CARLYLE

The accomplishments of our race have of late become so varied, that it

is often no easy task to assign him whom we would judge to his proper

station among men; and yet, until this has been done, the guns of

our criticism cannot be accurately levelled, and as a consequence the

greater part of our fire must remain futile. He, for example, who would

essay to take account of Mr. Gladstone, must read much else besides

Hansard; he must brush up his Homer, and set himself to acquire some

theology. The place of Greece in the providential order of the world,

and of laymen in the Church of England, must be considered, together

with a host of other subjects of much apparent irrelevance to a

statesman's life. So too in the case of his distinguished rival,

whose death eclipsed the gaiety of politics and banished epigram from

Parliament: keen must be the critical faculty which can nicely discern

where the novelist ended and the statesman began in Benjamin Disraeli.

Happily, no such difficulty is now before us. Thomas Carlyle was a

writer of books, and he was nothing else. Beneath this judgment he would

have winced, but have remained silent, for the facts are so.

Little men sometimes, though not perhaps so often as is taken for

granted, complain of their destiny, and think they have been hardly

treated, in that they have been allowed to remain so undeniably small;

but great men, with hardly an exception, nauseate their greatness, for

not being of the particular sort they most fancy. The poet Gray was

passionately fond, so his biographers tell us, of military history; but

he took no Quebec. General Wolfe took Quebec, and whilst he was taking

it, recorded the fact that he would sooner have written Gray's 'Elegy';

and so Carlyle--who panted for action, who hated eloquence, whose heroes

were Cromwell and Wellington, Arkwright and the 'rugged Brindley,'

who beheld with pride and no ignoble envy the bridge at Auldgarth

his mason-father had helped to build half a century before, and then

exclaimed, 'A noble craft, that of a mason; a good building will last

longer than most books--than one book in a million'; who despised men of

letters, and abhorred the 'reading public'; whose gospel was Silence

and Action--spent his life in talking and writing; and his legacy to the

world is thirty-four volumes octavo.

There is a familiar melancholy in this; but the critic has no need to

grow sentimental. We must have men of thought as well as men of action:

poets as much as generals; authors no less than artizans; libraries

at least as much as militia; and therefore we may accept and proceed

critically to examine Carlyle's thirty-four volumes, remaining somewhat

indifferent to the fact that had he had the fashioning of his own

destiny, we should have had at his hands blows instead of books.

Taking him, then, as he was--a man of letters--perhaps the best type of

such since Dr. Johnson died in Fleet Street, what are we to say of his

thirty-four volumes?

In them are to be found criticism, biography, history, politics, poetry,

and religion. I mention this variety because of a foolish notion, at one

time often found suitably lodged in heads otherwise empty, that Carlyle

was a passionate old man, dominated by two or three extravagant

ideas, to which he was for ever giving utterance in language of equal

extravagance. The thirty-four volumes octavo render this opinion

untenable by those who can read. Carlyle cannot be killed by an epigram,

nor can the many influences that moulded him be referred to any single

source. The rich banquet his genius has spread for us is of many

courses. The fire and fury of the Latter-Day Pamphlets may be

disregarded by the peaceful soul, and the preference given to the

'Past' of 'Past and Present,' which, with its intense and sympathetic

mediaevalism, might have been written by a Tractarian. The 'Life of

Sterling' is the favourite book of many who would sooner pick oakum

than read 'Frederick the Great' all through; whilst the mere student of

_belles lettres_ may attach importance to the essays on Johnson, Burns,

and Scott, on Voltaire and Diderot, on Goethe and Novalis, and yet

remain blankly indifferent to 'Sartor Resartus' and 'The French

Revolution.'

But true as this is, it is none the less true that, excepting possibly

the 'Life of Schiller,' Carlyle wrote nothing not clearly recognisable

as his. All his books are his very own--bone of his bone, and flesh

of his flesh. They are not stolen goods, nor elegant exhibitions of

recently and hastily acquired wares.

This being so, it may be as well if, before proceeding any further, I

attempt, with a scrupulous regard to brevity, to state what I take to

be the invariable indications of Mr. Carlyle's literary handiwork--the

tokens of his presence--'Thomas Carlyle, his mark.'

