The third and last mark to which I call attention is his humour.
Nowhere, surely, in the whole field of English literature, Shakespeare
excepted, do you come upon a more abundant vein of humour than
Carlyle's, though I admit that the quality of the ore is not of the
finest. His every production is bathed in humour. This must never be,
though it often has been, forgotten. He is not to be taken literally.
He is always a humourist, not unfrequently a writer of burlesque, and
occasionally a buffoon.
Although the spectacle of Mr. Swinburne taking Mr. Carlyle to task, as
he recently did, for indelicacy, has an oddity all its own, so far as
I am concerned I cannot but concur with this critic in thinking that
Carlyle has laid himself open, particularly in his 'Frederick the
Great,' to the charge one usually associates with the great and terrible
name of Dean Swift; but it is the Dean with a difference, and the
difference is all in Carlyle's favour. The former deliberately pelts
you with dirt, as did in old days gentlemen electors their parliamentary
candidates; the latter only occasionally splashes you, as does a public
vehicle pursuing on a wet day its uproarious course.
These, then, I take to be Carlyle's three principal marks or notes:
mysticism in thought, realism in description, and humour in both.
To proceed now to his actual literary work.
First, then, I would record the fact that he was a great critic, and
this at a time when our literary criticism was a scandal. He more than
any other has purged our vision and widened our horizons in this great
matter. He taught us there was no sort of finality, but only nonsense,
in that kind of criticism which was content with laying down some
foreign masterpiece with the observation that it was not suited for the
English taste. He was, if not the first, almost the first critic, who
pursued in his criticism the historical method, and sought to make
us understand what we were required to judge. It has been said that
Carlyle's criticisms are not final, and that he has not said the last
word about Voltaire, Diderot, Richter, and Goethe. I can well believe
it. But reserving 'last words' for the use of the last man (to whom they
would appear to belong), it is surely something to have said the _first_
sensible words uttered in English on these important subjects. We ought
not to forget the early days of the _Foreign and Quarterly Review_. We
have critics now, quieter, more reposeful souls, taking their ease on
Zion, who have entered upon a world ready to welcome them, whose keen
rapiers may cut velvet better than did the two-handed broadsword of
Carlyle, and whose later date may enable them to discern what their
forerunner failed to perceive; but when the critics of this century come
to be criticized by the critics of the next, an honourable, if not the
highest place will be awarded to Carlyle.
Turn we now to the historian and biographer. History and biography much
resemble one another in the pages of Carlyle, and occupy more than
half his thirty-four volumes; nor is this to be wondered at, since they
afford him fullest scope for his three strong points--his love of the
wonderful; his love of telling a story, as the children say, 'from the
very beginning;' and his humour. His view of history is sufficiently
lofty. History, says he, is the true epic poem, a universal divine
scripture whose plenary inspiration no one out of Bedlam shall bring
into question. Nor is he quite at one with the ordinary historian as to
the true historical method. 'The time seems coming when he who sees no
world but that of courts and camps, and writes only how soldiers were
drilled and shot, and how this ministerial conjurer out-conjured that
other, and then guided, or at least held, something which he called
the rudder of Government, but which was rather the spigot of Taxation,
wherewith in place of steering he could tax, will pass for a more or
less instructive Gazetteer, but will no longer be called an Historian.'
Nor does the philosophical method of writing history please him any
better:
'Truly if History is Philosophy teaching by examples, the writer fitted
to compose history is hitherto an unknown man. Better were it that mere
earthly historians should lower such pretensions, more suitable for
omniscience than for human science, and aiming only at some picture of
the things acted, which picture itself will be a poor approximation,
leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret--or at
most, in reverent faith, pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him whose
path is in the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only
all History and in Eternity will clearly reveal.'
