I
While in London I took a bright Sunday afternoon to visit Chelsea, and
walk along Cheyne Row and look upon the house in which Carlyle passed
nearly fifty years of his life, and in which he died. Many times I paced
to and fro. I had been there eleven years before, but it was on a dark,
rainy night, and I had brought away no image of the street or house. The
place now had a more humble and neglected look than I expected to see;
nothing that suggested it had ever been the abode of the foremost
literary man of his time, but rather the home of plain, obscure persons
of little means. One would have thought that the long residence there of
such a man as Carlyle would have enhanced the value of real estate for
many squares around, and drawn men of wealth and genius to that part of
the city. The Carlyle house was unoccupied, and, with its closed
shutters and little pools of black sooty water standing in the brick
area in front of the basement windows, looked dead and deserted indeed.
But the house itself, though nearly two hundred years old, showed no
signs of decay. It had doubtless witnessed the extinction of many
households before that of the Carlyles.
My own visit to that house was in one autumn night in 1871. Carlyle was
then seventy-six years old, his wife had been dead five years, his work
was done, and his days were pitifully sad. He was out taking his
after-dinner walk when we arrived, Mr. Conway and I; most of his walking
and riding, it seems, was done after dark, an indication in itself of
the haggard and melancholy frame of mind habitual to him. He presently
appeared, wrapped in a long gray coat that fell nearly to the floor. His
greeting was quiet and grandfatherly, and that of a man burdened with
his own sad thoughts. I shall never forget the impression his large,
long, soft hand made in mine, nor the look of sorrow and suffering
stamped upon the upper part of the face,--sorrow mingled with yearning
compassion. The eyes were bleared and filmy with unshed and unshedable
tears. In pleasing contrast to his coarse hair and stiff, bristly,
iron-gray beard, was the fresh, delicate color that just touched his
brown cheeks, like the tinge of poetry that plays over his own rugged
page. I noted a certain shyness and delicacy, too, in his manner, which
contrasted in the same way with what is alleged of his rudeness and
severity. He leaned his head upon his hand, the fingers thrust up
through the hair, and, with his elbow resting upon the table, looked
across to my companion, who kept the conversation going. This attitude
he hardly changed during the two hours we sat there. How serious and
concerned he looked, and how surprising that hearty, soliloquizing sort
of laugh which now and then came from him as he talked, not so much a
laugh provoked by anything humorous in the conversation, as a sort of
foil to his thoughts, as one might say, after a severe judgment, "Ah,
well-a-day, what matters it!" If that laugh could have been put in his
Latter-day Pamphlets, where it would naturally come, or in his later
political tracts, these publications would have given much less offense.
But there was amusement in his laugh when I told him we had introduced
the English sparrow in America. "Introduced!" he repeated, and laughed
again. He spoke of the bird as a "comical little wretch," and feared we
should regret the "introduction." He repeated an Arab proverb which says
Solomon's Temple was built amid the chirping of ten thousand sparrows,
and applied it very humorously in the course of his talk to the human
sparrows that always stand ready to chirrup and cackle down every great
undertaking. He had seen a cat walk slowly along the top of a fence
while a row of sparrows seated upon a ridge-board near by all pointed at
her and chattered and scolded, and by unanimous vote pronounced her this
and that, but the cat went on her way all the same. The verdict of
majorities was not always very formidable, however unanimous.
A monument had recently been erected to Scott in Edinburgh, and he had
been asked to take part in some attendant ceremony. But he had refused
peremptorily. "If the angel Gabriel had summoned me I would not have
gone," he said. It was too soon to erect a monument to Scott. Let them
wait a hundred years and see how they feel about it then. He had never
met Scott: the nearest he had come to it was once when he was the bearer
of a message to him from Goethe; he had rung at his door with some
trepidation, and was relieved when told that the great man was out. Not
long afterwards he had a glimpse of him while standing in the streets of
Edinburgh. He saw a large wagon coming drawn by several horses, and
containing a great many people, and there in the midst of them, full of
talk and hilarity like a great boy, sat Scott. Carlyle had recently
returned from his annual visit to Scotland, and was full of sad and
tender memories of his native land. He was a man in whom every beautiful
thing awakened melancholy thoughts. He spoke of the blooming lasses and
the crowds of young people he had seen on the streets of some northern
city, Aberdeen, I think, as having filled him with sadness; a kind of
homesickness of the soul was upon him, and deepened with age,--a
solitary and a bereaved man from first to last.
As I walked Cheyne Row that summer Sunday my eye rested again and again
upon those three stone steps that led up to the humble door, each
hollowed out by the attrition of the human foot, the middle one, where
the force of the footfall would be greatest, most deeply worn of
all,--worn by hundreds of famous feet, and many, many more not famous.
