His attitude on political questions, in which for ten years he still took

a more or less prominent part, represents him on his sterner side. The

first of these was the controversy about Governor Eyre, who, having

suppressed the Jamaica rebellion by the violent and, as alleged, cruel

use of martial law, and hung a quadroon preacher called Gordon--the man

whether honest or not being an undoubted incendiary--without any law at

all, was by the force of popular indignation dismissed in disgrace, and

then arraigned for mis-government and illegality. In the movement, which

resulted in the governor's recall and impeachment, there was doubtless

the usual amount of exaggeration--represented by the violent language

of one of Carlyle's minor biographers: "There were more innocent people

slain than at Jeffreys' Bloody Assize"; "The massacre of Glencoe was

nothing to it"; "Members of Christian Churches were flogged," etc.

etc.--but among its leaders there were so many men of mark and celebrity,

men like John S. Mill, T. Hughes, John Bright, Fawcett, Cairnes, Goldwin

Smith, Herbert Spencer, and Frederick Harrison, that it could not be set

aside as a mere unreasoning clamour. It was a hard test of Carlyle's

theory of strong government; and he stood to his colours. Years before,

on John Sterling suggesting that the negroes themselves should be

consulted as to making a permanent engagement with their masters, he had

said, "I never thought the rights of the negroes worth much discussing

in any form. Quashee will get himself made a slave again, and with

beneficent whip will be compelled to work." On this occasion he regarded

the black rebellion in the same light as the Sepoy revolt. He organised

and took the chair of a "Defence Committee," joined or backed by Ruskin,

Henry Kingsley, Tyndall, Sir R. Murchison, Sir T. Gladstone, and others.

"I never," says Mr. Froude, "knew Carlyle more anxious about anything."

He drew up a petition to Government and exerted himself heart and soul

for the "brave, gentle, chivalrous, and clear man," who when the ship was

on fire "had been called to account for having flung a bucket or two of

water into the hold beyond what was necessary." He had damaged some of

the cargo perhaps, but he had saved the ship, and deserved to be made

"dictator of Jamaica for the next twenty-five years," to govern after

the model of Dr. Francia in Paraguay. The committee failed to get

Eyre reinstalled or his pension restored; but the impeachment was

unsuccessful.

The next great event was the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, by the

Tories, educated by Mr. Disraeli to this method of "dishing the Whigs,"

by outbidding them in the scramble for votes. This instigated the famous

tract called _Shooting Niagara_, written in the spirit of the _Latter-Day

Pamphlets_--Carlyle's final and unqualified denunciation of this

concession to Democracy and all its works. But the upper classes in

England seemed indifferent to the warning. "Niagara, or what you like,"

the author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, "we will

at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when Church and State have

gone." A _mot_ emphatically of the decadence.

Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions being a means of

bringing the Irish question within the range of practical politics.

I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of

those Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house

had decided to expel and extirpate the human inhabitants,

which latter seemed to have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor

arsenic, and are trying to prevail by the method of love.

Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland for text and Cromwell's

storm of Drogheda for example, or Otto von Bismarck, would have been, in

his view, in place at Dublin Castle.

In the next great event of the century, the close of the greatest

European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which pleased Cato pleased

also the gods. Carlyle, especially in his later days, had a deepening

confidence in the Teutonic, a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He

regarded the contest between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, and

wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with exultation. When

a feeling spread in this country, naming itself sympathy for the

fallen,--really half that, the other half, as in the American war, being

jealousy of the victor,--and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a

decisive letter to the _Times_, November 11th 1870, tracing the sources

of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV., and ridiculing the

prevailing sentiment about the recaptured provinces of Lothringen and

Elsass. With a possible reference to Victor Hugo and his clients, he

remarks--

They believe that they are the "Christ of Nations."... I

wish they would inquire whether there might not be a

Cartouche of nations. Cartouche had many gallant

qualities--had many fine ladies begging locks of his hair

while the indispensable gibbet was preparing. Better he

should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, who has

him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part

of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and

try to become again a Chevalier Bayard. All Europe does

_not_ come to the rescue in gratitude for the heavenly

illumination it is getting from France: nor could all Europe

if it did prevent that awful Chancellor from having his own

way. Metz and the boundary fence, I reckon, will be

dreadfully hard to get out of that Chancellor's hands

again.... Considerable misconception as to Herr von Bismarck

is still prevalent in England. He, as I read him, is not a

person of Napoleonic ideas, but of ideas quite superior to

Napoleonic.... That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid

Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become

Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious,

gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive

France, seems to me the hopefulest fact that has occurred in

my time.

Carlyle seldom wrote with more force, or with more justice. Only, to be

complete, his paper should have ended with a warning. He has done more

than any other writer to perpetuate in England the memories of the great

thinkers and actors--Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Körner, Stein, Goethe,--who

taught their countrymen how to endure defeat and retrieve adversity. Who

will celebrate their yet undefined successors, who will train Germany

gracefully to bear the burden of prosperity? Two years later Carlyle

wrote or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to shake, his

historical sketch of the _Early Kings of Norway_, showing no diminution

of power either of thought or expression, his estimates of the three

Hakons and of the three Olafs being especially notable; and a paper

on _The Portraits of John Knox_, the prevailing dull gray of which is

relieved by a radiant vision of Mary Stuart.

He was incited to another public protest, when, in May 1877, towards the

close of the Russo-Turkish war, he had got, or imagined himself to have

got, reliable information that Lord Beaconsfield, then Prime Minister,

having sent our fleet to the Dardanelles, was planning to seize Gallipoli

and throw England into the struggle. Carlyle never seems to have

contemplated the possibility of a Sclavo-Gallic alliance against the

forces of civilised order in Europe, and he chose to think of the Czars

as the representatives of an enlightened autocracy. We are here mainly

interested in the letter he wrote to the _Times_, as "his last public act

in this world,"--the phrase of Mr. Froude, who does not give the letter,

and unaccountably says it "was brief, not more than three or four lines."

It is as follows:--

Sir--A rumour everywhere prevails that our miraculous

Premier, in spite of the Queen's Proclamation of Neutrality,

intends, under cover of care for "British interests," to

send the English fleet to the Baltic, or do some other feat

which shall compel Russia to declare war against England.

Latterly the rumour has shifted from the Baltic and become

still more sinister, on the eastern side of the scene, where

a feat is contemplated that will force, not Russia only,

but all Europe, to declare war against us. This latter I

have come to know as an indisputable fact; in our present

affairs and outlooks surely a grave one.

As to "British interests" there is none visible or

conceivable to me, except taking strict charge of our route

to India by Suez and Egypt, and for the rest, resolutely

steering altogether clear of any copartnery with the Turk in

regard to this or any other "British interest" whatever. It

should be felt by England as a real ignominy to be connected

with such a Turk at all. Nay, if we still had, as we ought

to have, a wish to save him from perdition and annihilation

in God's world, the one future for him that has any hope in

it is even now that of being conquered by the Russians, and

gradually schooled and drilled into peaceable attempt at

learning to be himself governed. The newspaper outcry

against Russia is no more respectable to me than the howling

of Bedlam, proceeding as it does from the deepest ignorance,

egoism, and paltry national jealousy.

These things I write, not on hearsay, but on accurate

knowledge, and to all friends of their country will

recommend immediate attention to them while there is yet

time, lest in a few weeks the maddest and most criminal

thing that a British government could do, should be done

and all Europe kindle into flames of war.--I am, etc.

T. CARLYLE.

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea,

_May 4th._

Meanwhile honours without stint were being rendered to the great author

and venerable sage. In 1868 he had by request a personal interview with

the Queen, and has left, in a letter, a graphic account of the interview

at the Deanery of Westminster. Great artists as Millais, Watts, and

Boehm vied with one another, in painting or sculpture, to preserve his

lineaments; prominent reviews to record their impression of his work,

and disciples to show their gratitude. One of these, Professor Masson

of Edinburgh, in memory of Carlyle's own tribute to Goethe, started a

subscription for a medal, presented on his eightieth birthday; but he

valued more a communication of the same date from Prince Bismarck. Count

Bernstoff from Berlin wrote him (1871) a semi-official letter of thanks

for the services he had conferred on Germany, and in 1874 he was

prevailed on to accept the Prussian "Ordre pour le mérite." In the same

year Mr. Disraeli proposed, in courteous oblivion of bygone hostilities,

to confer on him a pension and the "Order of the Grand Cross of Bath," an

emolument and distinction which Carlyle, with equal courtesy, declined.

To the Countess of Derby, whom he believed to be the originator of the

scheme, he (December 30th) expressed his sense of the generosity of the

Premier's letter: "It reveals to me, after all the hard things I have

said of him, a now and unexpected stratum of genial dignity and manliness

of character." To his brother John he wrote: "I do, however, truly admire

the magnanimity of Dizzy in regard to me. He is the only man I almost

never spoke of without contempt ... and yet see here he comes with a

pan of hot coals for my guilty head." That he was by no means gagged by

personal feeling or seduced in matters of policy is evident from the

above-quoted letter to the _Times_; but he liked Disraeli better than

he did his great rival; the one may have bewildered his followers, the

other, according to his critic's view, deceived himself--the lie, in

Platonic phrase, had got into the soul, till, to borrow an epigram, "he

made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice." "Carlyle," says

Mr. Froude, "did not regard Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who,

knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into

specious sentiments, but as the representative of the numerous cants of

the age ... differing from others in that the cant seemed true to him.

He in fact believed him to be one of those fatal figures created by

England's evil genius to work irreparable mischief." It must be admitted

that Carlyle's censures are so broadcast as to lose half their sting.

In uncontroversial writing, it is enough to note that his methods of

reforming the world and Mr. Gladstone's were as far as the poles asunder;

and the admirers of the latter may console themselves with the reflection

that the censor was, at the same time, talking with equal disdain of the

scientific discoverers of the age--conspicuously of Mr. Darwin, whom he

describes as "evolving man's soul from frog spawn," adding, "I have

no patience with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other

criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose _Adam Bede_ he pronounced

"simply dull," display a curious limitation or obtuseness of mind.

One of the pleasantest features of his declining years is the ardour of

his attachment to the few staunch friends who helped to cheer and console

them. He had a sincere regard for Fitzjames Stephen, "an honest man with

heavy strokes"; for Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he said in effect, "Your

duty one day will be to take away that bauble and close the doors of

the House of Discord"; for Tyndall always; for Lecky, despite their

differences; for Moncure Conway, athwart the question of "nigger"

philanthropies; for Kingsley and Tennyson and Browning, the last of whom

was a frequent visitor till near the end. Froude he had bound to his soul

by hoops of steel; and a more faithful disciple and apostle, in intention

always, in practice in the main (despite the most perplexing errors of

judgment), no professed prophet ever had. But Carlyle's highest praise

is reserved for Ruskin, whom he regarded as no mere art critic, but as a

moral power worthy to receive and carry onward his own "cross of fire."

The relationship between the two great writers is unchequered by any

shade of patronage on the one hand, of jealousy or adulation on the

other. The elder recognised in the younger an intellect as keen, a spirit

as fearless as his own, who in the Eyre controversy had "plunged his

rapier to the hilt in the entrails of the Blatant Beast," _i.e._ Popular

Opinion. He admired all Ruskin's books; the _Stones of Venice,_ the most

solid structure of the group, he named "Sermons in Stones"; he resented

an attack on _Sesame and Lilies_ as if the book had been his own; and

passages of the _Queen of the Air_ went into his heart "like arrows." The

_Order of the Rose_ has attempted a practical embodiment of the review

contemplated by Carlyle, as a counteractive to the money making practice

and expediency-worships of the day.

Meanwhile he had been putting his financial affairs in order. In 1867,

on return from Mentone, he had recorded his bequest of the revenues of

Graigenputtock for the endowment of three John Welsh bursaries in the

University of Edinburgh. In 1873 he made his will, leaving John Forster

and Froude his literary executors: a legacy of trust which, on the death

of the former, fell to the latter, to whose discretion, by various later

bequests, less and less limited, there was confided the choice--at

last almost made a duty--of editing and publishing the manuscripts and

journals of himself and his wife.

Early in his seventy-third year (December 1867) Carlyle quotes, "Youth is

a garland of roses," adding, "I did not find it such. 'Age is a crown of

thorns.' Neither is this altogether true for me. If sadness and sorrow

tend to loosen us from life, they make the place of rest more desirable."

