THE FINEST ENGLISH PROSE WRITER OF THE LAST CENTURY--HIS BEST
BOOKS, "PAST AND PRESENT," "SARTOR RESARTUS" AND THE "FRENCH
REVOLUTION."
As an influence in stimulating school and college students, Macaulay
must be given a foremost place, but greater than Macaulay, because of
his spiritual fervor and his moral force, stands Thomas Carlyle, the
great prophet and preacher of the nineteenth century, whose influence
will outlast that of all other writers of his time. And this spiritual
potency, which resides in his best work, is not weakened by his love
of the Strong Man in History or his fear of the rising tide of popular
democracy, in which he saw a dreadful repetition of the horrors of the
French Revolution. It was the Puritan element in his granite
character which gave most of the flaming spiritual ardor to
Carlyle's work. It was this which made him the greatest preacher of
his day, although he had left behind him all the old articles of faith
for which his forefathers went cheerfully to death on many a bloody
field.
[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE FROM THE WORLD-FAMED MASTERPIECE OF
PORTRAITURE BY JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER]
Carlyle believed a strong religious faith was vital to any real and
lasting work in this world, and from the day he gave out _Sartor
Resartus_ he preached this doctrine in all his books. He was born into
a generation that was content to accept the forms of religion, so long
as it could enjoy the good things of this world, and much of Carlyle's
speech sounded to the people of his day like the warnings of the
prophet Isaiah to the Israelites of old. But Carlyle was never daunted
by lack of appreciation or by any ridicule or abuse. These only made
him more confident in his belief that the spiritual life is the
greatest thing in this world. And he actually lived the life that he
preached.
For years Carlyle failed to make enough to support himself and his
wife, yet he refused a large income, offered by the LONDON TIMES for
editorial work, on the ground that he could not write to order nor
bend his opinions to those of others. He put behind him the
temptation to take advantage of great fame when it suddenly came to
him. When publishers were eager for his work he spent the same time in
preparing his books as when he was poor and unsought. He labored at
the smallest task to give the best that was in him; he wrote much of
his work in his heart's blood. Hence it is that through all of his
books, but especially through _Past and Present_ and _Heroes and Hero
Worship_, one feels the strong beat of the heart of this great man,
who yearned to make others follow the spiritual life that he had found
so full of strength and comfort.
Carlyle's life was largely one of work and self-denial. He was born of
poor parents at the little village of Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire,
Scotland. His father, though an uneducated stone-mason, was a man of
great mental force and originality, while his mother was a woman of
fine imagination, with a large gift of story telling. The boy received
the groundwork of a good education and then walked eighty miles to
Edinburgh University. Born in 1795, Carlyle went to Edinburgh in 1809.
His painful economy at college laid the foundation of the dyspepsia
which troubled him all his days, hampered his work and made him take a
gloomy view of life. At Edinburgh he made a specialty of mathematics
and German. He remained at the university five years.
The next fifteen years were spent in tutoring, hack writing for the
publishers and translation from the German. His first remunerative
work was the translation of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, a version
which still remains the best in English. After his marriage to Jane
Welsh he was driven by poverty to take refuge on his wife's lonely
farm at Craigenputtock, where he did much reading and wrote the early
essays which contain some of his best work. The EDINBURGH REVIEW and
FRASER'S were opened to him.
Finally, in 1833, when he was nearly forty years old, he made his
first literary hit with _Sartor Resartus_ which called out a storm of
caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the
strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug
English public regarded with reverence--all these features aroused
irritation. Four years later came _The French Revolution_, which
established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers.
From this time on he was freed from the fear of poverty, but it was
only in his last years, when he needed little, that he enjoyed an
income worthy of his labors.
Carlyle's great books, beside those I have mentioned, are the lives of
_Cromwell_ and of _Frederick the Great_. These are too long for
general reading, but a single volume condensation of the _Frederick_
gives a good idea of Carlyle's method of combining biography and
history. Carlyle outlived all his contemporaries--a lonely old man,
full of bitter remorse over imaginary neglect of his wife, and full
also of despair over the democratic tendencies of the age, which he
regarded as the outward signs of national degeneracy.
Carlyle's fame was clouded thirty years ago by the unwise publication
of reminiscences and letters which he never intended for print. Froude
was chosen as his biographer. One of the great masters of English,
Froude was a bachelor who idealized Mrs. Carlyle and who regarded as
the simple truth an old man's bitter regrets over opportunities
neglected to make his wife happier. Everyone who has studied Carlyle's
life knows that he was dogmatic, dyspeptic, irritable, and given to
sharp speech even against those he loved the best. But over against
these failings must be placed his tenderness, his unfaltering
affection, his self-denial, his tremendous labors, his small rewards.