This same transcendental way of looking at things is very noticeable
in the following view of Biography: 'For, as the highest gospel was a
Biography, so is the life of every good man still an indubitable gospel,
and preaches to the eye and heart and whole man, so that devils
even must believe and tremble, these gladdest tidings. Man is
heaven-born--not the thrall of circumstances, of necessity, but the
victorious subduer thereof.' These, then, being his views, what are
we to say of his works? His three principal historical works are, as
everyone knows, 'Cromwell,' 'The French Revolution,' and 'Frederick the
Great,' though there is a very considerable amount of other historical
writing scattered up and down his works. But what are we to say of these
three? Is he, by virtue of them, entitled to the rank and influence of a
great historian? What have we a right to demand of an historian? First,
surely, stern veracity, which implies not merely knowledge but honesty.
An historian stands in a fiduciary position towards his readers, and
if he withholds from them important facts likely to influence their
judgment, he is guilty of fraud, and, when justice is done in this
world, will be condemned to refund all moneys he has made by his false
professions, with compound interest. This sort of fraud is unknown to
the law, but to nobody else. 'Let me know the facts!' may well be the
agonized cry of the student who finds himself floating down what Arnold
has called 'the vast Mississippi of falsehood, History.' Secondly comes
a catholic temper and way of looking at things. The historian should be
a gentleman and possess a moral breadth of temperament. There should be
no bitter protesting spirit about him. He should remember the world he
has taken upon himself to write about is a large place, and that nobody
set him up over us. Thirdly, he must be a born story-teller. If he is
not this, he has mistaken his vocation. He may be a great philosopher, a
useful editor, a profound scholar, and anything else his friends like
to call him, except a great historian. How does Carlyle meet these
requirements? His veracity, that is, his laborious accuracy, is admitted
by the only persons competent to form an opinion, namely, independent
investigators who have followed in his track; but what may be called
the internal evidence of the case also supplies a strong proof of it.
Carlyle was, as everyone knows, a hero-worshipper. It is part of his
mysticism. With him man, as well as God, is a spirit, either of good or
evil, and as such should be either worshipped or reviled. He is never
himself till he has discovered or invented a hero; and, when he has got
him, he tosses and dandles him as a mother her babe. This is a terrible
temptation to put in the way of an historian, and few there be who are
found able to resist it. How easy to keep back an ugly fact, sure to
be a stumbling-block in the way of weak brethren! Carlyle is above
suspicion in this respect. He knows no reticence. Nothing restrains
him; not even the so-called proprieties of history. He may, after his
boisterous fashion, pour scorn upon you for looking grave, as you read
in his vivid pages of the reckless manner in which too many of his
heroes drove coaches-and-six through the Ten Commandments. As likely as
not he will call you a blockhead, and tell you to close your wide mouth
and cease shrieking. But, dear me! hard words break no bones, and it is
an amazing comfort to know the facts. Is he writing of Cromwell?--down
goes everything--letters, speeches, as they were written, as they were
delivered. Few great men are edited after this fashion. Were they to be
so--Luther, for example--many eyes would be opened very wide. Nor does
Carlyle fail in comment. If the Protector makes a somewhat distant
allusion to the Barbadoes, Carlyle is at your elbow to tell you it
means his selling people to work as slaves in the West Indies. As for
Mirabeau, 'our wild Gabriel Honoré,' well! we are told all about him;
nor is Frederick let off a single absurdity or atrocity. But when we
have admitted the veracity, what are we to say of the catholic temper,
the breadth of temperament, the wide Shakespearian tolerance? Carlyle
ought to have them all. By nature he was tolerant enough; so true a
humourist could never be a bigot. When his war-paint is not on, a child
might lead him. His judgments are gracious, chivalrous, tinged with a
kindly melancholy and divine pity. But this mood is never for long. Some
gadfly stings him: he seizes his tomahawk and is off on the trail.
It must sorrowfully be admitted that a long life of opposition and
indigestion, of fierce warfare with cooks and Philistines, spoilt his
temper, never of the best, and made him too often contemptuous, savage,
unjust. His language then becomes unreasonable, unbearable, bad.