Nearly every notable literary man of the century, both of England and
America, had trod those steps. Emerson's foot had left its mark there,
if one could have seen it, once in his prime and again in his old age,
and it was perhaps of him I thought, and of his new-made grave there
under the pines at Concord, that summer afternoon as I mused to and fro,
more than of any other visitor to that house. "Here we are shoveled
together again," said Carlyle from behind his wife, with a lamp high in
his hand, that October night thirty-seven years ago, as Jane opened the
door to Emerson. The friendship, the love of those two men for each
other, as revealed in their published correspondence, is one of the most
beautiful episodes in English literary history. The correspondence was
opened and invited by Emerson, but as years went by it is plain that it
became more and more a need and a solace to Carlyle. There is something
quite pathetic in the way he clung to Emerson and entreated him for a
fuller and more frequent evidence of his love. The New Englander, in
some ways, appears stinted and narrow beside him; Carlyle was much the
more loving and emotional man. He had less self-complacency than
Emerson, was much less stoical, and felt himself much more alone in the
world. Emerson was genial and benevolent from temperament and habit;
Carlyle was wrathful and vituperative, while his heart was really
bursting with sympathy and love. The savagest man, probably, in the
world in his time, who had anything like his enormous fund of
tenderness and magnanimity. He was full of contempt for the mass of
mankind, but he was capable of loving particular men with a depth and an
intensity that more than makes the account good. And let me say here
that the saving feature about Carlyle's contempt, which is such a
stumbling-block till one has come to understand it, is its perfect
sincerity and inevitableness, and the real humility in which it has its
root. He cannot help it; it is genuine, and has a kind of felicity. Then
there is no malice or ill-will in it, but pity rather, and pity springs
from love. We also know that he is always dominated by the inexorable
conscience, and that the standard by which he tries men is the standard
of absolute rectitude and worthiness. Contempt without love and humility
begets a sneering, mocking, deriding habit of mind, which was far enough
from Carlyle's sorrowing denunciations. "The quantity of sorrow he has,
does it not mean withal the quantity of _sympathy_ he has, the quantity
of faculty and victory he shall yet have? 'Our sorrow is the inverted
image of our nobleness.' The depth of our despair measures what
capability, and height of claim we have, to hope." (Cromwell.) Emerson
heard many responding voices, touched and won many hearts, but Carlyle
was probably admired and feared more than he was loved, and love he
needed and valued above all else. Hence his pathetic appeals to Emerson,
the one man he felt sure of, the one voice that reached him and moved
him among his contemporaries. He felt Emerson's serenity and courage,
and seemed to cling to, while he ridiculed, that New World hope that
shone in him so brightly.
The ship that carries the most sail is most buffeted by the winds and
storms. Carlyle carried more sail than Emerson did, and the very winds
of the globe he confronted and opposed; the one great movement of the
modern world, the democratic movement, the coming forward of the people
in their own right, he assailed and ridiculed in a vocabulary the most
copious and telling that was probably ever used, and with a concern and
a seriousness most impressive.
Much as we love and revere Emerson, and immeasurable as his service has
been, especially to the younger and more penetrating minds, I think it
will not do at all to say, as one of our critics (Mr. Stedman) has
lately said, that Emerson is as "far above Carlyle as the affairs of the
soul and universe are above those of the contemporary or even the
historic world." Above him he certainly was, in a thinner, colder air,
but not in any sense that implies greater power or a farther range. His
sympathies with the concrete world and his gripe upon it were far less
than Carlyle's. He bore no such burden, he fought no such battle, as the
latter did. His mass, his velocity, his penetrating power, are far less.
A tranquil, high-sailing, fair-weather cloud is Emerson, and a massive,
heavy-laden storm-cloud is Carlyle. Carlyle was never placidly sounding
the azure depths like Emerson, but always pouring and rolling
earthward, with wind, thunder, rain, and hail. He reaches up to the
Emersonian altitudes, but seldom disports himself there; never loses
himself, as Emerson sometimes does; the absorption takes place in the
other direction; he descends to actual affairs and events with fierce
precipitation. Carlyle's own verdict, written in his journal on
Emerson's second visit to him in 1848, was much to the same effect, and,
allowing for the Carlylean exaggeration, was true. He wrote that Emerson
differed as much from himself "as a gymnosophist sitting idle on a
flowery bank may do from a wearied worker and wrestler passing that way
with many of his bones broken."
All men would choose Emerson's fate, Emerson's history; how rare, how
serene, how inspiring, how beautiful, how fortunate! But as between
these two friends, our verdict must be that Carlyle did the more unique
and difficult, the more heroic, piece of work. Whether the more valuable
and important or not, it is perhaps too early in the day to say, but
certainly the more difficult and masterful. As an artist, using the term
in the largest sense, as the master-worker in, and shaper of, the
Concrete, he is immeasurably Emerson's superior. Emerson's two words
were truth and beauty, which lie, as it were, in the same plane, and the
passage from one to the other is easy; it is smooth sailing. Carlyle's
two words were truth and duty, which lie in quite different planes, and
the passage between which is steep and rough. Hence the pain, the
struggle, the picturesque power. Try to shape the actual world of
politics and human affairs according to the ideal truth, and see if you
keep your serenity. There is a Niagara gulf between them that must be
bridged. But what a gripe this man had upon both shores, the real and
the ideal! The quality of action, of tangible performance, that lies in
his works, is unique. "He has not so much written as spoken," and he has
not so much spoken as he has actually wrought. He experienced, in each
of his books, the pain and the antagonism of the man of action. His
mental mood and attitude are the same; as is also his impatience of
abstractions, of theories, of subtleties, of mere words. Indeed, Carlyle
was essentially a man of action, as he himself seemed to think, driven
by fate into literature. He is as real and as earnest as Luther or
Cromwell, and his faults are the same in kind. Not the mere _saying_ of
a thing satisfies him as it does Emerson; you must _do_ it; bring order
out of chaos, make the dead alive, make the past present, in some way
make your fine sayings point to, or result in, fact. He says the
Perennial lies always in the Concrete. Subtlety of intellect, which
conducts you, "not to new clearness, but to ever-new abstruseness, wheel
within wheel, depth under depth," has no charms for him. "My erudite
friend, the astonishing intellect that occupies itself in splitting
hairs, and not in twisting some kind of cordage and effectual
draught-tackle to take the road with, is not to me the most astonishing
of intellects."