The talk of Socrates in the _Republic_, and the fine phrases in Cicero's

_De Senectute_, hardly touch on the great grief, apart from physical

infirmities, of old age--its increasing solitariness. After sixty, a man

may make disciples and converts, but few new friends, while the old ones

die daily; the "familiar faces" vanish in the night to which there is no

morning, and leave nothing in their stead.

During these years Carlyle's former intimates were falling round him like

the leaves from an autumn tree, and the kind care of the few survivors,

the solicitous attention of his niece, nurse, and amanuensis, Mary

Aitken, yet left him desolate. Clough had died, and Thomas Erskine, and

John Forster, and Wilberforce, with whom he thought he agreed, and Mill,

his old champion and ally, with whom he so disagreed that he

almost maligned his memory--calling one of the most interesting of

autobiographies "the life of a logic-chopping machine." In March 1876 he

attended the funeral of Lady Augusta Stanley; in the following month his

brother Aleck died in Canada; and in 1878 his brother John at Dumfries.

He seemed destined to be left alone; his physical powers were waning. As

early as 1868 he and his last horse had their last ride together; later,

his right hand failed, and he had to write by dictation. In the gathering

gloom he began to look on death as a release from the shreds of life, and

to envy the old Roman mode of shuffling off the coil. His thoughts turned

more and more to Hamlet's question of the possible dreams hereafter, and

his longing for his lost Jeannie made him beat at the iron gates of the

"Undiscovered Country" with a yearning cry; but he could get no answer

from reason, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, least

of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven "by way of mesmeric and

spiritualistic trances." His question and answer are always--

Strength quite a stranger to me.... Life is verily a

weariness on those terms. Oftenest I feel willing to go, were

my time come. Sweet to rejoin, were it only in eternal sleep,

those that are away. That ... is now and then the whisper

of my worn-out heart, and a kind of solace to me. "But why

annihilation or eternal sleep?" I ask too. They and I are

alike in the will of the Highest.

"When," says Mr. Froude, "he spoke of the future and its uncertainties,

he fell back invariably on the last words of his favourite hymn--

Wir heissen euch hoffen."

His favourite quotations in those days were Macbeth's "To-morrow and

to-morrow and to-morrow"; Burns's line, "Had we never lo'ed sae

kindly,"--thinking of the tomb which he was wont to kiss in the gloamin'

in Haddington Church,--the lines from "The Tempest" ending, "our little

life is rounded with a sleep," and the dirge in "Cymbeline." He lived on

during the last years, save for his quiet walks with his biographer about

the banks of the Thames, like a ghost among ghosts, his physical life

slowly ebbing till, on February 4th 1881, it ebbed away. His remains

were, by his own desire, conveyed to Ecclefechan and laid under the

snow-clad soil of the rural churchyard, beside the dust of his kin. He

had objected to be buried, should the request be made (as it was by Dean

Stanley), in Westminster Abbey:[greek: andron gar epiphanon pasa gae

taphos.]

Of no man whose life has been so laid bare to us is it more difficult to

estimate the character than that of Thomas Carlyle; regarding no one of

equal eminence, with the possible exception of Byron, has opinion been

so divided. After his death there was a carnival of applause from his

countrymen in all parts of the globe, from Canton to San Francisco. Their

hot zeal, only equalled by that of their revelries over the memory of

Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer

than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one

perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist":

"Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

will be heard no more": the _Scotsman_ newspaper writes of him as

"probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the volcanic

glare of his _French Revolution_ all Epics, ancient and modern, grow pale

and shadowy,... his like is not now left in the world." More recently a

stalwart Aberdonian, on helping to put a bust into a monument, exclaims

in a strain of genuine ardour, "I knew Carlyle, and I aver to you that

his heart was as large and generous as his brain was powerful; that

he was essentially a most lovable man, and that there were depths of

tenderness, kindliness, benevolence, and most delicate courtesy in him,

with all his seeming ruggedness and sternness, such as I have found

throughout my life rarely in any human being."

On the other side, a little later, after the publication of the

_Reminiscences_, _Blackwood_ denounced the "old man eloquent" as "a

blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were the only person who knew good

from bad. ... Every one and every thing dealt with in his _History_ is

treated in the tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The _World_

remarks that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthumous

depreciation for a factitious fame; "but the game of venomous

recrimination was begun by himself.... There is little that is

extraordinary, still less that is heroic in his character. He had no

magnanimity about him ... he was full of littleness and weakness, of

shallow dogmatism and of blustering conceit." The _Quarterly_,

after alluding to Carlyle's style "as the eccentric expression of

eccentricity," denounces his choice of "heroes" as reckless of morality.

According to the same authority, he "was not a deep thinker, but he was a

great word-painter ... he has the inspiration as well as the contortions

of the Sibyl, the strength as well as the nodosities of the oak. ... In

the _French Revolution_ he rarely condescends to plain narrative ... it

resembles a drama at the Porte St. Martin, in so many acts and tableaux.

... The raisers of busts and statues in his honour are winging and

pointing new arrows aimed at the reputation of their most distinguished

contemporaries, and doing their best to perpetuate a baneful influence."

_Fraser_, no longer edited by Mr. Froude, swells the chorus of dissent:

"Money, for which he cared little, only came in quantity after the death

of his wife, when everything became indifferent to an old and life-weary

man. Who would be great at such a price? Who would buy so much misery

with so much labour? Most men like their work. In his Carlyle seems to

have found the curse imposed upon Adam.... He cultivated contempt of the

kindly race of men."

Ample texts for these and similar censures are to be found in the pages

of Mr. Froude, and he has been accused by Carlyle's devotees of having

supplied this material of malice prepense. No accusation was over more

ridiculously unjust. To the mind of every impartial reader, Froude

appears as one of the loyallest if one of the most infatuated of friends.

Living towards the close in almost daily communion with his master, and

in inevitable contact with his numerous frailties, he seems to have

revered him with a love that passeth understanding, and attributed to him

in good faith, as Dryden did in jest to the objects of his mock heroics,

every mental as well as every moral power, _e.g.,_ "Had Carlyle turned

his mind to it he would have been a great philologer." "A great

diplomatist was lost in Carlyle." "He would have done better as a man of

action than a man of words." By kicking the other diplomatists into the

sea, as he threatened to do with the urchins of Kirkcaldy! Froude's

panegyrics are in style and tone worthy of that put into the mouth of

Pericles by Thucydides, with which the modern biographer closes his

only too faithful record. But his claims for his hero--amounting to the

assertions that he was never seriously wrong; that he was as good as he

was great; that "in the weightier matters of the law his life had been

without speck or flaw"; that "such faults as he had were but as the

vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the

man"; that he never, in their intercourse, uttered a "trivial word, nor

one which he had better have left unuttered"--these claims will never be

honoured, for they are refuted in every third page after that on which

they appear:--_e.g._ in the Biography, vol. iv. p. 258, we are told that

Carlyle's "knowledge was not in points or lines but complete and solid":

facing the remark we read, "He liked _ill_ men like Humboldt, Laplace,

or the author of the _Vestiges_. He refused Darwin's transmutation of

species as unproved: he fought against it, though I could see he dreaded

that it might turn out true." The statement that "he always spoke

respectfully of Macaulay" is soon followed by criticisms that make us

exclaim, "Save us from such respect." The extraordinary assertion that

Carlyle was "always just in speaking of living men" is safeguarded by the

quotation of large utterances of injustice and contempt for Coleridge,

Byron, Shelley, Keats, Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and

disparaging patronage of Scott, of Jeffrey, of Mazzini, and of Mill. The

dog-like fidelity of Boswell and Eckermann was fitting to their attitude

and capacity; but the spectacle of one great writer surrendering himself

to another is a new testimony to the glamour of conversational genius.

[Footnote: This patronage of men, some quite, others nearly on his own

level, whom he delights in calling "small," "thin," and "poor," as if he

were the only big, fat, and rich, is more offensive than spurts of merely

dyspeptic abuse. As regards the libels on Lamb, Dr. Ireland has

endeavoured to establish that they were written in ignorance of the noble

tragedy of "Elia's" life; but this contention cannot be made good as

regards the later attacks.]

Carlyle was a great man, but a great man spoiled, that is, largely

soured. He was never a Timon; but, while at best a Stoic, he was at worst

a Cynic, emulous though disdainful, trying all men by his own standard,

and intolerant of a rival on the throne. To this result there contributed

the bleak though bracing environment of his early years, amid kindred

more noted for strength than for amenity, whom he loved, trusted, and

revered, but from whose grim creed, formally at least, he had to

tear himself with violent wrenches apart; his purgatory among the

border-ruffians of Annan school; his teaching drudgeries; his hermit

college days; ten years' struggle for a meagre competence; a lifelong

groaning under the Nessus shirt of the irritable yet stubborn

constitution to which genius is often heir; and above all his unusually

late recognition. There is a good deal of natural bitterness in reference

to the long refusal by the publishers of his first original work--an

idyll like Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_, and our finest prose poem in

philosophy. "Popularity," says Emerson, "is for dolls"; but it remains

to find the preacher, prophet, or poet wholly impervious to unjust

criticism. Neglect which crushes dwarfs only exasperates giants, but to

the latter also there is great harm done. Opposition affected Carlyle as

it affected Milton, it made him defiant, at times even fierce, to those

beyond his own inner circle. When he triumphed, he accepted his success

without a boast, but not without reproaches for the past. He was crowned;

but his coronation came too late, and the death of his wife paralysed his

later years.

Let those who from the Clyde to the Isis, from the Dee to the Straits,

make it their pastime to sneer at living worth, compare Ben Jonson's

lines,

Your praise and dispraise are to me alike,

One does not stroke me, nor the other strike,

with Samuel Johnson's, "It has been delayed till most of those whom I

wished to please are sunk into the grave, and success and failure are

empty sounds," and then take to heart the following:--

The "recent return of popularity greater than ever," which

I hear of, seems due alone to that late Edinburgh affair;

especially to the Edinburgh "Address," and affords new proof

of the singularly dark and feeble condition of "public

judgment" at this time. No idea, or shadow of an idea, is in

that Address but what had been set forth by me tens of times

before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism

receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to

buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done

with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me

£10,000 a year and bray unanimously their hosannahs

heaven-high for the rest of my life, who now would there be

to get the smallest joy or profit from it? To me I feel as

if it would be a silent sorrow rather, and would bring me

painful retrospections, nothing else.

We require no open-sesame, no clumsy confidence from attaches flaunting

their intimacy, to assure us that there were "depths of tenderness" in

Carlyle. His susceptibility to the softer influences of nature, of family

life, of his few chosen friends, is apparent in almost every page of his

biography, above all in the _Reminiscences_, those supreme records of

regret, remorse, and the inspiration of bereavement. There is no surge of

sorrow in our literature like that which is perpetually tossed up in

the second chapter of the second volume, with the never-to-be-forgotten

refrain--

Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait

not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh,

think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death

sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of

the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and

beautiful, when it is too late!

Were we asked to bring together the three most pathetic sentences in our

tongue since Lear asked the question, "And have his daughters brought him

to this pass?" we should select Swift's comment on the lock of Stella,

"Only a woman's hair"; the cry of Tennyson's Rizpah, "The bones had moved

in my side"; and Carlyle's wail, "Oh that I had you yet but for five

minutes beside me, to tell you all!" But in answer we hear only the

flapping of the folds of Isis, "strepitumque Acherontis avari."

All of sunshine that remained in my life went out in that

sudden moment. All of strength too often seems to have

gone.... Were it permitted, I would pray, but to whom? I can

well understand the invocation of saints. One's prayer now

has to be voiceless, done with the heart still, but also

with the hands still more.... Her birthday. She not here--I

cannot keep it for her now, and send a gift to poor old

Betty, who next to myself remembers her in life-long love

and sacred sorrow. This is all I can do.... Time was to

bring relief, said everybody; but Time has not to any

extent, nor, in truth, did I much wish him

Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua,

Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae.

Carlyle's pathos, far from being confined to his own calamity, was ready

to awake at every touch. "I was walking with him," writes Froude, "one

Sunday afternoon in Battersea Park. In the open circle among the trees

was a blind man and his daughter, she singing hymns, he accompanying her

on some instrument. We stood listening. She sang Faber's 'Pilgrims of the

Night.' The words were trivial, but the air, though simple, had something

weird and unearthly about it. 'Take me away,' he said, after a few

minutes, 'I shall cry if I stay longer.'"