Literature takes care of herself. You disobey her rules: well and good,
she shuts her door in your face; you plead your genius: she replies,
'Your temper,' and bolts it. Carlyle has deliberately destroyed, by his
own wilfulness, the value of a great deal he has written. It can never
become classical. Alas! that this should be true of too many eminent
Englishmen of our time. Language such as was, at one time, almost
habitual with Mr. Ruskin, is a national humiliation, giving point to the
Frenchman's sneer as to our distinguishing literary characteristic
being '_la brutalité_.' In Carlyle's case much must be allowed for his
rhetoric and humour. In slang phrase, he always 'piles it on.' Does
a bookseller misdirect a parcel, he exclaims, 'My malison on all
Blockheadisms and Torpid Infidelities of which this world is full.'
Still, all allowances made, it is a thousand pities; and one's thoughts
turn away from this stormy old man and take refuge in the quiet haven of
the Oratory at Birmingham, with his great Protagonist, who, throughout
an equally long life spent in painful controversy, and wielding weapons
as terrible as Carlyle's own, has rarely forgotten to be urbane, and
whose every sentence is a 'thing of beauty.' It must, then, be owned
that too many of Carlyle's literary achievements 'lack a gracious
somewhat.' By force of his genius he 'smites the rock and spreads
the water;' but then, like Moses, 'he desecrates, belike, the deed in
doing.'
Our third requirement was, it may be remembered, the gift of the
storyteller. Here one is on firm ground. Where is the equal of the man
who has told us the story of 'The Diamond Necklace'?
It is the vogue, nowadays, to sneer at picturesque writing. Professor
Seeley, for reasons of his own, appears to think that whilst politics,
and, I presume religion, may be made as interesting as you please,
history should be as dull as possible. This, surely, is a jaundiced
view. If there is one thing it is legitimate to make more interesting
than another, it is the varied record of man's life upon earth. So long
as we have human hearts and await human destinies, so long as we are
alive to the pathos, the dignity, the comedy of human life, so long
shall we continue to rank above the philosopher, higher than the
politician, the great artist, be he called dramatist or historian, who
makes us conscious of the divine movement of events, and of our fathers
who were before us. Of course we assume accuracy and labor in our
animated historian; though, for that matter, other things being equal, I
prefer a lively liar to a dull one.
Carlyle is sometimes as irresistible as 'The Campbells are Coming,' or
'Auld Lang Syne.' He has described some men and some events once and for
all, and so takes his place with Thucydides, Tacitus and Gibbon. Pedants
may try hard to forget this, and may in their laboured nothings seek to
ignore the author of 'Cromwell' and 'The French Revolution'; but as well
might the pedestrian in Cumberland or Inverness seek to ignore Helvellyn
or Ben Nevis. Carlyle is _there_, and will remain there, when the pedant
of today has been superseded by the pedant of to-morrow.
Remembering all this, we are apt to forget his faults, his
eccentricities, and vagaries, his buffooneries, his too-outrageous
cynicisms and his too-intrusive egotisms, and to ask ourselves--if it
be not this man, who is it then to be? Macaulay, answer some; and
Macaulay's claims are not of the sort to go unrecognised in a world
which loves clearness of expression and of view only too well.