Emerson split no hairs, but he twisted very little cordage for the rough
draught-horses of this world. He tells us to hitch our wagon to a star;
and the star is without doubt a good steed, when once fairly caught and
harnessed, but it takes an astronomer to catch it. The value of such
counsel is not very tangible unless it awakes us to the fact that every
power of both heaven and earth is friendly to a noble and courageous
activity.
Carlyle was impatient of Emerson's fine-spun sentences and
transcendental sleight-of-hand. Indeed, from a literary point of view,
one of the most interesting phases of the published correspondence
between these two notable men is the value which each unwittingly set
upon his own methods and work. Each would have the other like himself.
Emerson wants Emersonian epigrams from Carlyle, and Carlyle wants
Carlylean thunder from Emerson. Each was unconsciously his own ideal.
The thing which a man's nature calls him to do,--what else so well worth
doing? Certainly nothing else to him,--but to another? How surely each
one of us would make our fellow over in our own image! Carlyle wants
Emerson more practical, more concrete, more like himself in short. "The
vile Pythons of this Mud-world do verily require to have sun-arrows shot
into them, and red-hot pokers stuck through them, according to
occasion;" do this as I am doing it, or trying to do it, and I shall
like you better. It is well to know that nature will make good compost
of the carcass of an Oliver Cromwell, and produce a cart-load of
turnips from the same; but it is better to appreciate and make the most
of the live Oliver himself. "A faculty is in you for a _sort_ of speech
which is itself _action_, an artistic sort. You _tell_ us with piercing
emphasis that man's soul is great; _show_ us a great soul of a man, in
some work symbolic of such; this is the seal of such a message, and you
will feel by and by that you are called to do this. I long to see some
concrete Thing, some Event, Man's Hope, American Forest, or piece of
Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well _Emersonized_,
depicted by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson and cast forth from
him, then to live by itself." Again: "I will have all things condense
themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy; I have
a _body_ myself; in the brown leaf, sport of the Autumn winds, I find
what mocks all prophesyings, even Hebrew ones." "Alas, it is so easy to
screw one's self up into high and even higher altitudes of
Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows
of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament
sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you, for me; but whither
does it lead? I dread always, to inanity and mere injuring of the
lungs!"--with more of the same sort.
On the other hand, Emerson evidently tires of Carlyle's long-winded
heroes. He would have him give us the gist of the matter in a few
sentences. Cremate your heroes, he seems to say; get all this gas and
water out of them, and give us the handful of lime and iron of which
they are composed. He hungered for the "central monosyllables." He
praises Cromwell and Frederick, yet says to his friend, "that book will
not come which I most wish to read, namely, the culled results, the
quintessence of private conviction, a _liber veritatis_, a few
sentences, hints of the final moral you drew from so much penetrating
inquest into past and present men."
This is highly characteristic of Emerson; his bid for the quintessence
of things. He was always impatient of creative imaginative works; would
sublunate or evaporate them in a hurry. Give him the pith of the matter,
the net result in the most pungent words. It must still be picture and
parable, but in a sort of disembodied or potential state. He fed on the
marrow of Shakespeare's sentences, and apparently cared little for his
marvelous characterizations. One is reminded of the child's riddle:
Under the hill there is a mill, in the mill there is a chest, in the
chest there is a till, in the till there is a phial, in the phial there
is a drop I would not give for all the world. This drop Emerson would
have. Keep or omit the chest and the mill and all that circumlocution,
and give him the precious essence. But the artistic or creative mind
does not want things thus abridged,--does not want the universe reduced
to an epigram. Carlyle wants an actual flesh-and-blood hero, and, what
is more, wants him immersed head and ears in the actual affairs of this
world.
Those who seek to explain Carlyle on the ground of his humble origin
shoot wide of the mark. "Merely a peasant with a glorified intellect,"
says a certain irate female, masquerading as the "Day of Judgment."
It seems to me Carlyle was as little of a peasant as any man of his
time,--a man without one peasant trait or proclivity, a regal and
dominating man, "looking," as he said of one of his own books, "king and
beggar in the face with an indifference of brotherhood and an
indifference of contempt." The two marks of the peasant are stolidity
and abjectness; he is dull and heavy, and he dare not say his soul is
his own. No man ever so hustled and jostled titled dignitaries, and made
them toe the mark, as did Carlyle. It was not merely that his intellect
was towering; it was also his character, his will, his standard of
manhood, that was towering. He bowed to the hero, to valor and personal
worth, never to titles or conventions. The virtues and qualities of his
yeoman ancestry were in him without doubt; his power of application, the
spirit of toil that possessed him, his frugal, self-denying habits, came
from his family and race, but these are not peasant traits, but heroic
traits. A certain coarseness of fibre he had also, together with great
delicacy and sensibility, but these again he shares with all strong
first-class men. You cannot get such histories as Cromwell and Frederick
out of polished _littérateurs_; you must have a man of the same heroic
fibre, of the same inexpugnableness of mind and purpose. Not even was
Emerson adequate to such a task; he was fine enough and high enough, but
he was not coarse enough and broad enough. The scholarly part of
Carlyle's work is nearly always thrown in the shade by the manly part,
the original raciness and personal intensity of the writer. He is not in
the least veiled or hidden by his literary vestments. He is rather
hampered by them, and his sturdy Annandale character often breaks
through them in the most surprising manner. His contemporaries soon
discovered that if here was a great writer, here was also a great man,
come not merely to paint their picture, but to judge them, to weigh them
in the balance. He is eminently an artist, and yet it is not the
artistic or literary impulse that lies at the bottom of his works, but a
moral, human, emotional impulse and attraction,--the impulse of justice,
of veracity, or of sympathy and love.