The melancholy, "often as of deep misery frozen torpid," that runs

through his writing, that makes him forecast death in life and paint the

springs of nature in winter hue, the "hoarse sea," the "bleared skies,"

the sunsets "beautiful and brief and wae," compels our compassion in a

manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne, and De Quincey,

and other colour dramatists, because we feel it is as genuine as the

melancholy of Burns. Both had the relief of humour, but Burns only of the

two was capable of gaiety. "Look up there," said Leigh Hunt, pointing to

the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony that sings with infinite

voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man." "Eh, it's a sair

sicht," was the reply.

We have referred to a few out of a hundred instances of Carlyle's

practical benevolence. To all deserving persons in misfortune he was a

good Samaritan, and like all benefactors the dupe of some undeserving.

Charity may be, like maternal affection, a form of self-indulgence, but

it is so only to kind-hearted men. In all that relates to money Carlyle's

career is exemplary. He had too much common sense to affect to despise

it, and was restive when he was underpaid; he knew that the labourer was

worthy of his hire. But, after hacking for Brewster he cannot be said to

have ever worked for wages, his concern was rather with the quality of

his work, and, regardless of results, he always did his best. A more

unworldly man never lived; from his first savings he paid ample tributes

to filial piety and fraternal kindness, and to the end of his life

retained the simple habits in which he had been trained. He hated waste

of all kinds, save in words, and carried his home frugalities even to

excess. In writing to James Aitken, engaged to his sister, "the Craw," he

says, "remember in marriage you have undertaken to do to others as you

would wish they should do to you." But this rede he did not reck.

"Carlyle," writes Longfellow, "was one of those men who sacrificed their

happiness to their work"; the misfortune is that the sacrifice did not

stop with himself. He seemed made to live with no one but himself.

Alternately courteous and cross-grained, all his dramatic power went into

his creations; he could not put himself into the place of those near him.

Essentially perhaps the bravest man of his age, he would not move an inch

for threat or flattery; centered in rectitude, conscience never made

him a coward. He bore great calamities with the serenity of a Marcus

Aurelius: his reception of the loss of his first volume of the _French

Revolution_ was worthy of Sidney or of Newton: his letters, when the

successive deaths of almost all that were dearest left him desolate, are

among the noblest, the most resigned, the most pathetic in biography.

Yet, says Mr. Froude, in a judgment which every careful reader must

endorse: "Of all men I have ever seen Carlyle was the least patient of

the common woes of humanity." "A positive Christian," says Mrs. Carlyle,

"in bearing others' pain, he was a roaring Thor when himself pricked by

a pin," and his biographer corroborates this: "If matters went well with

himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any

one else; and, on the other hand, if he were uncomfortable he required

all the world to be uncomfortable along with him." He did his work with

more than the tenacity of a Prescott or a Fawcett, but no man ever made

more noise over it than this apostle of silence. "Sins of passion he

could forgive, but those of insincerity never." Carlyle has no tinge of

insincerity; his writing, his conversation, his life, are absolutely,

dangerously, transparent. His utter genuineness was in the long run one

of the sources of his success. He always, if we allow for a habit of

rhetorical exaggeration, felt what he made others feel.

Sullen moods, and "words at random sent," those judging him from a

distance can easily condone; the errors of a hot head are pardonable to

one who, in his calmer hours, was ready to confess them. "Your temptation

and mine," he writes to his brother Alexander, "is a tendency to

imperiousness and indignant self-help; and, if no wise theoretical,

yet, practical forgetfulness and tyrannical contempt of other men." His

nicknaming mania was the inheritance of a family failing, always fostered

by the mocking-bird at his side. Humour, doubtless, ought to discount

many of his criticisms. Dean Stanley, in his funeral sermon, charitably

says, that in pronouncing the population of England to be "thirty

millions, mostly fools," Carlyle merely meant that "few are chosen and

strait is the gate," generously adding--"There was that in him, in spite

of his contemptuous descriptions of the people, which endeared him to

those who knew him best. The idols of their market-place he trampled

under foot, but their joys and sorrows, their cares and hopes, were to

him revered things." Another critic pleads for his discontent that it had

in it a noble side, like that of Faust, and that his harsh judgments of

eminent men were based on the belief that they had allowed meaner to

triumph over higher impulses, or influences of society to injure their

moral fibre. This plea, however, fails to cover the whole case. Carlyle's

ignorance in treating men who moved in spheres apart from his own, as the

leaders of science, definite theological enlightenment, or even poetry

and arts, was an intellectual rather than a moral flaw; but in the

implied assertion, "what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to

regret the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous powers,

which, beginning with his student days, possessed him to the last. The

fame of Newton, Leibnitz, Gibbon, whose works he came to regard as the

spoon-meat of his "rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his

or of any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot career, as a

"rose-water imbecility," or maligned Mill's intrepid thought as that of a

mere machine, he was astray on more delicate ground, and alienated some

of his truest friends. Among the many curses of our nineteenth-century

literature denounced by its leading Censor, the worst, the want of

loyalty among literary men, he fails to denounce because he largely

shares in it. "No sadder proof," he declares, "can be given by a man of

his own littleness than disbelief in great men," and no one has done more

to retrieve from misconception the memories of heroes of the past;

but rarely does either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a good word for any

considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises,

more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from _Sartor,_ of which

he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his

self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his

enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger

Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson

would he grant the privilege to hold his own. _Per contra,_ he

overestimated those who were content to be his echoes.

Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he used

and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who had preceded him in

his lines of historical investigation, as if they had been poachers on

his premises, _e.g._ Heath, the royalist writer of the Commonwealth

time, is "carrion Heath": Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is "my

reverend imbecile friend": his predecessors in _Friedrich,_ as Schlosser,

Preuss, Ranke, Förster, Vehse, are "dark chaotic dullards whose books

are mere blotches of printed stupor, tumbled mountains of marine stores

"--criticism valueless even when it raises the laughter due to a

pantomime. Carlyle assailed three sets of people:--

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

behaved, badly to him.

2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could not understand--as

Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and the leaders of Physics and

Metaphysics.

3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him an unrestricted

homage or an implicit following, as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc.

The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his strictures been

always just,--so winged with humorous epigram,--they would have blasted a

score of reputations: as it is they have only served to mar his own. He

was a typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the *_oistros_

of their ambitious competition and restless push, wanting in repose,

never like

a gentleman at wise

With moral breadth of tomperament,

too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call this man as

good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast

between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is

possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others

of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when

he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a

rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if

not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard at

Ecclefechan.

Truth, in the sense of saying what he thought, was one of his ruling

passions. To one of his brothers on the birth of a daughter, he writes,

"Train her to this, as the cornerstone of all morality, to stand by the

truth, to abhor a lie as she does hell-fire." The "gates of hell" is the

phrase of Achilles; but Carlyle has no real point of contact with the

Greek love of abstract truth. He objects that "Socrates is terribly at

ease in Zion": he liked no one to be at ease anywhere. He is angry with

Walter Scott because he hunted with his friends over the breezy heath

instead of mooning alone over twilight moors. Read Scott's _Memoirs_ in

the morning, the _Reminiscences_ at night, and dispute if you like about

the greater genius, but never about the healthier, better, and larger

man.

Hebraism, says Matthew Arnold, is the spirit which obeys the mandate,

"walk by your light"; Hellenism the spirit which remembers the other,

"have a care your light be not darkness." The former prefers doing to

thinking, the latter is bent on finding the truth it loves. Carlyle is

a Hebraist unrelieved and unretrieved by the Hellene. A man of

inconsistencies, egotisms, Alpine grandeurs and crevasses, let us take

from him what the gods or protoplasms have allowed. His way of life,

duly admired for its stern temperance, its rigidity of noble aim--eighty

years spent in contempt of favour, plaudit, or reward,--left him austere

to frailty other than his own, and wrapt him in the repellent isolation

which is the wrong side of uncompromising dignity. He was too great to

be, in the common sense, conceited. All his consciousness of power left

him with the feeling of Newton, "I am a child gathering shells on the

shore": but what sense he had of fallibility arose from his glimpse of

the infinite sea, never from any suspicion that, in any circumstances, he

might be wrong and another mortal right: Shelley's lines on Byron--

The sense that he was greater than his kind

Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind

By gazing on its own exceeding light.

fit him, like Ruskin's verdict, "What can you say of Carlyle but that he

was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning?" which withers while

it immortalises.

[Footnote: In the _Times_ of February 7th 1881, there appeared an

interesting account of Carlyle's daily routine. "No book hack could have

surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and late

in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties.

At ten o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he

took up his pen and laboured hard until three o'clock. Nothing, not even

the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then

came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends.... In the evening he

read and prepared for the work of the morrow."]

CHAPTER VIII

CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN

Carlyle was so essentially a Preacher that the choice of a profession

made for him by his parents was in some measure justified; but he was

also a keen Critic, unamenable to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of

the revolutionary spirit of the age, even while protesting against its

extremes: above all, he was a literary Artist. Various opinions will

continue to be held as to the value of his sermons; the excellence of his

best workmanship is universally acknowledged. He was endowed with few of

the qualities which secure a quick success--fluency, finish of style,

the art of giving graceful utterance to current thought; he had in

full measure the stronger if slower powers--sound knowledge, infinite

industry, and the sympathetic insight of penetrative imagination--that

ultimately hold the fastnesses of fame. His habit of startling his

hearers, which for a time restricted, at a later date widened their

circle. There is much, sometimes even tiresome, repetition in Carlyle's

work; the range of his ideas is limited, he plays on a few strings, with

wonderfully versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually

confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But,

after the perfunctory work for Brewster he wrote nothing wholly

commonplace; occasionally paradoxical to the verge of absurdity, he is

never dull.

Setting aside his TRANSLATIONS, always in prose,--often in

verse,--masterpieces of their kind, he made his first mark in CRITICISM,

which may be regarded as a higher kind of translation: the great value of

his work in this direction is due to his so regarding it. Most criticism

has for its aim to show off the critic; good criticism interprets the

author. Fifty years ago, in allusion to methods of reviewing, not even

now wholly obsolete, Carlyle wrote:--

The first and most convenient is for the reviewer to perch

himself resolutely, as it were, on the shoulder of his

author, and therefrom to show as if he commanded him and

looked down upon him by natural superiority of stature.

Whatsoever the great man says or does the little man shall

treat with an air of knowingness and light condescending

mockery, professing with much covert sarcasm that this or

that is beyond _his_ comprehension, and cunningly

asking his readers if _they_ comprehend it.

There is here perhaps some "covert sarcasm" directed against

contemporaries who forgot that their mission was to pronounce on the

merits of the books reviewed, and not to patronise their authors; it may

be set beside the objection to Jeffrey's fashion of saying, "I like this;

I do not like that," without giving the reason why. But in this instance

the writer did reck his own rede. The temptation of a smart critic is to

seek or select legitimate or illegitimate objects of attack; and that

Carlyle was well armed with the shafts of ridicule is apparent in his

essays as in his histories; superabundantly so in his letters and

conversation. His examination of the _German Playwrights_, of _Taylor's

German Literature_, and his inimitable sketch of Herr Döring, the hapless

biographer of Richter, are as amusing as is Macaulay's _coup de grâce_ to

Robert Montgomery. But the graver critic would have us take to heart

these sentences of his essay on Voltaire:--

Far be it from us to say that solemnity is an essential of

greatness; that no great man can have other than a rigid

vinegar aspect of countenance, never to be thawed or warmed

by billows of mirth. There are things in this world to be

laughed at as well as things to be admired. Nevertheless,

contempt is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one if

we habitually live in it. The faculty of love, of admiration,

is to be regarded as a sign and the measure of high souls;

unwisely directed, it leads to many evils; but without it,

there cannot be any good. Ridicule, on the other hand, is

the smallest of all faculties that other men are at pains to

repay with any esteem.... Its nourishment and essence is

denial, which hovers only on the surface, while knowledge

dwells far below,... it cherishes nothing but our vanity,

which may in general be left safely enough to shift for

itself.

[Footnote: As an estimate of Voltaire this brilliant essay is inadequate.

Carlyle's maxim, we want to be told "not what is _not_ true but what _is_

true," prevented him from appreciating the great work of Encyclopaedists.]

We may compare with this one of the writer's numerous warnings to young

men taking to literature, as to drinking, in despair of anything better

to do, ending with the exhortation, "Witty above all things, oh, be not

witty"; or turn to the passage in the review of Sir Walter Scott:--

Is it with ease or not with ease that a man shall do his

best in any shape; above all, in this shape justly named of

soul's travail, working in the deep places of thought?... Not

so, now nor at any time.... Virgil and Tacitus, were they

ready writers? The whole _Prophecies of Isaiah_ are not

equal in extent to this cobweb of a Review article.

Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity; but not till

he had thought with intensity,... no easy writer he. Neither

was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with case.

Goethe tells us he "had nothing sent to him in his sleep," no

page of his but he knew well how it came there.

Schiller--"konnte nie fertig werden"--never could get done.

Dante sees himself "growing lean" over his _Divine Comedy_;

in stern solitary death wrestle with it, to prevail over it

and do it, if his uttermost faculty may; hence too it is done

and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures for

evermore among men. No; creation, one would think, cannot be

easy; your Jove has severe pains and fire flames in the head,

out of which an armed Pallas is struggling! As for

manufacture, that is a different matter.... Write by steam

if thou canst contrive it and sell it, but hide it like

virtue.

In these and frequent similar passages lies the secret of Carlyle's slow

recognition, long struggle, and ultimate success; also of his occasional

critical intolerance. Commander-in-chief of the "red artillery," he sets

too little store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of the

light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but contempt for the

banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and

salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with

the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he

deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt to

leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can

only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of

ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every

ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher.

Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been

inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no

amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in

"the chamber of little ease," Carlyle travestied Goethe's "worship of

sorrow" till it became a pride in pain. He forgot that rude energy

requires restraint. Hercules Furens and Orlando Furioso did more than cut

down trees; they tore them up; but to no useful end. His power is often

almost Miltonic; it is never Shakespearian; and his insistent earnestness

would run the risk of fatiguing us were it not redeemed by his

humour. But he errs on the better side; and his example is a salutary

counteractive in an age when the dust of so many skirmishers obscures the

air, and laughter is too readily accepted as the test of truth, his stern

conception of literature accounts for his exaltations of the ideal, and

denunciations of the actual, profession of letters in passages which,

from his habit of emphasising opposite sides of truth, instead of

striking a balance, appear almost side by side in contradiction. The

following condenses the ideal:--

If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the

high and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have

guidance, freedom, immortality? These two in all degrees

I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind

blow whither it listeth. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse,

indignation, despair itself--all these like hell-hounds lie

beleaguering the souls of the poor day worker as of every

man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task,

and all these are stifled--all these shrink murmuring far

off in their caves.

Against this we have to set innumerable tirades on the crime of worthless

writing, _e.g._--

No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag

his pen, without saying something; he knows not what

mischief he does, past computation, scattering words without

meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease.

For thistle-down flies abroad on all winds and airs of

wind.... Ship-loads of fashionable novels, sentimental

rhymes, tragedies, farces ... tales by flood and field are

swallowed monthly into the bottomless pool; still does the

press toil,... and still in torrents rushes on the great

army of publications to their final home; and still oblivion,

like the grave, cries give! give! How is it that of all

these countless multitudes no one can ... produce ought that

shall endure longer than "snowflake on the river? Because

they are foam, because there is no reality in them. . . ."

Not by printing ink alone does man live. Literature, as

followed at present, is but a species of brewing or cooking,

where the cooks use poison and vend it by telling

innumerable lies.

These passages owe their interest to the attestation of their sincerity

by the writer's own practice. "Do not," he counsels one of his unknown

correspondents, "take up a subject because it is singular and will get

you credit, but because you _love_ it;" and he himself acted on the

rule. Nothing more impresses the student of Carlyle's works than his

_thoroughness._ He never took a task in hand without the determination to

perform it to the utmost of his ability; consequently when he satisfied

himself that he was master of his subject he satisfied his readers; but

this mastery was only attained, as it is only attainable, by the most

rigorous research. He seems to have written down his results with

considerable fluency: the molten ore flowed freely forth, but the process

of smelting was arduous. The most painful part of literary work is not

the actual composition, but the accumulation of details, the wearisome

compilation of facts, weighing of previous criticisms, the sifting of the

grains of wheat from the bushels of chaff. This part of his task Carlyle

performed with an admirable conscientiousness. His numerous letters

applying for out-of-the-way books to buy or borrow, for every pamphlet

throwing light on his subject, bear testimony to the careful exactitude

which rarely permitted him to leave any record unread or any worthy

opinion untested about any event of which or any person of whom he

undertook to write. From Templand (1833) he applies for seven volumes of

Beaumarchais, three of Bassompierre, the Memoirs of Abbé Georgel, and

every attainable account of Cagliostro and the Countess de la Motte, to

fuse into _The Diamond Necklace._ To write the essay on _Werner_ and

the _German Playwrights_ he swam through seas of trash. He digested the

whole of _Diderot_ for one review article. He seems to have read through

_Jean Paul Richter,_ a feat to accomplish which Germans require a

special dictionary. When engaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole

shoal of obscure seventeenth-century papers from Yarmouth, the remnant of

a yet larger heap, "read hundredweights of dreary books," and endured

"a hundred Museum headaches." In grappling with _Friedrich_ he waded

through so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping

condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes and places of

which he meant to speak, from St. Ives to Prague, and explored the

battlefields. Work done after this fashion seldom brings a swift return;

but if it is utilised and made vivid by literary genius it has a claim to

permanence. Bating a few instances where his sense of proportion is

defective, or his eccentricity is in excess, Carlyle puts his ample

material to artistic use; seldom making ostentation of detail, but

skilfully concentrating, so that we read easily and readily recall what he

has written. Almost everything he has done has made a mark: his best work

in criticism is final, it does not require to be done again. He interests

us in the fortunes of his leading characters: _first_, because he feels

with them; _secondly_, because he knows how to distinguish the essence

from the accidents of their lives, what to forget and what to remember,

where to begin and where to stop. Hence, not only his set biographies, as

of Schiller and of Sterling, but the shorter notices in his Essays, are

intrinsically more complete and throw more real light on character than

whole volumes of ordinary memoirs.

With the limitations above referred to, and in view of his antecedents,

the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation is wonderfully wide. Often

perversely unfair to the majority of his English contemporaries, the

scales seem to fall from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of

other nations. The charity expressed in the saying that we should judge

men, not by the number of their faults, but by the amount of their

deflection from the circle, great or small, that bounds their being,

enables him often to do justice to those most widely differing in creed,

sentiment, and lines of activity from one another and from himself.

When treating congenial themes he errs by overestimate rather than by

depreciation: among the qualities of his early work, which afterwards

suffered some eclipse in the growth of other powers, is its flexibility.

It was natural for Carlyle, his successor in genius in the Scotch

lowlands, to give an account of Robert Burns which throws all previous

criticism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong affinities

to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his so-called heroes: but he

is fair to the characters, if not always to the work, of Voltaire and

Diderot, slurs over or makes humorous the escapades of Mirabeau, is

undeterred by the mysticism of Novalis, and in the fervour of his worship

fails to see the gulf between himself and Goethe.

Carlyle's ESSAYS mark an epoch, _i.e._ the beginning of a new era, in

the history of British criticism. The able and vigorous writers who

contributed to the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly

Reviews_ successfully applied their taste and judgment to such works as

fell within their sphere, and could be fairly tested by their canons; but

they passed an alien act on everything that lay beyond the range of their

insular view. In dealing with the efforts of a nation whose literature,

the most recent in Europe save that of Russia, had only begun to command

recognition, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous. If

the old formulas have been theoretically dismissed, and a conscientious

critic now endeavours to place himself in the position of his author,

the change is largely due to the influence of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._

Previous to their appearance, the literature of Germany, to which half

of these papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir Walter

Scott's translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen,_ De Quincey's travesties,

and Taylor's renderings from Lessing) a sealed book to English readers,

save those who were willing to breathe in an atmosphere of Coleridgean

mist. Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because he was

the first fully to apprehend its meaning. The _Life of Schiller,_ which

the author himself depreciated, remains one of the best of comparatively

short biographies, it abounds in admirable passages (conspicuously the

contrast between the elder and the younger of the Dioscuri at Weimar) and

has the advantage to some readers of being written in classical English

prose.

To the essays relating to Germany, which we may accept as the _disjecta

membra_ of the author's unpublished History, there is little to add.

In these volumes we have the best English account of the Nibelungen

Lied--the most graphic, and in the main most just analyses of the genius

of Heyne, Rchter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, who is

recorded to have said, "Carlyle is almost more at home in our literature

than ourselves." With the Germans he is on his chosen ground; but the

range of his sympathies is most apparent in the portrait gallery of

eighteenth-century Frenchmen that forms, as it were, a proscenium to his

first great History. Among other papers in the same collection the most

prominent are the _Signs of the Times_ and _Characteristics,_ in which

he first distinctly broaches some of his peculiar views on political

philosophy and life.

The scope and some of the limitations of Carlyle's critical power are

exhibited in his second Series of Lectures, delivered in 1838, when (_æt_.

43) he had reached the maturity of his powers. The first three of these

lectures, treating of Ancient History and Literature, bring into strong

relief the speaker's inadequate view of Greek thought and civilisation:--

Greek transactions had never anything alive, no result for

us, they were dead entirely ... all left is a few ruined

towers, masses of stone and broken statuary.... The writings

of Socrates are made up of a few wire-drawn notions about

virtue; there is no conclusion, no word of life in him.

[Footnote: Though a mere reproduction of the notes of Mr. Chisholm Anstey,

this posthumous publication is justified by its interest and obvious

authenticity. The appearance in a prominent periodical (while these sheets

are passing through the press) of _Wotton Reinfred_ is more open to

question. This fragment of a romance, partly based on the plan of _Wilhelm

Meister_, with shadowy love episodes recalling the manner of the "Minerva

Press," can add nothing to Carlyle's reputation.]

These and similar dogmatic utterances are comments of the Hebrew on the

Hellene. To the Romans, "the men of antiquity," he is more just, dwelling

on their agriculture and road-making as their "greatest work written

on the planet;" but the only Latin author he thoroughly appreciates is

Tacitus, "a Colossus on edge of dark night." Then follows an exaltation

of the Middle Ages, in which "we see belief getting the victory over

unbelief," in the strain of Newman's _Grammar of Assent_. On the

surrender of Henry to Hildebrand at Canossa his approving comment is,

"the clay that is about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its

rights; the danger is always the other way, that the spiritual part of

man will become overlaid with the bodily part." In the later struggle

between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens his sympathy is with Gregory and

Innocent. In the same vein is his praise of Peter the Hermit, whose motto

was not the "action, action" of Demosthenes, but, "belief, belief." In

the brief space of those suggestive though unequal discourses the speaker

allows awkward proximity to some of the self-contradictions which, even

when scattered farther apart, perplex his readers and render it impossible

to credit his philosophy with more than a few strains of consistent

thought.

In one page "the judgments of the heart are of more value than those of

the head." In the next "morals in a man are the counterpart of the

intellect that is in him." The Middle Ages were "a healthy age," and

therefore there was next to no Literature. "The strong warrior disdained

to write." "Actions will be preserved when all writers are forgotten."

Two days later, apropos of Dante, he says, "The great thing which any

nation can do is to produce great men.... When the Vatican shall have

crumbled to dust, and St. Peter's and Strassburg Minster be no more; for

thousands of years to come Catholicism will survive in this sublime

relic of antiquity--the _Divina Commedia."_

[Footnote: It has been suggested that Carlyle may have been in this

instance a student of Vauvenargues, who in the early years of the much-

maligned eighteenth century wrote "Les graudes pensées viennent du

coeur."]

Passing to Spain, Carlyle salutes Cervantes and the Cid,--calling Don

Quixote the "poetry of comedy," "the age of gold in self-mockery,"--pays

a more reserved tribute to Calderon, ventures on the assertion that

Cortes was "as great as Alexander," and gives a sketch, so graphic that

it might serve as a text for Motley's great work, of the way in which

the decayed Iberian chivalry, rotten through with the Inquisition, broke

itself on the Dutch dykes. After a brief outline of the rise of the

German power, which had three avatars--the overwhelming of Rome, the

Swiss resistance to Austria, and the Reformation--we have a rough

estimate of some of the Reformers. Luther is exalted even over Knox;

Erasmus is depreciated, while Calvin and Melanchthon are passed by.

The chapter on the Saxons, in which the writer's love of the sea appears

in picturesque reference to the old rover kings, is followed by unusually

commonplace remarks on earlier English literature, interspersed with some

of Carlyle's refrains.