Macaulay's position never admitted of doubt. We know what to expect, and
we always get it. It is like the old days of W. G. Grace's cricket. We
went to see the leviathan slog for six, and we saw it. We expected him
to do it, and he did it. So with Macaulay--the good Whig, as he takes up
the History, settles himself down in his chair, and knows it is going
to be a bad time for the Tories. Macaulay's style--his much-praised
style--is ineffectual for the purpose of telling the truth about
anything. It is splendid, but _splendide mendax_, and in Macaulay's case
the style was the man. He had enormous knowledge, and a noble spirit;
his knowledge enriched his style and his spirit consecrated it to the
service of Liberty. We do well to be proud of Macaulay; but we must add
that, great as was his knowledge, great also was his ignorance, which
was none the less ignorance because it was wilful; noble as was his
spirit, the range of subject over which it energized was painfully
restricted. He looked out upon the world, but, behold, only the Whigs
were good. Luther and Loyola, Cromwell and Claverhouse, Carlyle and
Newman--they moved him not; their enthusiasms were delusions, and their
politics demonstrable errors. Whereas, of Lord Somers and Charles first
Earl Grey it is impossible to speak without emotion. But the world
does not belong to the Whigs; and a great historian must be capable of
sympathizing both with delusions and demonstrable errors. Mr. Gladstone
has commented with force upon what he calls Macaulay's invincible
ignorance, and further says that to certain aspects of a case
(particularly those aspects most pleasing to Mr. Gladstone) Macaulay's
mind was hermetically sealed. It is difficult to resist these
conclusions; and it would appear no rash inference from them, that a man
in a state of invincible ignorance and with a mind hermetically sealed,
whatever else he may be--orator, advocate, statesman, journalist, man of
letters--can never be a great historian. But, indeed, when one remembers
Macaulay's limited range of ideas: the commonplaceness of his morality,
and of his descriptions; his absence of humour, and of pathos--for
though Miss Martineau says she found one pathetic passage in the
History, I have often searched for it in vain; and then turns to
Carlyle--to his almost bewildering affluence of thought, fancy, feeling,
humour, pathos--his biting pen, his scorching criticism, his world-wide
sympathy (save in certain moods) with everything but the smug
commonplace--to prefer Macaulay to him, is like giving the preference to
Birket Foster over Salvator Rosa. But if it is not Macaulay, who is it
to be? Mr. Hepworth Dixon or Mr. Froude? Of Bishop Stubbs and Professor
Freeman it behoves every ignoramus to speak with respect. Horny-handed
sons of toil, they are worthy of their wage. Carlyle has somewhere
struck a distinction between the historical artist and the historical
artizan. The bishop and the professor are historical artizans; artists
they are not--and the great historian is a great artist.
England boasts two such artists. Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle.
The elder historian may be compared to one of the great Alpine
roadways--sublime in its conception, heroic in its execution, superb in
its magnificent uniformity of good workmanship. The younger resembles
one of his native streams, pent in at times between huge rocks, and
tormented into foam, and then effecting its escape down some precipice,
and spreading into cool expanses below; but however varied may be its
fortunes--however startling its changes--always in motion, always in
harmony with the scene around. Is it gloomy? It is with the gloom of the
thunder-cloud. Is it bright? It is with the radiance of the sun.
It is with some consternation that I approach the subject of Carlyle's
politics. One handles them as does an inspector of police a parcel
reported to contain dynamite. The Latter-Day Pamphlets might not unfitly
be labelled 'Dangerous Explosives.'
In this matter of politics there were two Carlyles; and, as generally
happens in such cases, his last state was worse than his first. Up to
1843, he not unfairly might be called a Liberal--of uncertain vote it
may be--a man difficult to work with, and impatient of discipline, but
still aglow with generous heat; full of large-hearted sympathy with
the poor and oppressed, and of intense hatred of the cruel and
shallow sophistries that then passed for maxims, almost for axioms, of
government. In the year 1819, when the yeomanry round Glasgow was called
out to keep down some dreadful monsters called 'Radicals,' Carlyle
describes how he met an advocate of his acquaintance hurrying along,
musket in hand, to his drill on the Links. 'You should have the like of
this,' said he, cheerily patting his gun. 'Yes, was the reply, 'but
I haven't yet quite settled on which side.' And when he did make his
choice, on the whole he chose rightly. The author of that noble pamphlet
'Chartism,' published in 1840, was at least once a Liberal. Let me quote
a passage that has stirred to effort many a generous heart now cold in
death: 'Who would suppose that Education were a thing which had to be
advocated on the ground of local expediency, or indeed on any ground?
As if it stood not on the basis of an everlasting duty, as a prime
necessity of man! It is a thing that should need no advocating; much
as it does actually need. To impart the gift of thinking to those who
cannot think, and yet who could in that case think: this, one
would imagine, was the first function a government had to set about
discharging. Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any province of an
empire, the inhabitants living all mutilated in their limbs, each strong
man with his right arm lamed? How much crueller to find the strong soul
with its eyes still sealed--its eyes extinct, so that it sees not! Light
has come into the world; but to this poor peasant it has come in vain.