What love of work well done, what love of genuine leadership, of
devotion to duty, of mastery of affairs, in fact what love of man pure
and simple, lies at the bottom of "Frederick," lies at the bottom of
"Cromwell"! Here is not the disinterestedness of Shakespeare, here is
not the Hellenic flexibility of mind and scientific impartiality Mr.
Arnold demands: here is espousal, here is vindication, here is the moral
bias of the nineteenth century. But here also is _reality_, here is the
creative touch, here are men and things made alive again, palpable to
the understanding and enticing to the imagination. Of all histories
that have fallen into my hands, "Frederick" is the most vital and real.
If the current novels were half so entertaining, I fear I should read
little else. The portrait-painting is like that of Rembrandt; the eye
for battles and battle-fields is like that of Napoleon, or Frederick
himself; the sifting of events, and the separating of the false from the
true, is that of the most patient and laborious science; the descriptive
passages are equaled by those of no other man; while the work as a
whole, as Emerson says, "is a Judgment Day, for its moral verdict, on
the men and nations and manners of modern times." It is to be read for
its honest history; it is to be read for its inexhaustible wit and
humor; it is to be read for its poetic fire, for its felicities of
style, for its burden of human sympathy and effort, its heroic
attractions and stimulating moral judgments. All Carlyle's histories
have the quick, penetrating glance, that stroke of the eye, as the
French say, that lays the matter open to the heart. He did not write in
the old way of a topographical survey of the surface: his "French
Revolution" is more like a transverse section; more like a geologist's
map than like a geographer's; the depths are laid open; the abyss yawns;
the cosmic forces and fires stalk forth and become visible and real. It
was this power to detach and dislocate things and project them against
the light of a fierce and lurid imagination that makes his pages unique
and matchless, of their kind, in literature. He may be deficient in the
historical sense, the sense of development, and of compensation in
history; but in vividness of apprehension of men and events, and power
of portraiture, he is undoubtedly without a rival. "Those devouring eyes
and that portraying hand," Emerson says.
Those who contract their view of Carlyle till they see only his faults
do a very unwise thing. Nearly all his great traits have their shadows.
His power of characterization sometimes breaks away into caricature; his
command of the picturesque leads him into the grotesque; his eloquent
denunciation at times becomes vituperation; his marvelous power to name
things degenerates into outrageous nicknaming; his streaming humor,
which, as Emerson said, floats every object he looks upon, is not free
from streaks of the most crabbed, hide-bound ill-humor. Nearly every
page has a fringe of these things, and sometimes a pretty broad one, but
they are by no means the main matter, and often lend an additional
interest. The great personages, the great events, are never caricatured,
though painted with a bold, free hand, but there is in the border of the
picture all manner of impish and grotesque strokes. In "Frederick" there
is a whole series of secondary men and incidents that are touched off
with the hand of a master caricaturist. Some peculiarity of feature or
manner is seized upon, magnified, and made prominent on all occasions.
We are never suffered to forget George the Second's fish eyes and
gartered leg; nor the lean May-pole mistress of George the First; nor
the Czarina's big fat cheek; nor poor Bruhl, "vainest of human
clothes-horses," with his twelve tailors and his three hundred and
sixty-five suits of clothes; nor Augustus, "the dilapidated strong,"
with his three hundred and fifty-four bastards. Nor can any reader of
that work ever forget "Jenkins' Ear,"--the poor fraction of an ear of an
English sailor snipped off by the Spaniards, and here made to stand for
a whole series of historical events. Indeed, this severed ear looms up
till it becomes like a sign in the zodiac of those times. His portrait
of the French army, which he calls the Dauphiness, is unforgettable, and
is in the best style of his historical caricature. It makes its exit
over the Rhine before Duke Ferdinand, "much in rags, much in disorder,
in terror, and here and there almost in despair, winging their way like
clouds of draggled poultry caught by a mastiff in the corn. Across
Weser, across Ems, finally across the Rhine itself, every feather of
them,--their long-drawn cackle, of a shrieky type, filling all nature in
those months." A good sample of the grotesque in Carlyle, pushed to the
last limit, and perhaps a little beyond, is in this picture of the
Czarina of Russia, stirred up to declare war against Frederick by his
Austrian enemies: "Bombarded with cunningly-devised fabrications, every
wind freighted for her with phantasmal rumors, no ray of direct daylight
visiting the poor Sovereign Woman; who is lazy, not malignant, if she
could avoid it; mainly a mass of esurient oil, with alkali on the back
of alkali poured in, at this rate for ten years past, till, by pouring
and by stirring, they get her to the state of _soap_ and froth."