The mind is one, and consists not of bundles of faculties at

all ... the same features appear in painting, singing,

fighting ... when I hear of the distinction between the poet

and the thinker, I really see no difference at all.... Bacon

sees, Shakespeare sees through,... Milton is altogether

sectarian--a Presbyterian one might say--he got his

knowledge out of Knox.... Eve is a cold statue.

Coming to the well-belaboured eighteenth century--when much was done of

which the nineteenth talks, and massive books were written that we are

content to criticise--we have the inevitable denunciations of scepticism,

materialism, argumentation, logic; the quotation, (referred to a motto

"in the Swiss gardens"), "Speech is silvern, silence is golden," and a

loud assertion that all great things are silent. The age is commended

for Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's spinning jenny, and Whitfield's

preaching, but its policy and theories are alike belittled. The summaries

of the leading writers are interesting, some curious, and a few absurd.

On the threshold of the age Dryden is noted "as a great poet born in the

worst of times": Addison as "an instance of one formal man doing great

things": Swift is pronounced "by far the greatest man of that time, not

unfeeling," who "carried sarcasm to an epic pitch": Pope, we are told,

had "one of the finest heads ever known." Sterne is handled with a

tenderness that contrasts with the death sentence pronounced on him by

Thackeray, "much is forgiven him because he loved much,... a good simple

being after all." Johnson, the "much enduring," is treated as in the

_Heroes_ and the Essay. Hume, with "a far duller kind of sense," is

commended for "noble perseverance and Stoic endurance of failure; but his

eye was not open to faith," etc. On which follows a stupendous criticism

of Gibbon, whom Carlyle, returning to his earlier and juster view, ended

by admiring.

With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more

futile account of human things than he has done of the

_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.

The sketch of the Pre-Revolution period is slight, and marked by a

somewhat shallow reference to Rousseau. The last lecture on the recent

German writers is a mere _réchauffé_ of the Essays. Carlyle closes

with the famous passage from Richter, one of those which indicate the

influence in style as in thought of the German over the Scotch humorist.

"It is now the twelfth hour of the night, birds of darkness are on the

wing, the spectres uprear, the dead walk, the living dream. Thou, Eternal

Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn." The whole volume is a testimony

to the speaker's power of speech, to his often unsurpassed penetration,

and to the hopeless variance of the often rapidly shifting streams of his

thought.

Detailed criticism of Carlyle's HISTORIES belongs to the sphere of

separate disquisitions. Here it is only possible to take note of their

general characteristics. His conception of what history should be is

shared with Macaulay. Both writers protest against its being made a mere

record of "court and camp," of royal intrigue and state rivalry, of

pageants of procession, or chivalric encounters. Both find the sources of

these outwardly obtrusive events in the underground current of national

sentiment, the conditions of the civilisation from which they were

evolved, the prosperity or misery of the masses of the people.

The essence of history does not lie in laws, senate-houses,

or battle-fields, but in the tide of thought and action--the

world of existence that in gloom and brightness blossoms and

fades apart from these.

But Carlyle differs from Macaulay in his passion for the concrete. The

latter presents us with pictures to illustrate his political theory; the

former leaves his pictures to speak for themselves. "Give him a fact,"

says Emerson, "he loaded you with thanks; a theory, with ridicule or

even abuse." It has been said that with Carlyle History was philosophy

teaching by examples. He himself defines it as "the essence of

innumerable biographies." He individualises everything he meets; his

dislike of abstractions is everywhere extreme. Thus while other writers

have expanded biography into history, Carlyle condenses history into

biography. Even most biographies are too vague for him. He delights in

Boswell: he glides over their generalisations to pick out some previously

obscure record from Clarendon or Hume. Even in _The French Revolution,_

where the author has mainly to deal with masses in tumult, he gives most

prominence to their leaders. They march past us, labelled with strange

names, in the foreground of the scene, on which is being enacted the

death wrestle of old Feudalism and young Democracy. This book is unique

among modern histories for a combination of force and insight only

rivalled by the most incisive passages of the seventh book of Thucydides,

of Tacitus, of Gibbon, and of Michelet.

[Footnote: _Vide_ a comparison of Carlyle and Michelet in Dr. Oswald's

interesting and suggestive little volume of criticism and selection,

_Thomas Carlyle, ein Lebensbild und Goldkörner aus seinen Werken._]

_The French Revolution_ is open to the charge of being a comment and a

prophecy rather than a narrative: the reader's knowledge of the main

events of the period is too much assumed for the purpose of a school

book. Even Dryasdust will turn when trod on, and this book has been a

happy hunting field to aggressive antiquarians, to whom the mistake of a

day in date, the omission or insertion of a letter in a name, is of more

moment than the difference between vitalising or petrifying an era. The

lumber merchants of history are the born foes of historians who, like

Carlyle and Mr. Froude, have manifested their dramatic power of making

the past present and the distant near. That the excess of this power is

not always compatible with perfect impartiality may be admitted; for a

poetic capacity is generally attended by heats of enthusiasm, and is

liable to errors of detail; but without some share of it--

Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit

Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln.

Mere research, the unearthing and arrangement of what Sir Philip Sidney

calls "old moth-eaten records," supplies material for the work of the

historian proper; and, occasionally to good purpose, corrects it, but, as

a rule, with too much flourish. Applying this minute criticism to _The

French Revolution,_ one reviewer has found that the author has given the

wrong number to a regiment: another esteemed scholar has discovered that

there are seven errors in the famous account of the flight to Varennes,

to wit:--the delay in the departure was due to Bouille, not to the Queen;

she did not lose her way and so delay the start; Ste. Menehould is too

big to be called a village; on the arrest, it was the Queen who asked for

hot water and eggs; the King only left the coach once; it went rather

faster than is stated; and, above all, _infandum!_ it was not painted

yellow, but green and black. This criticism does not in any degree

detract from the value of one of the most vivid and substantially

accurate narratives in the range of European literature. Carlyle's object

was to convey the soul of the Revolution, not to register its upholstery.

The annalist, be he dryasdust or gossip, is, in legal phrase, "the devil"

of the prose artist, whose work makes almost as great a demand on the

imaginative faculty as that of the poet. Historiography is related to

History as the Chronicles of Holinshed and the Voyages of Hakluyt to the

Plays of Shakespeare, plays which Marlborough confessed to have been

the main source of his knowledge of English history. Some men are born

philologists or antiquarians; but, as the former often fail to see the

books because of the words, so the latter cannot read the story for the

dates. The mass of readers require precisely what has been contemptuously

referred to as the "Romance of History," provided it leaves with them

an accurate impression, as well as an inspiring interest. Save in his

over-hasty acceptance of the French _blague_ version of "The Sinking of

the Vengeur," Carlyle has never laid himself open to the reproach of

essential inaccuracy. As far as possible for a man of genius, he was

a devotee of facts. He is never a careless, though occasionally

an impetuous writer; his graver errors are those of emotional

misinterpretation. It has been observed that, while contemning

Robespierre, he has extenuated the guilt of Danton as one of the main

authors of the September massacres, and, more generally, that "his

quickness and brilliancy made him impatient of systematic thought." But

his histories remain the best illuminations of fact in our language. _The

French Revolution_ is a series of flame-pictures; every page is on fire;

we read the whole as if listening to successive volleys of artillery:

nowhere has such a motley mass been endowed with equal life. This book

alone vindicates Lowell's panegyric: "the figures of most historians seem

like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs through any hole

that criticism may tear in them; but Carlyle's are so real that if you

prick them they bleed."

When Carlyle generalises, as in the introductions to his Essays, he is

apt to thrust his own views on his subject and on his readers; but,

unlike De Quincey, who had a like love of excursus, he comes to the point

before the close.

The one claimed the privilege, assumed by Coleridge, of starting from no

premises and arriving at no conclusion; the other, in his capacity as

a critic, arrives at a conclusion, though sometimes from questionable

premises. It is characteristic of his habit of concentrating, rather than

condensing, that Carlyle abandoned his design of a history of the Civil

Wars for _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches._ The events of the

period, whose issues the writer has firmly grasped, are brought into

prominence mainly as they elucidate the career of his hero; but the

"elucidations" have been accepted, with a few reservations, as final. No

other work has gone so far to reverse a traditional estimate. The old

current conceptions of the Protector are refuted out of his own mouth;

but it was left for his editor to restore life to the half-forgotten

records, and sweep away the clouds that obscured their revelations of a

great though rugged character. _Cromwell_ has been generally accepted

in Scotland as Carlyle's masterpiece--a judgment due to the fact of its

being, among the author's mature works, the least apparently opposed

to the theological views prevalent in the north of our island. In

reality--though containing some of his finest descriptions and

battle-pieces, conspicuously that of "Dunbar"--it is the least artistic

of his achievements, being overladen with detail and superabounding in

extract. A good critic has said that it was a labour of love, like

Spedding's _Bacon;_ but that the correspondence, lavishly reproduced in

both works, has "some of the defects of lovers' letters for those to whom

they are not addressed."

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

Carlyle has established that Oliver was not a hypocrite, "not a man of

falsehood, but a man of truth": he has thrown doubts on his being a

fanatic; but he has left it open to M. Guizot to establish that his later

rule was a practical despotism.

In _Friedrich II._ he undertook a yet greater task; and his work

stretching over a wider arena, is, of necessity, more of a history, less

of a biography, than any of his others. In constructing and composing it

he was oppressed not only by the magnitude and complexity of his theme,

but, for the first time, by hesitancies as to his choice of a hero.

He himself confessed, "I never was admitted much to _Friedrich's_

confidence, and I never cared very much about him." Yet he determined,

almost of malice prepense, to exalt the narrow though vivid Prussian

as "the last of the kings, the one genuine figure in the eighteenth

century," and though failing to prove his case, he has, like a loyal

lawyer, made the best of his brief. The book embodies and conveys the

most brilliant and the most readable account of a great part of the

century, and nothing he has written bears more ample testimony to the

writer's pictorial genius. It is sometimes garrulous with the fluency of

an old man eloquent; parts of the third volume, with its diffuse extracts

from the king's survey of his realm, are hard if not weary reading; but

the rest is a masterpiece of historic restoration. The introductory

portion, leading us through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy

and political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the procession

of the half-forgotten host of German worthies,--St. Adalbert and his

mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth;

Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret with the mouth; Sigismund

_supra grammaticam_; Augustus the physically strong; Albert Achilles and

Albert Alcibiades; Anne of Cleves; Mr. John Kepler,--who move on the

pages, more brightly "pictured" than those of Livy, like marionettes

inspired with life. In the main body of the book the men and women of the

Prussian court are brought before us in fuller light and shade. Friedrich

himself, at Sans Souci, with his cocked-hat, walking-stick and wonderful

gray eyes; Sophia Charlotte's grace, wit, and music; Wilhelmina and her

book; the old Hyperborean; the black artists Seckendorf and Grumkow;

George I. and his blue-beard chamber; the little drummer; the Old

Dessaner; the cabinet Venus; Grävenitz Hecate; Algarotti; Goetz in his

tower; the tragedy of Katte; the immeasurable comedy of Maupertuis, the

flattener of the earth, and Voltaire; all these and a hundred more are

summoned by a wizard's wand from the land of shadows, to march by

the central figures of these volumes; to dance, flutter, love, hate,

intrigue, and die before our eyes. It is the largest and most varied

showbox in all history; a prelude to a series of battle-pieces--Rossbach,

Leuthen, Molwitz, Zorndorf--nowhere else, save in the author's own pages,

approached in prose, and rarely rivalled out of Homer's verse.

Carlyle's style, in the chiar-oscuro of which his Histories and

three-fourths of his Essays are set, has naturally provoked much

criticism and some objurgation. M. Taine says it is "exaggerated and

demoniacal." Hallam could not read _The French Revolution_ because of its

"abominable" style, and Wordsworth, whose own prose was perfectly limpid,

is reported to have said, "No Scotchman can write English. C---- is a pest

to the language."

[Footnote: Carlyle with equal unfairness disparaged Hallam's _Middle

Ages:--"Eh, the poor miserable skeleton of a book," and regarded the

_Literature of Europe_ as a valley of dry bones.]