For six thousand years the sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have been
devising, doing, discovering; in mysterious, infinite, indissoluble
communion, warring, a little band of brothers, against the black empire
of necessity and night; they have accomplished such a conquest and
conquests; and to this man it is all as if it had not been. The
four-and-twenty letters of the alphabet are still runic enigmas to him.
He passes by on the other side; and that great spiritual kingdom,
the toil-won conquest of his own brothers, all that his brothers have
conquered, is a thing not extant for him. An invisible empire; he knows
it not--suspects it not. And is not this his withal; the conquest of
his own brothers, the lawfully acquired possession of all men? Baleful
enchantment lies over him, from generation to generation; he knows
not that such an empire is his--that such an empire is his at all....
Heavier wrong is not done under the sun. It lasts from year to year,
from century to century; the blinded sire slaves himself out, and leaves
a blinded son; and men, made in the image of God, continue as two-legged
beasts of labour: and in the largest empire of the world it is a debate
whether a small fraction of the revenue of one day shall, after thirteen
centuries, be laid out on it, or not laid out on it. Have we governors?
Have we teachers? Have we had a Church these thirteen hundred years?
What is an overseer of souls, an archoverseer, archiepiscopus? Is he
something? If so, let him lay his hand on his heart and say what thing!'
Nor was the man who in 1843 wrote as follows altogether at sea in
politics:
'Of Time Bill, Factory Bill, and other such Bills, the present editor
has no authority to speak. He knows not, it is for others than he
to know, in what specific ways it may be feasible to interfere with
legislation between the workers and the master-workers--knows only and
sees that legislative interference, and interferences not a few, are
indispensable. Nay, interference has begun; there are already factory
inspectors. Perhaps there might be mine inspectors too. Might there
not be furrow-field inspectors withal, to ascertain how, on _7s. 6d._
a week, a human family does live? Again, are not sanitary regulations
possible for a legislature? Baths, free air, a wholesome temperature,
ceilings twenty feet high, might be ordained by Act of Parliament in
all establishments licensed as mills. There are such mills already
extant--honour to the builders of them. The legislature can say to
others, "Go you and do likewise--better if you can."'
By no means a bad programme for 1843; and a good part of it has been
carried out, but with next to no aid from Carlyle.
The Radical party has struggled on as best it might, without the author
of 'Chartism' and 'The French Revolution'--
'They have marched prospering, not through his presence;
Songs have inspired them, not from his lyre;'
and it is no party spirit that leads one to regret the change of mind
which prevented the later public life of this great man, and now
the memory of it, from being enriched with something better than a
five-pound note for Governor Eyre.
But it could not be helped. What brought about the rupture was his
losing faith in the ultimate destiny of man upon earth. No more terrible
loss can be sustained. It is of both heart and hope. He fell back upon
heated visions of heaven-sent heroes, devoting their early days for
the most part to hoodwinking the people, and their latter ones, more
heroically, to shooting them.
But it is foolish to quarrel with results, and we may learn something
even from the later Carlyle. We lay down John Bright's Reform Speeches,
and take up Carlyle and light upon a passage like this: 'Inexpressibly
delirious seems to me the puddle of Parliament and public upon what it
calls the Reform Measure, that is to say, the calling in of new supplies
of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, amenability to beer and
balderdash, by way of amending the woes we have had from previous
supplies of that bad article.' This view must be accounted for as well
as Mr. Bright's. We shall do well to remember, with Carlyle, that the
best of all Reform Bills is that which each citizen passes in his own
breast, where it is pretty sure to meet with strenuous opposition.
The reform of ourselves is no doubt an heroic measure never to be
overlooked, and, in the face of accusations of gullibility, bribability,
amenability to beer and balderdash, our poor humanity can only stand
abashed, and feebly demur to the bad English in which the charges are
conveyed. But we can't all lose hope. We remember Sir David Ramsay's
reply to Lord Rea, once quoted by Carlyle himself. Then said his
lordship: 'Well, God mend all.' 'Nay, by God, Donald, we must help Him
to mend it!' It is idle to stand gaping at the heavens, waiting to feel
the thong of some hero of questionable morals and robust conscience; and
therefore, unless Reform Bills can be shown to have checked purity of
election, to have increased the stupidity of electors, and generally to
have promoted corruption--which notoriously they have not--we may allow
Carlyle to make his exit 'swearing,' and regard their presence in the
Statute Book, if not with rapture, at least, with equanimity.
