Only,
and such episodes as that of Voltaire would make the fortune of any
other writer. Though not the safest of guides in politics or practical
philosophy, his value as an inspirer and awakener cannot be
over-estimated. It is a power which belongs only to the highest order of
minds, for it is none but a divine fire that can so kindle and
irradiate. The debt due him from those who listened to the teachings of
his prime for revealing to them what sublime reserves of power even the
humblest may find in manliness, sincerity, and self-reliance, can be
paid with nothing short of reverential gratitude. As a purifier of the
sources whence our intellectual inspiration is drawn, his influence has
been second only to that of Wordsworth, if even to his.