Carlyle had a narrow escape from being the most formidable blackguard
the world had ever seen; was, indeed, in certain moods, a kind of divine
blackguard,--a purged and pious Rabelais, who could bespatter the devil
with more telling epithets than any other man who ever lived. What a
tongue, what a vocabulary! He fairly oxidizes, burns up, the object of
his opprobrium, in the stream of caustic epithets he turns upon it. He
had a low opinion of the contemporaries of Frederick and Voltaire: they
were "mere ephemera; contemporary eaters, scramblers for provender,
talkers of acceptable hearsay; and related merely to the butteries and
wiggeries of their time, and not related to the Perennialities at all,
as these two were." He did not have to go very far from home for some of
the lineaments of Voltaire's portrait: "He had, if no big gloomy devil
in him among the bright angels that were there, a multitude of ravening,
tumultuary imps, or little devils, very _ill-chained_, and was lodged,
he and his restless little devils, in a skin far too thin for him and
them!"
Of Frederick's cynicism he says there was "always a kind of vinegar
cleanness in it, _except_ in theory." Equally original and felicitous is
the "albuminous simplicity" which he ascribes to the Welfs. Newspaper
men have never forgiven him for calling them the "gazetteer owls of
Minerva;" and our Catholic brethren can hardly relish his reference to
the "consolations" the nuns deal out to the sick as "poisoned
gingerbread." In "Frederick" one comes upon such phrases as
"milk-faced," "bead-roll histories," "heavy pipe-clay natures," a
"stiff-jointed, algebraic kind of piety," etc.
Those who persist in trying Carlyle as a philosopher and man of ideas
miss his purport. He had no philosophy, and laid claim to none, except
what he got from the German metaphysicians,--views which crop out here
and there in "Sartor." He was a preacher of righteousness to his
generation, and a rebuker of its shams and irreverences, and as such he
cut deep, cut to the bone, and to the marrow of the bone. That piercing,
agonized, prophetic, yet withal melodious and winsome voice, how it
rises through and above the multitudinous hum and clatter of
contemporary voices in England, and alone falls upon the ear as from out
the primal depths of moral conviction and power! He is the last man in
the world to be reduced to a system or tried by logical tests. You might
as well try to bind the sea with chains. His appeal is to the
intuitions, the imagination, the moral sense. His power of mental
abstraction was not great; he could not deal in abstract ideas. When he
attempted to state his philosophy, as in the fragment called "Spiritual
Optics," which Froude gives, he is far from satisfactory. His
mathematical proficiency seemed to avail him but little in the region of
pure ideality. His mind is precipitated at once upon the concrete, upon
actual persons and events. This makes him the artist he is, as
distinguished from the mystic and philosopher, and is perhaps the basis
of Emerson's remark, that there is "more character than intellect in
every sentence;" that is, more motive, more will-power, more stress of
conscience, more that appeals to one as a living personal identity,
wrestling with facts and events, than there is that appeals to him as a
contemplative philosopher.
Carlyle owed everything to his power of will and to his unflinching
adherence to principle. He was in no sense a lucky man, had no good
fortune, was borne by no current, was favored and helped by no
circumstance whatever. His life from the first was a steady pull against
both wind and tide. He confronted all the cherished thoughts, beliefs,
tendencies, of his time; he spurned and insulted his age and country. No
man ever before poured out such withering scorn upon his contemporaries.
Many of his political tracts are as blasting as the Satires of Juvenal.
The opinions and practices of his times, in politics, religion, and
literature, were as a stubbly, brambly field, to which he would fain
apply the match and clean the ground for a nobler crop. He would purge
and fertilize the soil by fire. His attitude was one of warning and
rebuking. He was refused every public place he ever aspired to,--every
college and editorial chair. Every man's hand was against him. He was
hated by the Whigs and feared by the Tories. He was poor, proud,
uncompromising, sarcastic; he was morose, dyspeptic, despondent,
compassed about by dragons and all manner of evil menacing forms; in
fact, the odds were fearfully against him, and yet he succeeded, and
succeeded on his own terms. He fairly conquered the world; yes, and the
flesh and the devil. But it was one incessant, heroic struggle and
wrestle from the first. All through his youth and his early manhood he
was nerving himself for the conflict. Whenever he took counsel with
himself it was to give his courage a new fillip. In his letters to his
people, in his private journal, in all his meditations, he never loses
the opportunity to take a new hitch upon his resolution, to screw his
purpose up tighter. Not a moment's relaxation, but ceaseless vigilance
and "desperate hope." In 1830 he says in his journal: "Oh, I care not
for poverty, little even for disgrace, nothing at all for want of
renown. But the horrible feeling is when I cease my own struggle, lose
the consciousness of my own strength, and become positively quite
worldly and wicked." A year later he wrote: "To it, thou _Taugenichts_!
Gird thyself! stir! struggle! forward! forward! Thou art bundled up here
and tied as in a sack. On, then, as in a sack race; running, not
raging!" Carlyle made no terms with himself nor with others. He would
not agree to keep the peace; he would be the voice of absolute
conscience, of absolute justice, come what come might. "Woe to them that
are at ease in Zion," he once said to John Sterling. The stern,
uncompromising front which he first turned to the world he never
relaxed for a moment. He had his way with mankind at all times; or
rather conscience had its way with him at all times in his relations
with mankind. He made no selfish demands, but ideal demands. Jeffries,
seeing his attitude and his earnestness in it, despaired of him; he
looked upon him as a man butting his head against a stone wall; he never
dreamed that the wall would give way before the head did. It was not
mere obstinacy; it was not the pride of opinion: it was the thunders of
conscience, the awful voice of Sinai, within him; he _dared_ not do
otherwise.