But it must not be forgotten that the battle is still raging--the
issue is still uncertain. Mr. Froude is still free to assert that the
'_post-mortem_' will prove Carlyle was right. His political sagacity
no reader of 'Frederick' can deny; his insight into hidden causes
and far-away effects was keen beyond precedent--nothing he ever said
deserves contempt, though it may merit anger. If we would escape his
conclusion, we must not altogether disregard his premises. Bankruptcy
and death are the final heirs of imposture and make-believes. The old
faiths and forms are worn too threadbare by a thousand disputations to
bear the burden of the new democracy, which, if it is not merely to win
the battle but to hold the country, must be ready with new faiths and
forms of her own. They are within her reach if she but knew it; they
lie to her hand: surely they will not escape her grasp! If they do not,
then, in the glad day when worship is once more restored to man, he
will with becoming generosity forget much that Carlyle has written, and
remembering more, rank him amongst the prophets of humanity.
Carlyle's poetry can only be exhibited in long extracts, which would
be here out of place, and might excite controversy as to the meaning of
words, and draw down upon me the measureless malice of the metricists.
There are, however, passages in 'Sartor Resartus' and the 'French
Revolution' which have long appeared to me to be the sublimest poetry of
the century; and it was therefore with great pleasure that I found Mr.
Justice Stephen, in his book on 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,'
introducing a quotation from the 8th chapter of the 3rd book of 'Sartor
Resartus,' with the remark that 'it is perhaps the most memorable
utterance of the greatest poet of the age.'
As for Carlyle's religion, it may be said he had none, inasmuch as
he expounded no creed and put his name to no confession. This is the
pedantry of the schools. He taught us religion, as cold water and fresh
air teach us health, by rendering the conditions of disease well nigh
impossible. For more than half a century, with superhuman energy, he
struggled to establish the basis of all religions, 'reverence and godly
fear.' 'Love not pleasure, love God; this is the everlasting Yea.'
One's remarks might here naturally come to an end, with a word or two of
hearty praise of the brave course of life led by the man who awhile back
stood the acknowledged head of English letters. But the present time is
not the happiest for a panegyric on Carlyle. It would be in vain to
deny that the brightness of his reputation underwent an eclipse, visible
everywhere, by the publication of his 'Reminiscences.' They surprised
most of us, pained not a few, and hugely delighted that ghastly crew,
the wreckers of humanity, who are never so happy as when employed in
pulling down great reputations to their own miserable levels. When these
'baleful creatures,' as Carlyle would have called them, have lit upon
any passage indicative of conceit or jealousy or spite, they have
fastened upon it and screamed over it, with a pleasure but ill-concealed
and with a horror but ill-feigned. 'Behold,' they exclaim, 'your hero
robbed of the nimbus his inflated style cast around him--this preacher
and fault-finder reduced to his principal parts: and lo! the main
ingredient is most unmistakably "bile!"'
The critic, however, has nought to do either with the sighs of the
sorrowful, 'mourning when a hero falls,' or with the scorn of the
malicious, rejoicing, as did Bunyan's Juryman, Mr. Live-loose, when
Faithful was condemned to die: 'I could never endure him, for he would
always be condemning my way.'
The critic's task is to consider the book itself, _i. e._, the nature of
its contents, and how it came to be written at all.
When this has been done, there will not be found much demanding moral
censure; whilst the reader will note with delight, applied to the
trifling concerns of life, those extraordinary gifts of observation and
apprehension which have so often charmed him in the pages of history and
biography.
These peccant volumes contain but four sketches: one of his father,
written in 1832; the other three, of Edward Irving, Lord Jeffrey, and
Mrs. Carlyle, all written after the death of the last-named, in 1866.