Carlyle's style is not that of Addison, of Berkeley, or of Helps; its

peculiarities are due to the eccentricity of an always eccentric being;

but it is neither affected nor deliberately imitated. It has been

plausibly asserted that his earlier manner of writing, as in _Schiller,_

under the influence of Jeffrey, was not in his natural voice. "They

forget," he said, referring to his critics, "that the style is the skin

of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old woman." Erratic,

metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and therefore a dangerous model,

"the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and

angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the _Birthmark_

in Hawthorne's romance. To recast a chapter of the _Revolution_ in the

form of a chapter of Macaulay would be like rewriting Tacitus in the

form of Cicero, or Browning in the form of Pope. Carlyle is seldom

obscure, the energy of his manner is part of his matter; its abruptness

corresponds to the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often as

it were by a series of electric shocks, that threaten to break through

the formal restraints of an ordinary sentence. He writes like one who

must, under the spell of his own winged words; at all hazards,

determined to convey his meaning; willing, like Montaigne, to "despise

no phrase of those that run in the streets," to speak in strange tongues,

and even to coin new words for the expression of a new emotion. It is

his fashion to care as little for rounded phrase as for logical argument:

and he rather convinces and persuades by calling up a succession of

feelings than by a train of reasoning. He repeats himself like a

preacher, instead of condensing like an essayist. The American Thoreau

writes in the course of an incisive survey:--

Carlyle's ... mastery over the language is unrivalled; it

is with him a keen, resistless weapon; his power of words

is endless. All nature, human and external, is ransacked to

serve and run his errands. The bright cutlery, after all the

dross of Birmingham has been thrown aside, is his style....

He has "broken the ice, and the torrent streams forth." He

drives six-in-hand over ruts and streams and never upsets....

With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all

his moods and experiences, and crashes his way through

shoals of dilettante opinions. It is not in man to determine

what his style shall be, if it is to be his own.

But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a careless or ready

writer. He weighed every sentence: if in all his works, from _Sartor_ to

the _Reminiscences_, you pencil-mark the most suggestive passages you

disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and

fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though

a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a

great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping

his pencil "in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse," now etching his

scenes with the tender touch of a Millet.

Emerson, in one of his early letters to Carlyle, wrote, "Nothing seems

hid from those wonderful eyes of yours; those devouring eyes; those

thirsty eyes; those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine."

Men of genius, whether expressing themselves in prose or verse, on canvas

or in harmony, are, save when smitten, like Beethoven, by some malignity

of Nature, endowed with keener physical senses than other men. They

actually, not metaphorically, see more and hear more than their fellows.

Carlyle's super-sensitive ear was to him, through life, mainly a torment;

but the intensity of his vision was that of a born artist, and to' it we

owe the finest descriptive passages, if we except those of Mr. Ruskin, in

English prose. None of our poets, from Chaucer and Dunbar to Burns and

Tennyson, has been more alive to the influences of external nature. His

early letters abound in passages like the following, on the view from

Arthur's Seat:--

The blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills

swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags

and rude precipices at our feet (where not a hillock rears

its head unsung) with Edinburgh at their base clustering

proudly over her rugged foundations and covering with a

vapoury mantle the jagged black masses of stonework that

stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Faeryland....

I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and

the moon's fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as

it is, was riding quietly above me.

Compare with this the picture, in a letter to Sterling, of Middlebie

burn, "leaping into its cauldron, singing a song better than Pasta's"; or

that of the Scaur Water, that may be compared with Tennyson's verses in

the valley of Cauteretz; or the sketches of the Flemish cities in the

tour of 1842, with the photograph of the lace-girl, recalling Sterne at

his purest; or the account of the "atmosphere like silk" over the moor,

with the phrase, "it was as if Pan slept"; or the few lines written at

Thurso, where "the sea is always one's friend"; or the later memories of

Mentone, old and new, in the _Reminiscences_ (vol. ii. pp. 335-340).

The most striking of those descriptions are, however, those in which the

interests of some thrilling event or crisis of human life or history

steal upon the scene, and give it a further meaning, as in the dim streak

of dawn rising over St. Abb's Head on the morning of Dunbar, or in the

following famous apostrophe:--

O evening sun of July, how at this hour thy beams fall slant

on reapers amid peaceful, woody fields; on old women

spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main;

on balls at the Orangerie at Versailles, where high-rouged

dames of the palace are even now dancing with

double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring

Hell-porch of an Hôtel-de-Ville.

Carlyle is, here and there, led astray by the love of contrast; but not

even Heinrich Heine has employed antithesis with more effect than in the

familiar passage on the sleeping city in _Sartor_, beginning, "Ach mein

Lieber ... it is a true sublimity to dwell here," and ending, "But I,

mein Werther, sit above it all. I am alone with the stars." His thought,

seldom quite original, is often a resuscitation or survival, and owes

much of its celebrity to its splendid brocade. _Sartor Resartus_ itself

escaped the failure that was at first threatened by its eccentricity

partly from its noble passion, partly because of the truth of the

"clothes philosophy," applied to literature as to life.

His descriptions, too often caricatures, of men are equally vivid. They

set the whole great mass of _Friedrich_ in a glow; they lighten the

tedium of _Cromwell's_ lumbering despatches; they give a heart of fire

to _The French Revolution_. Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_ attempts

and fulfils on a smaller what Carlyle achieved on a greater scale. The

historian makes us sympathise with the real actors, even more than the

novelist does with the imaginary characters on the same stage. From the

account of the dying Louis XV. to the "whiff of grapeshot" which closed

the last scene of the great drama, there is not a dull page. Théroigne

de Méricourt, Marat, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Robespierre,

Talleyrand, Mdme. Roland, above all Marie Antoinette--for whom Carlyle

has a strong affection--and Buonaparte, so kindle and colour the scene

that we cannot pause to feel weary of the phrases with which they are

labelled. The author's letters show the same power of baptizing, which he

used often to unfair excess. We can no more forget Count d'Orsay as the

"Phoebus Apollo of Dandyism," Daniel Webster's "brows like cliffs and

huge black eyes," or Wordsworth "munching raisins" and recognising no

poet but himself, or Maurice "attacked by a paroxysm of mental cramp,"

than we can dismiss from our memories "The Glass Coachman" or "The

Tobacco Parliament."

Carlyle quotes a saying of Richter, that Luther's words were half

battles; he himself compares those of Burns to cannon-balls; much of his

own writing is a fusilade. All three were vehement in abuse of things

and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not

sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are,

by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his

humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining

over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as

finely quaint as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's. There is in

it, as in all the highest humour, a sense of apparent contrast, even of

contradiction, in life, of matter for laughter in sorrow and tears in

joy. He seems to check himself, and as if afraid of wearing his heart

in his sleeve, throws in absurd illustrations of serious propositions,

partly to show their universal range, partly in obedience to an instinct

of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermonising and to cut the story

short. Carlyle's grotesque is a mode of his golden silence, a sort of

Socratic irony, in the indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and

at himself. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, ridicule of

his own and other ages, now in droll reference or mock heroic detail,

in an odd conception, a character sketch, an event in parody, in an

antithesis or simile,--sometimes it lurks in a word, and again in a

sentence. In direct pathos--the other side of humour--he is equally

effective. His denunciations of sentiment remind us of Plato attacking

the poets, for he is at heart the most emotional of writers, the greatest

of the prose poets of England; and his dramatic sympathy extends alike to

the actors in real events and to his ideal creations. Few more pathetic

passages occur in literature than his "stories of the deaths of kings."

The following among the less known of his eloquent passages is an

apotheosis of their burials:--

In this manner did the men of the Eastern Counties take up

the slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in

the village of Hoxne; seek out the severed head and

reverently reunite the same. They embalmed him with myrrh

and sweet spices, with love, pity, and all high and awful

thoughts; consecrating him with a very storm of melodious,

adoring admiration, and sun-dried showers of tears; joyfully,

yet with awe (as all deep joy has something of the awful in

it), commemorating his noble deeds and godlike walk and

conversation while on Earth. Till, at length, the very Pope

and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear of it; and they,

summing up as correctly as they well could, with _Advocatus

Diaboli_ pleadings and other forms of process, the

general verdict of mankind, declared that he had in very

fact led a hero's life in this world: and, being now gone,

was gone, as they conceived, to God above and reaping his

reward there. Such, they said, was the best judgment they

could form of the case, and truly not a bad judgment.

Carlyle's reverence for the past makes him even more apt to be touched by

its sorrows than amused by its follies. With a sense of brotherhood he

holds out hands to all that were weary; he feels even for the pedlars

climbing the Hohenzollern valley, and pities the solitude of soul on the

frozen Schreckhorn of power, whether in a dictator of Paraguay or in

a Prussian prince. He leads us to the death chamber of Louis XV., of

Mirabeau, of Cromwell, of Sterling, his own lost friend; and we feel with

him in the presence of a solemnising mystery. Constantly, amid the din of

arms or words, and the sarcasms by which he satirises and contemns old

follies and idle strifes, a gentler feeling wells up in his pages like

the sound of the Angelus. Such pauses of pathos are the records of real

or fanciful situations, as of Teufelsdröckh "left alone with the night"

when Blumine and Herr Towgood ride down the valley; of Oliver recalling

the old days at St. Ives; of the Electress Louisa bidding adieu to her

Elector.

At the moment of her death, it is said, when speech had fled, he felt

from her hand, which lay in his, three slight slight pressures--farewell

thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easily to forget in this world.

There is nothing more pathetic in the range of his works, if in that of

our literature, than the account of the relations of father and son in

the domestic history of the Prussian Court, from the first estrangement

between them--the young Friedrich in his prison at Cüstrin, the old

Friedrich gliding about seeking shelter from ghosts, mourning for

Absalom--to the reconciliation, the end, and the afterthoughts:--

The last breath of Friedrich Wilhelm having fled, Friedrich

hurried to a private room; sat there all in tears; looking

back through the gulfs of the Past, upon such a Father now

rapt away for ever. Sad all and soft in the moonlight of

memory--the lost Loved One all in the right as we now see,

we all in the wrong!--This, it appears, was the Son's fixed

opinion. Sever, years hence here is how Friedrich concludes

the _History_ of his Father, written with a loyal

admiration throughout: "We have left under silence the

domestic chagrins of this great Prince; readers must have

some indulgence for the faults of the children, in

consideration of the virtues of such a Father." All in

tears he sits at present, meditating these sad things. In a

little while the Old Dessauer, about to leave for Dessau,

ventures in to the Crown Prince, Crown Prince no longer;

"embraces his knees," offers weeping his condolence, his

congratulation; hopes withal that his sons and he will be

continued in their old posts, and that he the Old Dessauer

"will have the same authority as in the late reign."

Friedrich's eyes, at this last clause, flash out tearless,

strangely Olympian. "In your posts I have no thought of

making change; in your posts yes; and as to authority I

know of none there can be but what resides in the king that

is sovereign," which, as it were, struck the breath out of

the Old Dessauer; and sent him home with a painful

miscellany of feelings, astonishment not wanting among them.

At an after hour the same night Friedrich went to Berlin,

met by acclamation enough. He slept there not without

tumult of dreams, one may fancy; and on awakening next

morning the first sound he heard was that of the regiment

Glasenap under his windows, swearing fealty to the new King.

He sprang out of bed in a tempest of emotion; bustled

distractedly to and fro, wildly weeping. Pöllnitz, who came

into the anteroom, found him in this state, "half-dressed,

with dishevelled hair, in tears, and as if beside himself."

"These huzzahings only tell me what I have lost," said the

new King. "He was in great suffering," suggested Pöllnitz;

"he is now at rest." True, he suffered; but he was here with

us; and now----!

Carlyle has said of Dante's _Francesco_ "that it is a thing woven as of

rainbows on a ground of eternal black." The phrase, well applied to the

_Inferno_, is a perhaps half-conscious verdict on his own tenderness as

exhibited in his life and in his works.

CHAPTER IX

CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

One of the subtlest of Robert Browning's critics, in the opening sentence

of his work, quotes a saying of Hegel's, "A great man condemns the world

to the task of explaining him"; adding, "The condemnation is a double one,

and it generally falls heaviest on the great man himself who has to submit

to explanation." Cousin, the graceful Eclectic, is reported to have said

to the great Philosopher, "will you oblige me by stating the results of

your teaching in a few sentences?" and to have received the reply, "It is

not easy, especially in French."

[Footnote: _Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher,_ by

Professor Henry Jones, of St. Andrews.]