First of all, it may be stated, without a shadow of a doubt, that he

is one of those who would sooner be wrong with Plato than right with

Aristotle; in one word, he is a mystic. What he says of Novalis may with

equal truth be said of himself: 'He belongs to that class of persons

who do not recognise the syllogistic method as the chief organ for

investigating truth, or feel themselves bound at all times to stop short

where its light fails them. Many of his opinions he would despair of

proving in the most patient court of law, and would remain well content

that they should be disbelieved there.' In philosophy we shall not be

very far wrong if we rank Carlyle as a follower of Bishop Berkeley;

for an idealist he undoubtedly was. 'Matter,' says he, 'exists only

spiritually, and to represent some idea, and body it forth. Heaven and

Earth are but the time-vesture of the Eternal. The Universe is but one

vast symbol of God; nay, if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a

symbol of God? Is not all that he does symbolical, a revelation to sense

of the mystic God-given force that is in him?--a gospel of Freedom,

which he, the "Messias of Nature," preaches as he can by act and word.'

'Yes, Friends,' he elsewhere observes, 'not our logical mensurative

faculty, but our imaginative one, is King over us, I might say Priest

and Prophet, to lead us heavenward, or magician and wizard to lead us

hellward. The understanding is indeed thy window--too clear thou canst

not make it; but phantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina,

healthy or diseased.' It would be easy to multiply instances of this,

the most obvious and interesting trait of Mr. Carlyle's writing; but

I must bring my remarks upon it to a close by reminding you of his

two favourite quotations, which have both significance. One from

Shakespeare's _Tempest_:

'We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep;'

the other, the exclamation of the Earth-spirit, in Goethe's _Faust_:

''Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,

And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.'

But this is but one side of Carlyle. There is another as strongly

marked, which is his second note; and that is what he somewhere calls

'his stubborn realism.' The combination of the two is as charming as it

is rare. No one at all acquainted with his writings can fail to remember

his almost excessive love of detail; his lively taste for facts, simply

as facts. Imaginary joys and sorrows may extort from him nothing but

grunts and snorts; but let him only worry out for himself, from that

great dust-heap called 'history,' some undoubted fact of human and

tender interest, and, however small it may be, relating possibly to

some one hardly known, and playing but a small part in the events he is

recording, and he will wax amazingly sentimental, and perhaps shed as

many real tears as Sterne or Dickens do sham ones over their figments.

This realism of Carlyle's gives a great charm to his histories and

biographies. The amount he tells you is something astonishing--no

platitudes, no rigmarole, no common-form, articles which are the staple

of most biography, but, instead of them, all the facts and features

of the case--pedigree, birth, father and mother, brothers and sisters,

education, physiognomy, personal habits, dress, mode of speech; nothing

escapes him. It was a characteristic criticism of his, on one of Miss

Martineau's American books, that the story of the way Daniel Webster

used to stand before the fire with his hands in his pockets was worth

all the politics, philosophy, political economy, and sociology to be

found in other portions of the good lady's writings. Carlyle's eye was

indeed a terrible organ: he saw everything. Emerson, writing to

him, says: 'I think you see as pictures every street, church,

Parliament-house, barracks, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf,

and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabout, and

make all your own.' He crosses over, one rough day, to Dublin; and he

jots down in his diary the personal appearance of some unhappy creatures

he never saw before or expected to see again; how men laughed, cried,

swore, were all of huge interest to Carlyle. Give him a fact, he loaded

you with thanks; propound a theory, you were rewarded with the most

vivid abuse.

This intense love for, and faculty of perceiving, what one may call the

'concrete picturesque,' accounts for his many hard sayings about fiction

and poetry. He could not understand people being at the trouble of

inventing characters and situations when history was full of men and

women; when streets were crowded and continents were being peopled under

their very noses. Emerson's sphynx-like utterances irritated him at

times, as they well might; his orations and the like. 'I long,' he says,

'to see some _concrete thing_, some Event--Man's Life, American Forest,

or piece of Creation which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well

_Emersonised_, depicted by Emerson--filled with the life of Emerson, and

cast forth from him then to live by itself.' [*] But Carlyle forgot

the sluggishness of the ordinary imagination, and, for the moment, the

stupendous dulness of the ordinary historian. It cannot be matter

for surprise that people prefer Smollett's 'Humphrey Clinker' to his

'History of England.'

[* Footnote: One need scarcely add, nothing of the sort

ever proceeded from Emerson. How should it? Where was it

to come from? When, to employ language of Mr. Arnold's

own, 'any poor child of nature' overhears the author of

'Essays in Criticism' telling two worlds that Emerson's

'Essays' are the most valuable prose contributions to the

literature of the century, his soul is indeed filled 'with

an unutterable sense of lamentation and mourning and woe.'

Mr. Arnold's silence was once felt to be provoking.

Wordsworth's lines kept occurring to one's mind--

'Poor Matthew, all his frolics o'er,

Is silent as a standing pool.'