A selfish or self-seeking man Carlyle in no sense was, though it has so
often been charged upon him. He was the victim of his own genius; and he
made others its victims, not of his selfishness. This genius, no doubt,
came nearer the demon of Socrates than that of any modern man. He is
under its lash and tyranny from first to last. But the watchword of his
life was "_Entsagen_," renunciation, self-denial, which he learned from
Goethe. His demon did not possess him lightly, but dominated and drove
him.
One would as soon accuse St. Simeon Stylites, thirty years at the top of
his penitential pillar, of selfishness. Seeking his own ends, following
his own demon, St. Simeon certainly was; but seeking his ease or
pleasure, or animated by any unworthy, ignoble purpose, he certainly was
not. No more was Carlyle, each one of whose books was a sort of pillar
of penitence or martyrdom atop of which he wrought and suffered, shut
away from the world, renouncing its pleasures and prizes, wrapped in
deepest gloom and misery, and wrestling with all manner of real and
imaginary demons and hindrances. During his last great work,--the
thirteen years spent in his study at the top of his house, writing the
history of Frederick,--this isolation, this incessant toil and
penitential gloom, were such as only religious devotees have voluntarily
imposed upon themselves.
If Carlyle was "ill to live with," as his mother said, it was not
because he was selfish. He was a man, to borrow one of Emerson's early
phrases, "inflamed to a fury of personality." He must of necessity
assert himself; he is shot with great velocity; he is keyed to an
extraordinary pitch; and it was this, this raging fever of
individuality, if any namable trait or quality, rather than anything
lower in the scale, that often made him an uncomfortable companion and
neighbor.
And it may be said here that his wife had the same complaint, and had it
bad, the feminine form of it, and without the vent and assuagement of it
that her husband found in literature. Little wonder that between two
such persons, living childless together for forty years, each
assiduously cultivating their sensibilities and idiosyncrasies, there
should have been more or less frictions. Both sarcastic, quick-witted,
plain-spoken, sleepless, addicted to morphia and blue-pills, nerves all
on the outside; the wife without any occupation adequate to her genius,
the husband toiling like Hercules at his tasks and groaning much louder;
both flouting at happiness; both magnifying the petty ills of life into
harrowing tragedies; both gifted with "preternatural intensity of
sensation;" Mrs. C. nearly killed by the sting of a wasp; Mr. C. driven
nearly distracted by the crowing of a cock or the baying of a dog; the
wife hot-tempered, the husband atrabilarious; one caustic, the other
arrogant; marrying from admiration rather than from love--could one
reasonably predict, beforehand, a very high state of domestic felicity
for such a couple? and would it be just to lay the blame all on the
husband, as has generally been done in this case? Man and wife were too
much alike; the marriage was in no sense a union of opposites; at no
point did the two sufficiently offset and complement each other; hence,
though deeply devoted, they never seemed to find the repose and the
soothing acquiescence in the society of one another that marriage
should bring. They both had the great virtues,--nobleness, generosity,
courage, deep kindliness, etc.,--but neither of them had the small
virtues. Both gave way under small annoyances, paltry cares, petty
interruptions,--bugs, cocks, donkeys, street noises, etc. To great
emergencies, to great occasions, they could oppose great qualities;
there can be no doubt of that, but the ordinary every-day hindrances and
petty burdens of life fretted their spirits into tatters. Mrs. C. used
frequently to return from her trips to the country with her "mind all
churned into froth,"--no butter of sweet thought or sweet content at
all. Yet Carlyle could say of her, "Not a bad little dame at all. She
and I did aye very weel together; and 'tweel, it was not every one that
could have done with her," which was doubtless the exact truth. Froude
also speaks from personal knowledge when he says: "His was the soft
heart and hers the stern one."
We are now close on to the cardinal fact of Carlyle's life and
teachings, namely, the urgency of his quest for heroes and heroic
qualities. This is the master key to him; the main stress of his
preaching and writing is here. He is the medium and exemplar of the
value of personal force and prowess, and he projected this thought into
current literature and politics, with the emphasis of gunpowder and
torpedoes. He had a vehement and overweening conceit in man. A sort of
anthropomorphic greed and hunger possessed him always, an insatiable
craving for strong, picturesque characters, and for contact and conflict
with them. This was his ruling passion (and it amounted to a passion)
all his days. He fed his soul on heroes and heroic qualities, and all
his literary exploits were a search for these things. Where he found
them not, where he did not come upon some trace of them in books, in
society, in politics, he saw only barrenness and futility. He was an
idealist who was inhospitable to ideas; he must have a man, the flavor
and stimulus of ample concrete personalities. "In the country," he said,
writing to his brother in 1821, "I am like an alien, a stranger and
pilgrim from a far-distant land." His faculties were "up in mutiny, and
slaying one another for lack of fair enemies." He must to the city, to
Edinburgh, and finally to London, where, thirteen years later, we find
his craving as acute as ever. "Oct. 1st. This morning think of the old
primitive Edinburgh scheme of _engineership_; almost meditate for a
moment resuming it _yet_! It were a method of gaining bread, of getting
into contact with men, my two grand wants and prayers."