The retort applies, with severity, to those who attempt to systematise

Carlyle; for he himself was, as we have seen, intolerant of system. His

mathematical attainment and his antipathy to logical methods beyond

the lines of square and circle, his love of concise fact and his often

sweeping assertions are characteristic of the same contradictions in

his nature as his almost tyrannical premises and his practically

tender-hearted conclusions. A hard thinker, he was never a close

reasoner; in all that relates to human affairs he relies on nobility of

feeling rather than on continuity of thought. Claiming the full latitude

of the prophet to warn, exhort, even to command, he declines either to

preach or to accept the rubric of the partisan or of the priest.

In praise of German literature, he remarks, "One of its chief qualities

is that it has no particular theory at all on the front of it;" and of

its leaders, "I can only speak of the revelations these men have made to

me. As to their doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be

said"; yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him "out

of the blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that

his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their

discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings,

inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of

credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or mountain air,

and found in them the key of the perennial riddle and the solution of the

insoluble mystery. But in later years the curtain to many of them became

the picture.

When Carlyle was first recognised in London as a rising author, curiosity

was rife as to his "opinions"; was he a Chartist at heart or an

Absolutist, a Calvinist like Knox, a Deist like Hume, a Feudalist with

Scott, or a Democrat with Burns--inquisitions mostly vain. He had come

from the Scotch moors and his German studies, a strange element, into the

midst of an almost foreign society, not so much to promulgate a new set

of opinions as to infuse a new life into those already existing. He

claimed to have a "mission," but it was less to controvert any form of

creed than to denounce the insufficiency of shallow modes of belief. He

raised the tone of literature by referring to higher standards than those

currently accepted; he tried to elevate men's minds to the contemplation

of something better than themselves, and impress upon them the vacuity

of lip-services; he insisted that the matter of most consequence was the

grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to

sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty

to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only

barren but obstructive; that it is only

When half-gods go, the gods arrive.

But his manner of reading these important lessons admitted the retort

that he himself was content rather to dwell on what is _not_ than to

discover what _is_ true. Belief, he reiterates, is the cure for all the

worst of human ills; but belief in what or in whom? In "the eternities

and immensities," as an answer, requires definition. It means that we are

not entitled to regard ourselves as the centres of the universe; that

we are but atoms of space and time, with relations infinite beyond our

personalities; that the first step to a real recognition of our duties is

the sense of our inferiority to those above us, our realisation of the

continuity of history and life, our faith and acquiescence in some

universal law. This truth, often set forth

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

no one has enforced with more eloquence than Carlyle; but though he

founded a dynasty of ideas, they are comparatively few; like a group of

strolling players, each with a well-filled wardrobe, and ready for many

parts.

The difficulty of defining Carlyle results not merely from his frequent

golden nebulosity, but from his love of contradicting even himself. Dr.

Johnson confessed to Boswell that when arguing in his dreams he was often

worsted and took credit for the resignation with which he bore these

defeats, forgetting that the victor and the vanquished were one and the

same. Similarly his successor took liberties with himself which he would

allow to no one else, and in doing so he has taken liberties with his

reader. His praise and blame of the profession of letters, as the highest

priesthood and the meanest trade; his early exaltation of "the writers of

newspapers, pamphlets, books," as "the real effective working church of a

modern country"; and his later expressed contempt for journalism as

"mean and demoralising"--"we must destroy the faith in newspapers";

his alternate faith and unfaith in Individualism; the teaching of the

_Characteristics_ and the _Signs of the Times_ that all healthy genius is

unconscious, and the censure of Sir Walter Scott for troubling himself

too little with mysteries; his commendation of "the strong warrior" for

writing no books, and his taking sides with the mediæval monks against

the kings--there is no reconciliation of such contradictories. They are

the expression of diverse moods and emphatically of different stages of

mental progress, the later, as a rule, more negative than the earlier.

This change is most marked in the sphere of politics. At the close of his

student days Carlyle was to all intents a Radical, and believed in

Democracy; he saw hungry masses around him, and, justly attributing some

of their suffering to misgovernment, vented his sympathetic zeal for the

oppressed in denunciation of the oppressors.

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

1819.]

He began not only by sympathising with the people, but by believing in

their capacity to manage best their own affairs: a belief that steadily

waned as he grew older until he denied to them even the right to choose

their rulers. As late, however, as 1830, he argued against Irving's

conservatism in terms recalled in the _Reminiscences_. "He objected

clearly to my Reform Bill notions, found Democracy a thing forbidden,

leading even to outer darkness: I a thing inevitable and obliged to lead

whithersoever it could." During the same period he clenched his theory by

taking a definite side in the controversy of the age. "This," he writes to

Macvey Napier, "this is the day when the lords are to reject the Reform

Bill. The poor lords can only accelerate (by perhaps a century) their own

otherwise inevitable enough abolition."

The political part of _Sartor Resartus_, shadowing forth some scheme of

well-organised socialism, yet anticipates, especially in the chapter on

_Organic Filaments_, the writer's later strain of belief in dukes, earls,

and marshals of men: but this work, religious, ethical, and idyllic,

contains mere vague suggestions in the sphere of practical life. About

this time Carlyle writes of liberty: "What art thou to the valiant and

the brave when thou art thus to the weak and timid, dearer than life,

stronger than death, higher than purest love?" and agrees with the

verdict, "The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive

struggles of anarchy." But he soon passed from the mood represented

by Emily Brontë to that of the famous apostrophe of Madame Roland. He

proclaimed that liberty to do as we like is a fatal license, that the

only true liberty is that of doing what is right, which he interprets

living under the laws enacted by the wise. Mrs. Austin in 1832 wrote to

Mrs. Carlyle, "I am that monster made up of all the Whigs hate--a Radical

and an Absolutist." The expression, at the time, accurately defined

Carlyle's own political position: but he shifted from it, till the

Absolutist, in a spirit made of various elements, devoured the Radical.

The leading counsel against the aristocracy changed his brief and became

chief advocate on their side, declaring "we must recognise the hereditary

principle if there is to be any fixity in things." In 1835, he says to

Emerson:--

I believe literature to be as good as dead ... and nothing

but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps

three generations.... I suffer also terribly from the

solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a

kind of passion with me to feel myself among my brothers.

And then How? Alas I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay, I

feel it to be a wretched necessity unfit for me;

Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet

these two are the grand categories under which all English

spiritual activity, that so much as thinks remuneration

possible, must range itself.

And somewhat later--

People accuse me, not of being an incendiary Sansculotte,

but of being a Tory, thank Heaven!

Some one has written with a big brush, "He who is not a radical in his

youth is a knave, he who is not a conservative in his age is a fool." The

rough, if not rude, generalisation has been plausibly supported by

the changes in the mental careers of Burke, Coleridge, Southey, and

Wordsworth. But Carlyle was "a spirit of another sort," of more mixed

yarn; and, as there is a vein of Conservatism in his early Radicalism,

so there is, as also in the cases of Landor and even of Goethe, still

a revolutionary streak in his later Conservatism. Consequently, in his

instance, there is a plea in favour of the prepossession (especially

strong in Scotland) which leads the political or religious party that a

distinguished man has left still to persist in claiming him; while

that which he has joined accepts him, if at all, with distrust. Scotch

Liberals will not give up Carlyle, one of his biographers keenly

asseverating that he was to the last "a democrat at heart"; while

the representative organ of northern Conservatism on the same ground

continues to assail him--"mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst

vergebens." On all questions directly bearing on the physical welfare of

the masses of the people, his speech and action remained consistent with

his declaration that he had "never heard an argument for the corn laws

which might not make angels weep." From first to last he was an advocate

of Free Trade--though under the constant protest that the greatness of

a nation depended in a very minor degree on the abundance of its

possessions--and of free, unsectarian, and compulsory Education. while,

in theology, though remote from either, he was more tolerant of the

dogmatic narrowness of the Low Church of the lower, than of the Ritualism

of the upper, classes. His unwavering interest in the poor and his belief

that legislation should keep them in constant view, was in accord with

the spirit of Bentham's standard: but Carlyle, rightly or wrongly,

came to regard the bulk of men as children requiring not only help and

guidance but control.

On the question of "the Suffrage" he completely revolved. It appears,

from the testimony of Mr. Froude, that the result of the Reform Bill of

1832 disappointed him in merely shifting power from the owners of land to

the owners of shops, and leaving the handicraftsmen and his own peasant

class no better off. Before a further extension became a point

of practical politics he had arrived at the conviction that the

ascertainment of truth and the election of the fittest did not lie with

majorities. These sentences of 1835 represent a transition stage:--

Conservatism I cannot attempt to conserve, believing it to

be a portentous embodied sham.... Whether the Tories stay

out or in, it will be all for the advance of Radicalism,

which means revolt, dissolution, and confusion and a

darkness which no man can see through.

No one had less faith in the paean chanted by Macaulay and others on the

progress of the nation or of the race, a progress which, without faith

in great men, was to him inevitably downward; no one protested with more

emphasis against the levelling doctrines of the French Revolution. It has

been observed that Carlyle's _Chartism_ was "his first practical step in

politics"; it is more true to say that it first embodied, with more than

his usual precision, the convictions he had for some time held of the

dangers of our social system; with an indication of some of the means to

ward them off, based on the realisation of the interdependence of all

classes in the State. This book is remarkable as containing his last,

very partial, concessions to the democratic creed, the last in which he

is willing to regard a wide suffrage as a possible, though by no means

the best, expedient. Subsequently, in _Past and Present_ and the

_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, he came to hold "that with every extension of the

Franchise those whom the voters would elect would be steadily inferior

and more unfit." Every stage in his political progress is marked by a

growing distrust in the judgment of the multitude, a distrust set forth,

with every variety of metaphor, in such sentences as the following:--

There is a divine message or eternal regulation of the

Universe. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count

heads, ask Universal Suffrage by the ballot-box and that

will tell!" From Adam's time till now the Universe was wont

to be of a somewhat abstruse nature, partially disclosing

itself to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was

not the majority. Of what use towards the general result of

finding out what it is wise to do, can the fools be? ... If

of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common

calculation, how in the name of wonder will you ever get a

ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these

ten men? ... Only by reducing to zero nine of these votes can

wisdom ever issue from your ten. The mass of men consulted at

the hustings upon any high matter whatsoever, is as ugly an

exhibition of human stupidity as this world sees.... If the

question be asked and the answer given, I will generally

consider in any case of importance, that the said answer is

likely to be wrong, and that I have to go and do the reverse

of the same ... for how should I follow a multitude to do

evil? Cease to brag to me of America and its model

institutions.... On this side of the Atlantic or on that,

Democracy is for ever impossible! The Universe is a monarchy

and a hierarchy, the noble in the high places, the ignoble in

the low; this is in all times and in all places the Almighty

Maker's law. Democracy, take it where you will, is found a

regulated method of rebellion, it abrogates the old

arrangement of things, and leaves zero and vacuity. It is the

consummation of no-government and _laissez faire_.

Alongside of this train of thought there runs a constant protest against

the spirit of revolt. In _Sartor_ we find: "Whoso cannot obey cannot be

free, still less bear rule; he that is the inferior of nothing can be the

superior of nothing"; and in _Chartism_--

Men who rebel and urge the lower classes to rebel ought to

have other than formulas to go upon, ... those to whom

millions of suffering fellow-creatures are "masses," mere

explosive masses for blowing down Bastiles with, for voting

at hustings for us--such men are of the questionable

species.... Obedience ... is the primary duty of man....

Of all "rights of men" this right of the ignorant to be

guided by the wiser, gently or forcibly--is the

indisputablest.... Cannot one discern, across all democratic

turbulence, clattering of ballot-boxes, and infinite

sorrowful jangle, that this is at bottom the wish and prayer

of all human hearts everywhere, "Give me a leader"?

The last sentence indicates the transition from the merely negative

aspect of Carlyle's political philosophy to the positive, which is

his HERO-WORSHIP, based on the excessive admiration for individual

greatness,--an admiration common to almost all imaginative writers,

whether in prose or verse; on his notions of order and fealty, and on a

reverence for the past, which is also a common property of poets. The

Old and Middle Ages, according to his view, had their chiefs, captains,

kings, and waxed or waned with the increase or decrease of their

Loyality. Democracy, the new force of our times, must in its turn be

dominated by leaders. Raised to independence over the arbitrary will of a

multitude, these are to be trusted and followed, if need be, to death.

Your noblest men at the summit of affairs is the ideal world

of poets.... Other aim in this earth we have none. That

we all reverence "great men" is to me the living rock amid

all rushings down whatsoever. All that democracy ever meant

lies there, the attainment of a truer Aristocracy or

Government of the Best. Make search for the Able man. How to

get him is the question of questions.