When separated from his wife Carlyle wrote her letters that are like
those of a young lover, an infinite tenderness in every line. One of
her great crosses was the belief that her husband was in love with the
brilliant Lady Ashburton. Her jealousy was absurd, as this great lady
invited Carlyle to her dinners because he was the most brilliant
talker in all England, and he accepted because the opportunity to
indulge in monologue to appreciative hearers was a keener pleasure to
him than to write eloquent warnings to his day and generation.
Froude's unhappy book, with a small library of commentary that it
called forth, is practically forgotten, but Carlyle's fame and his
books endure because they are real and not founded on illusion.
Carlyle opens a new world to the college student or the ambitious
youth who may be gaining an education by his own efforts. He sounds a
note that is found in no other author of our time. Doubtless some of
this attraction is due to his singular style, formed on a long study
of the German, but most of it is due to the tremendous earnestness of
the man, which lays hold of the young reader. Never shall I forget
when in college preparatory days I devoured _Past and Present_ and was
stirred to extra effort by its trumpet calls that work is worship and
that the night soon cometh when no man can work.
His fine chapter on _Labor_ with its splendid version of the _Mason's
Song_ of Goethe has stimulated thousands to take up heavy burdens and
go on with the struggle for that culture of the mind and the soul
which is the more precious the harder the fight to secure it. I
remember copying in a commonplace book some of Carlyle's sonorous
passages that stir the blood of the young like a bugle call to arms.
Reading them over years after, I am glad to say that they still
appealed to me, for it seems to me that the saddest thing in this
world is to lose one's youthful enthusiasms. When you can keep these
fresh and strong, after years of contact with a selfish world, age
cannot touch you.
[Illustration: ARCHHOUSE, ECCLEFECHAN, DUMFRIESSHIRE THE
BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS CARLYLE--FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN THE POSSESSION
OF ALEXANDER CARLYLE, M.A. ON WHICH CARLYLE HAS WRITTEN A
MEMORANDUM TO SHOW IN WHICH ROOM HE WAS BORN]
In this appeal to all that is best and noblest in youth, Carlyle
stands unrivaled. He has far more heart, force and real warm blood
than Emerson, who saw just as clearly, but who could not make his
thought reach the reader. A course in Carlyle should be compulsory in
the freshman year at every college. If the lecturer were a man still
full of his early enthusiasms it could not fail to have rich results.
Take, for instance, those two chapters in _Past and Present_ that are
entitled "Happy" and "Labor." In a dozen pages are summed up all
Carlyle's creed. In these pages he declares that the only enduring
happiness is found in good, honest work, done with all a man's heart
and soul. And after caustic words on the modern craving for happiness
he ends a noble diatribe with these words, which are worth framing and
hanging on the wall, where they may be studied day by day:
Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor
paper-crown's tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting
Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her
veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness,
unhappiness; all that was but wages thou hadst; thou hast
spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin
of it remains with thee; it is all spent, eaten; and now thy
work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy
work!
_Sartor Resartus_ is very hard reading, but if you make up your mind
to go through it you will be repaid by many fine thoughts and many
noble passages of impassioned prose. Under the guise of Herr Diogenes
Teufelsdrockh, Carlyle tells the story of his early religious doubts,
his painful struggles that recall Bunyan's wrestlings with despair,
and his final entry upon a new spiritual life. He wrote to let others
know how he had emerged from the Valley of the Shadow of Pessimism
into the delectable Mountains of Faith. Carlyle was the first of his
day to proclaim the great truth that the spiritual life is far more
important than the material life, and this he showed by the humorous
philosophy of clothes, which he unfolded in the style of the German
pedants. Carlyle evidently took great pleasure in developing this
satire on German philosophy, which is full of broad humor.
_The French Revolution_ has been aptly called "history by lightning
flashes." One needs to have a good general idea of the period before
reading Carlyle's work. Then he can enjoy this series of splendid
pictures of the upheaval of the nether world and the strange moral
monsters that sated their lust for blood and power in those evil
days, which witnessed the terrible payment of debts of selfish
monarchy. Carlyle reaches the height of his power in this book, which
may be read many times with profit.
The sources of Carlyle's strength as a writer are his moral and
spiritual fervor and his power of making the reader see what he sees.
The first insures him enduring fame, as it makes what he wrote eighty
years ago as fresh and as full of fine stimulus as though it were
written yesterday. The other faculty was born in him. He had an eye
for pictures; he described what he saw down to the minutest detail; he
made the men of the French Revolution as real as the people he met on
his tour of Ireland. He made Cromwell and Frederick men of blood and
iron, not mere historical lay figures. And over all he cast the
glamour of his own indomitable spirit, which makes life look good even
to the man who feels the pinch of poverty and whose outlook is dreary.
You can't keep down the boy who makes Carlyle his daily companion; he
will rise by very force of fighting spirit of this dour old
Scotchman.