Nothing but man, but heroes, touched him, moved him, satisfied him. He
stands for heroes and hero-worship, and for that alone. Bring him the
most plausible theory, the most magnanimous idea in the world, and he is
cold, indifferent, or openly insulting; but bring him a brave, strong
man, or the reminiscence of any noble personal trait,--sacrifice,
obedience, reverence,--and every faculty within him stirs and responds.
Dreamers and enthusiasts, with their schemes for the millennium, rushed
to him for aid and comfort, and usually had the door slammed in their
faces. They forgot it was a man he had advertised for, and not an idea.
Indeed, if you had the blow-fly of any popular ism or reform buzzing in
your bonnet, No. 5 Cheyne Row was the house above all others to be
avoided; little chance of inoculating such a mind as Carlyle's with your
notions,--of _blowing_ a toiling and sweating hero at his work. But
welcome to any man with real work to do and the courage to do it;
welcome to any man who stood for any real, tangible thing in his own
right. "In God's name, what _art_ thou? Not Nothing, sayest thou! Then,
How much and what? This is the thing I would know, and even _must_ soon
know, such a pass am I come to!" ("Past and Present.")
Caroline Fox, in her Memoirs, tells how, in 1842, Carlyle's sympathies
were enlisted in behalf of a Cornish miner who had kept his place in the
bottom of a shaft, above a blast the fuse of which had been prematurely
lighted, and allowed his comrades to be hauled up when only one could
escape at a time. He inquired out the hero, who, as by miracle, had
survived the explosion, and set on foot an enterprise to raise funds for
the bettering of his condition. In a letter to Sterling, he said there
was help and profit in knowing that there was such a true and brave
workman living, and working with him on the earth at that time. "Tell
all the people," he said, "that a man of this kind ought to be
hatched,--that it were shameful to eat him as a breakfast egg!"
All Carlyle's sins of omission and commission grew out of this terrible
predilection for the individual hero: this bent or inclination
determined the whole water-shed, so to speak, of his mind; every rill
and torrent swept swiftly and noisily in this one direction. It is the
tragedy in Burns's life that attracts him; the morose heroism in
Johnson's, the copious manliness in Scott's, the lordly and regal
quality in Goethe. Emerson praised Plato to him; but the endless
dialectical hair-splitting of the Greek philosopher,--"how does all this
concern me at all?" he said. But when he discovered that Plato hated the
Athenian democracy most cordially, and poured out his scorn upon it, he
thought much better of him. History swiftly resolves itself into
biography to him; the tide in the affairs of men ebbed and flowed in
obedience to the few potent wills. We do not find him exploiting or
elucidating ideas and principles, but moral qualities,--always on the
scent, on the search of the heroic.
He raises aloft the standard of the individual will, the supremacy of
man over events. He sees the reign of law; none see it clearer. "Eternal
Law is silently present everywhere and everywhen. By Law the Planets
gyrate in their orbits; by some approach to Law the street-cabs ply in
their thoroughfares." But law is still personal will with him, the will
of God. He can see nothing but individuality, but conscious will and
force, in the universe. He believed in a personal God. He had an inward
ground of assurance of it in his own intense personality and vivid
apprehension of personal force and genius. He seems to have believed in
a personal devil. At least he abuses "Auld Nickie-Ben" as one would
hardly think of abusing an abstraction. However impractical we may
regard Carlyle, he was entirely occupied with practical questions; an
idealist turned loose, in the actual affairs of this world, and intent
only on bettering them. That which so drew reformers and all ardent
ideal natures to him was not the character of his conviction, but the
torrid impetuosity of his belief. He had the earnestness of fanaticism,
the earnestness of rebellion; the earnestness of the Long Parliament and
the National Convention,--the only two parliaments he praises. He did
not merely see the truth and placidly state it, standing aloof and apart
from it; but, as soon as his intellect had conceived a thing as true,
every current of his being set swiftly in that direction; it was an
outlet at once for his whole pent-up energies, and there was a flood and
sometimes an inundation of Carlylean wrath and power. Coming from
Goethe, with his marvelous insight and cool, uncommitted moral nature,
to the great Scotchman, is like coming from dress parade to a battle,
from Melancthon to Luther. It would be far from the truth to say that
Goethe was not in earnest: he was all eyes, all vision; he saw
everything, but saw it for his own ends and behoof, for contemplation
and enjoyment. In Carlyle the vision is productive of pain and
suffering, because his moral nature sympathizes so instantly and
thoroughly with his intellectual; it is a call to battle, and every
faculty is enlisted. It was this that made Carlyle akin to the reformers
and the fanatics, and led them to expect more of him than they got. The
artist element in him, and his vital hold upon the central truths of
character and personal force, saved him from any such fate as overtook
his friend Irving.