It is precisely the question to which Carlyle never gives, and hardly

attempts, a reply; and his failure to answer it invalidates the

larger half of his Politics. Plato has at least detailed a scheme for

eliminating his philosopher guardians, though it somewhat pedantically

suggests a series of Chinese examinations: his political, though probably

unconscious disciple has only a few negative tests. The warrior or sage

who is to rule is _not_ to be chosen by the majority, especially in our

era, when they would choose the Orators who seduce and "traduce the

State"; nor are we ever told that the election is to rest with either

Under or Upper House: the practical conclusion is that when we find a man

of great force of character, whether representing our own opinions or the

reverse, we should take him on trust. This brings us to the central maxim

of Carlyle's political philosophy, to which we must, even in our space,

give some consideration, as its true meaning has been the theme of so

much dispute.

It is a misfortune of original thought that it is hardly ever put

in practice by the original thinker. When his rank as a teacher is

recognised, his words have already lost half their value by repetition.

His manner is aped by those who find an easy path to notoriety in

imitation; the belief he held near his heart is worn as a creed like a

badge; the truth he promulgated is distorted in a room of mirrors, half

of it is a truism, the other half a falsism. That which began as a

denunciation of tea-table morality, is itself the tea-table morality of

the next generation: an outcry against cant may become the quintessence

of cant; a revolt from tyranny the basis of a new tyranny; the

condemnation of sects the foundation of a new sect; the proclamation of

peace a bone of contention. There is an ambiguity in most general maxims,

and a seed of error which assumes preponderance over the truth when the

interpreters of the maxim are men easily led by formulæ. Nowhere is this

degeneracy more strikingly manifested than in the history of some of

the maxims which Carlyle either first promulgated or enforced by his

adoption. When he said, or quoted, "Silence is better than speech," he

meant to inculcate patience and reserve. Always think before you speak:

rather lose fluency than waste words: never speak for the sake of

speaking. It is the best advice, but they who need it most are the last

to take it; those who speak and write not because they have something to

say, but because they wish to say or must say something, will continue to

write and speak as long as they can spell or articulate. Thoughtful men

are apt to misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit

still and leave the "war of words to those who like it." When Carlyle

condemned self-consciousness, a constant introspection and comparison of

self with others, he theoretically struck at the root of the morbid moods

of himself and other mental analysts; he had no intention to over-exalt

mere muscularity or to deify athletic sports. It were easy to multiply

instances of truths clearly conceived at first and parodied in their

promulgation; but when we have the distinct authority of the discoverer

himself for their correct interpretation, we can at once appeal to it.

A yet graver, not uncommon, source of error arises when a great writer

misapplies the maxims of his own philosophy, or states them in such a

manner that they are sure to be misapplied.

Carlyle has laid down the doctrine that MIGHT IS RIGHT at various times

and in such various forms, with and without modification or caveat, that

the real meaning can only be ascertained from his own application of it.

He has made clear, what goes without saying, that by "might" he does not

intend mere physical strength.

Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute

force; conquest of that kind does not endure. The strong man,

what is he? The wise man. His muscles and bones are not

stronger than ours; but his soul is stronger, clearer,

nobler.... Late in man's history, yet clearly at length, it

becomes manifest to the dullest that mind is stronger than

matter, that not brute Force, but only Persuasion and Faith,

is the king of this world.... Intellect has to govern this

world and will do it.

There are sentences which indicate that he means something more than even

mental force; as in his Diary (Froude, iv. 422), "I shall have to tell

Lecky, Right is the eternal symbol of Might"; and again in _Chartism_,

"Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them

centuries to try it, and they are found to be identical. The strong thing

is the just thing. In kings we have either a divine right or a diabolic

wrong." On the other hand, we read in _Past and Present_:--

Savage fighting Heptarchies: their lighting is an

ascertainment who has the right to rule over them.

And again--

Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: _either_ of

these, once ascertained, puts an end to battle.

And elsewhere--

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

Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere correctly

articulated mights.... All goes by wager of battle in this

world, and it is, well understood, the measure of all

worth.... By right divine the strong and capable govern the

weak and foolish.... Strength we may say is Justice itself.

It is not left for us to balance those somewhat indefinite definitions.

Carlyle has himself in his Histories illustrated and enforced his own

interpretations of the summary views of his political treatises. There

he has demonstrated that his doctrine, "Might is Right," is no mere

unguarded expression of the truism that moral might is right. In his

hands it implies that virtue is in all cases a property of strength, that

strength is everywhere a property of virtue; that power of whatever sort

having any considerable endurance, carries with it the seal and signal of

its claim to respect, that whatever has established itself has, in the

very act, established its right to be established. He is never careful

enough to keep before his readers what he must himself have dimly

perceived, that victory _by right_ belongs not to the force of will

alone, apart from clear and just conceptions of worthy ends. Even in its

crude form, the maxim errs not so much in what it openly asserts as

in what it implicitly denies. Aristotle (the first among ancients to

_question_ the institution of slavery, as Carlyle has been one of the

last of moderns to defend it) more guardedly admits that strength is

in itself _a_ good,--[Greek: kai estin aei to kratoun en uperochae

agathoutinos],--but leaves it to be maintained that there are forms of

good which do not show themselves in excess of strength. Several of

Carlyle's conclusions and verdicts seem to show that he only acknowledges

those types of excellence that have already manifested themselves as

powers; and this doctrine (which, if adopted in earlier ages, would

practically have left possession with physical strength) colours all his

History and much of his Biography. Energy of any sort compels his homage.

Himself a Titan, he shakes hands with all Titans, Gothic gods, Knox,

Columbus, the fuliginous Mirabeau, burly Danton dying with "no weakness"

on his lips. The fulness of his charity is for the errors of Mohammed,

Cromwell, Burns, Napoleon I.,--whose mere belief in his own star he

calls sincerity,--the atrocious Francia, the Norman kings, the Jacobins,

Brandenburg despots; the fulness of his contempt for the conscientious

indecision of Necker, the Girondists, the Moderates of our own

Commonwealth. He condones all that ordinary judgments regard as the

tyranny of conquest, and has for the conquered only a _væ victis._ In

this spirit, he writes :--

M. Thierry celebrates with considerable pathos the fate of

the Saxons; the fate of the Welsh, too, moves him; of the

Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into

the mountains, whither they were not worth following. What

can we say, but that the cause which pleased the gods had in

the end to please Cato also?

When all is said, Carlyle's inconsistent optimism throws no more light

than others have done on the apparent relapses of history, as the

overthrow of Greek civilisation, the long night of the Dark Ages, the

spread of the Russian power during the last century, or of continental

Militarism in the present. In applying the tests of success or failure we

must bear in mind that success is from its very nature conspicuous. We

only know that brave men have failed when they have had a "sacred bard."

The good that is lost is, _ipso facto_, forgotten. We can rarely tell of

greatness unrecognised, for the very fact of our being able to tell of it

would imply a former recognition. The might of evil walks in darkness:

we remember the martyrs who, by their deaths, ultimately drove the

Inquisition from England; not those whose courage quailed. "It was their

fate," as a recent writer remarks, "that was the tragedy." Reading

Carlyle's maxim between the lines of his chapter on the Reformation,

and noting that the Inquisition triumphed in Spain, while in Austria,

Bavaria, and Bohemia Protestantism was stifled by stratagem or by force;

that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was successful; and that the

revocation of the Edict of Nantes killed the France of Henry IV., we see

its limitations even in the long perspective of the past. Let us,

however, grant that in the ultimate issue the Platonic creed,

"Justice is stronger than injustice," holds good.

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

It is when Carlyle turns to politics and regards them as history

accomplished instead of history in progress that his principle leads to

the most serious error. No one has a more withering contempt for evil as

meanness and imbecility; but he cannot see it in the strong hand. Of two

views, equally correct, "evil is weakness," such evil as sloth, and

"corruptio optimi pessima," such evil as tyranny--he only recognises the

first. Despising the palpable anarchies of passion, he has no word of

censure for the more settled form of anarchy which announced, "Order

reigns at Warsaw." He refuses his sympathy to all unsuccessful efforts,

and holds that if races are trodden under foot, they are [Greek: phusei

doulo dunamenoi allou einai] they who have allowed themselves to be

subjugated deserve their fate. The cry of "oppressed nationalities" was to

him mere cant. His Providence is on the side of the big battalions, and

forgives very violent means to an orderly end. To his credit he declined

to acknowledge the right of Louis Napoleon to rule France; but he accepted

the Czars, and ridiculed Mazzini till forced to admit, almost with

chagrin, that he had, "after all," substantially succeeded.

Treason never prospers, what's the reason?

That when it prospers, none dare call it treason.

Apprehending, on the whole more keenly than any of his contemporaries,

the foundations of past greatness, his invectives and teaching lay

athwart much that is best as well as much that is most hazardous in the

new ideas of the age. Because mental strength, endurance, and industry

do not appear prominently in the Negro race, he looks forward with

satisfaction to the day when a band of white buccaneers shall undo

Toussaint l'Ouverture's work of liberation in Hayti, advises the English

to revoke the Emancipation Act in Jamaica, and counsels the Americans

to lash their slaves--better, he admits, made serfs and not saleable by

auction--not more than is necessary to get from them an amount of work

satisfactory to the Anglo-Saxon mind. Similarly he derides all movements

based on a recognition of the claims of weakness to consideration and

aid.

Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable,

Doing or suffering.

The application of the maxim, "Might is Right," to a theory of government

is obvious; the strongest government must be the best, _i.e._ that in

which Power, in the last resort supreme, is concentrated in the hands of

a single ruler; the weakest, that in which it is most widely diffused,

is the worst. Carlyle in his Address to the Edinburgh students commends

Machiavelli for insight in attributing the preservation of Rome to

the institution of the Dictatorship. In his _Friedrich_ this view is

developed in the lessons he directs the reader to draw from Prussian

history. The following conveys his final comparative estimate of an

absolute and a limited monarchy:--

This is the first triumph of the constitutional Principle

which has since gone to such sublime heights among

us--heights which we begin at last to suspect may be depths

leading down, all men now ask whitherwards. A much-admired

invention in its time, that of letting go the rudder or

setting a wooden figure expensively to take care of it, and

discovering that the ship would sail of itself so much the

more easily. Of all things a nation needs first to be

drilled, and a nation that has not been governed by

so-called tyrants never came to much in the world.

Among the currents of thought contending in our age, two are

conspicuously opposed. The one says: Liberty is an end not a mere means

in itself; apart from practical results the crown of life. Freedom of

thought and its expression, and freedom of action, bounded only by

the equal claim of our fellows, are desirable for their own sakes as

constituting national vitality: and even when, as is sometimes the case,

Liberty sets itself against improvements for a time, it ultimately

accomplishes more than any reforms could accomplish without it. The fewer

restraints that are imposed from without on human beings the better: the

province of law is only to restrain men from violently or fraudulently

invading the province of other men. This view is maintained and in great

measure sustained by J.S. Mill in his _Liberty_, the _Areopagitica_ of

the nineteenth century, and more elaborately if not more philosophically

set forth in the comprehensive treatise of Wilhelm von Humboldt on _The

Sphere and Duties of Government_. These writers are followed with various

reserves by Grote, Buckle, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and by Mr. Lecky. Mill

writes:--

The idea of rational Democracy is not that the people

themselves govern; but that they have security for good

government. This security they can only have by retaining in

their own hands the ultimate control. The people ought to be

masters employing servants more skilful than themselves.

[Footnote: It should be noted that Mill lays as great

stress on Individualism as Carlyle does, and a more

practical stress. He has the same belief in the essential

mediocrity of the masses of men whose "think ing is done for

them ... through the newspapers," and the same scorn for

"the present low state of society." He writes, "The

initiation of all wise and noble things comes and must come

from individuals: generally at first from some one

individual"; but adds, "I am not countenancing the sort of

'hero-worship' which applauds the strong man of genius for

forcibly seizing on the government of the world.... All he

can claim is freedom to point out the way."]

To this Carlyle, with at least the general assent of Mr. Froude, Mr.

Ruskin, and Sir James Stephen, substantially replies:--

In freedom for itself there is nothing to raise a man above

a fly; the value of a human life is that of its work done;

the prime province of law is to get from its subjects the

most of the best work. The first duty of a people is to

find--which means to accept--their chief; their second and

last to obey him. We see to what men have been brought by

"Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," by the dreams of

idealogues, and the purchase of votes.