The only fault that has been found with the first sketch is, that in
it Carlyle hazards the assertion that Scotland does not now contain his
father's like. It ought surely to be possible to dispute this opinion
without exhibiting emotion. To think well of their forbears is one
of the few weaknesses of Scotchmen. This sketch, as a whole, must be
carried to Carlyle's credit, and is a permanent addition to literature.
It is pious, after the high Roman fashion. It satisfies our finest sense
of the fit and proper. Just exactly so should a literate son write of an
illiterate peasant father. How immeasurable seems the distance between
the man from whom proceeded the thirty-four volumes we have been writing
about and the Calvinistic mason who didn't even know his Burns!--and yet
here we find the whole distance spanned by filial love.
The sketch of Lord Jeffrey is inimitable. One was getting tired of
Jeffrey, and prepared to give him the go-by, when Carlyle creates him
afresh, and, for the first time, we see the bright little man bewitching
us by what he is, disappointing us by what he is not. The spiteful
remarks the sketch contains may be considered, along with those of
the same nature to be found only too plentifully in the remaining two
papers.
After careful consideration of the worst of these remarks, Mrs.
Oliphant's explanation seems the true one; they are most of them
sparkling bits of Mrs. Carlyle's conversation. She, happily for herself,
had a lively wit, and, perhaps not so happily, a biting tongue, and was,
as Carlyle tells us, accustomed to make him laugh, as they drove home
together from London crushes, by far from genial observations on her
fellow-creatures, little recking--how should she?--that what was so
lightly uttered was being engraven on the tablets of the most marvellous
of memories, and was destined long afterwards to be written down in grim
earnest by a half-frenzied old man, and printed, in cold blood, by an
English gentleman.
The horrible description of Mrs. Irving's personal appearance, and the
other stories of the same connection, are recognised by Mrs. Oliphant as
in substance Mrs. Carlyle's; whilst the malicious account of Mrs. Basil
Montague's head-dress is attributed by Carlyle himself to his wife.
Still, after dividing the total, there is a good helping for each, and
blame would justly be Carlyle's due if we did not remember, as we
are bound to do, that, interesting as these three sketches are, their
interest is pathological, and ought never to have been given us. Mr.
Froude should have read them in tears, and burnt them in fire. There is
nothing surprising in the state of mind which produced them. They are
easily accounted for by our sorrow-laden experience. It is a familiar
feeling which prompts a man, suddenly bereft of one whom he alone really
knew and loved, to turn in his fierce indignation upon the world, and
deride its idols whom all are praising, and which yet to him seem
ugly by the side of one of whom no one speaks. To be angry with such
a sentence as 'scribbling Sands and Eliots, not fit to compare with my
incomparable Jeannie,' is at once inhuman and ridiculous. This is the
language of the heart, not of the head. It is no more criticism than is
the trumpeting of a wounded elephant zoölogy.
Happy is the man who at such a time holds both peace and pen; but
unhappiest of all is he who, having dipped his sorrow into ink, entrusts
the manuscript to a romantic historian.
The two volumes of the 'Life,' and the three volumes of Mrs. Carlyle's
'Correspondence,' unfortunately did not pour oil upon the troubled
waters. The partizanship they evoked was positively indecent. Mrs.
Carlyle had her troubles and her sorrows, as have most women who live
under the same roof with a man of creative genius; but of one thing we
may be quite sure, that she would have been the first, to use her
own expressive language, to require God 'particularly to damn' her
impertinent sympathizers. As for Mr. Froude, he may yet discover his
Nemesis in the spirit of an angry woman whose privacy he has invaded,
and whose diary he has most wantonly published.
These dark clouds are ephemeral. They will roll away, and we shall once
more gladly recognise the lineaments of an essentially lofty character,
of one who, though a man of genius and of letters, neither outraged
society nor stooped to it; was neither a rebel nor a slave; who in
poverty scorned wealth; who never mistook popularity for fame; but from
the first assumed, and throughout maintained, the proud attitude of one
whose duty it was to teach and not to tickle mankind.
Brother-dunces, lend me your ears! not to crop, but that I may whisper
into their furry depths: 'Do not quarrel with genius. We have none
ourselves, and yet are so constituted that we cannot live without it.'