Out of Carlyle's fierce and rampant individualism come his grasp of
character and his power of human portraiture. It is, perhaps, not too
much to say, that in all literature there is not another such a master
portrait-painter, such a limner and interpreter of historical figures
and physiognomies. That power of the old artists to paint or to carve a
man, to body him forth, almost re-create him, so rare in the moderns,
Carlyle had in a preëminent degree. As an artist it is his
distinguishing gift, and puts him on a par with Rembrandt, Angelo,
Reynolds, and with the antique masters of sculpture. He could put his
finger upon the weak point and upon the strong point of a man as
unerringly as fate. He knew a man as a jockey knows a horse. His
pictures of Johnson, of Boswell, of Voltaire, of Mirabeau, what
masterpieces! His portrait of Coleridge will doubtless survive all
others, inadequate as it is in many ways; one fears, also that poor Lamb
has been stamped to last. None of Carlyle's characterizations have
excited more ill-feeling than this same one of Lamb. But it was plain
from the outset that Carlyle could not like such a verbal acrobat as
Lamb. He doubtless had him or his kind in view when he wrote this
passage in "Past and Present:" "His poor fraction of sense has to be
perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me,--perhaps
(this is the commonest) to be topsy-turvied, left standing on its head,
that I may remember it the better! Such grinning insanity is very sad to
the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they
should look on one like faces! I love honest laughter as I do sunlight,
but not dishonest; most kinds of dancing, too, but the St. Vitus kind,
not at all!"
If Carlyle had taken to the brush instead of to the pen, he would
probably have left a gallery of portraits such as this century has not
seen. In his letters, journals, reminiscences, etc., for him to mention
a man is to describe his face, and with what graphic pen-and-ink
sketches they abound! Let me extract a few of them. Here is Rousseau's
face, from "Heroes and Hero Worship:" "A high but narrow-contracted
intensity in it; bony brows; deep, straight-set eyes, in which there is
something bewildered-looking,--bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness;
a face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of an antagonism
against that; something mean, plebeian, there, redeemed only by
_intensity_; the face of what is called a fanatic,--a sadly _contracted_
hero!" Here a glimpse of Danton: "Through whose black brows and rude,
flattened face there looks a waste energy as of Hercules." Camille
Desmoulins: "With the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated
with genius, as if a naphtha lamp burned in it." Through Mirabeau's
"shaggy, beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face there
look natural ugliness, smallpox, incontinence, bankruptcy, and burning
fire of genius; like comet fire, glaring fuliginous through murkiest
confusions."
On first meeting with John Stuart Mill he describes him to his wife as
"a slender, rather tall, and elegant youth, with small, clear,
Roman-nosed face, two small, earnestly smiling eyes; modest, remarkably
gifted with precision of utterance; enthusiastic, yet lucid, calm; not a
great, yet distinctly a gifted and amiable youth."
A London editor, whom he met about the same time, he describes as "a
tall, loose, lank-haired, wrinkly, wintry, vehement-looking flail of a
man." He goes into the House of Commons on one of his early visits to
London: "Althorp spoke, a thick, large, broad-whiskered, farmer-looking
man; Hume also, a powdered, clean, burly fellow; and Wetherell, a
beetle-browed, sagacious, quizzical old gentleman; then Davies, a
Roman-nosed dandy," etc. He must touch off the portrait of every man he
sees. De Quincey "is one of the smallest men you ever in your life
beheld; but with a most gentle and sensible face, only that the teeth
are destroyed by opium, and the little bit of an under lip projects like
a shelf." Leigh Hunt: "Dark complexion (a trace of the African, I
believe); copious, clean, strong black hair, beautifully shaped head,
fine, beaming, serious hazel eyes; seriousness and intellect the main
expression of the face (to our surprise at first)."
Here is his sketch of Tennyson: "A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed,
bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and
easy, who swings outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an
inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke. Great now and
then when he does emerge,--a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted
man."
Here we have Dickens in 1840: "Clear blue intelligent eyes; eyebrows
that he arches amazingly; large, protrusive, rather loose mouth; a face
of most extreme _mobility_, which he shuttles about--eyebrows, eyes,
mouth, and all--in a very singular manner while speaking. Surmount this
with a loose coil of common-colored hair, and set it on a small compact
figure, very small, and dressed à la D'Orsay rather than well,--this is
Pickwick."
Here is a glimpse of Grote, the historian of Greece: "A man with
straight upper lip, large chin, and open mouth (spout mouth); for the
rest, a tall man, with dull, thoughtful brow and lank, disheveled hair,
greatly the look of a prosperous Dissenting minister."
In telling Emerson whom he shall see in London, he says: "Southey's
complexion is still healthy mahogany brown, with a fleece of white hair,
and eyes that seem running at full gallop; old Rogers, with his pale
head, white, bare, and cold as snow, with those large blue eyes, cruel,
sorrowful, and that sardonic shelf chin."
In another letter he draws this portrait of Webster: "As a logic-fencer,
advocate, or parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him, at
first sight, against all the extant world. The tanned complexion; that
amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of
brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown_; the
mastiff-mouth accurately closed: I have not traced as much of _silent
Berserker rage_, that I remember of, in any other man." In writing his
histories Carlyle valued, above almost anything else, a good portrait of
his hero, and searched far and wide for such. He roamed through endless
picture-galleries in Germany searching for a genuine portrait of
Frederick the Great, and at last, chiefly by good luck, hit upon the
thing he was in quest of. "If one would buy an indisputably authentic
_old shoe_ of William Wallace for hundreds of pounds, and run to look at
it from all ends of Scotland, what would one give for an authentic
visible shadow of his face, could such, by art natural or art magic, now
be had!" "Often I have found a Portrait superior in real instruction to
half a dozen written 'Biographies,' as Biographies are written; or,
rather, let me say, I have found that the Portrait was a small lighted
_candle_ by which the Biographies could for the first time be _read_,
and some human interpretation be made of them."