our critical chapter to a more convenient season.
VI.
PAST AND PRESENT.[10]
Here is Carlyle’s new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to follow his
poem on France, entitled the History of the French Revolution. In its
first aspect it is a political tract, and since Burke, since Milton,
we have had nothing to compare with it. It grapples honestly with the
facts lying before all men, groups and disposes them with a master’s
mind, and, with a heart full of manly tenderness, offers his best
counsel to his brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and
accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the dreadful
political signs in England for the last few years, has conversed much
on these topics with such wise men of all ranks and parties as are
drawn to a scholar’s house, until such daily and nightly meditation
has grown into a great connection, if not a system of thoughts;
and the topic of English politics becomes the best vehicle for the
expression of his recent thinking, recommended to him by the desire
to give some timely counsels, and to strip the worst mischiefs of
their plausibility. It is a brave and just book, and not a semblance.
“No new truth,” say the critics on all sides. Is it so? Truth is very
old, but the merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects
in their right places, and he is the commander who is always in the
mount, whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details
into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than
any other. The book makes great approaches to true contemporary
history, a very rare success, and firmly holds up to daylight the
absurdities still tolerated in the English and European system. It
is such an appeal to the conscience and honor of England as cannot
be forgotten, or be feigned to be forgotten. It has the merit which
belongs to every honest book, that it was self-examining before it
was eloquent, and so hits all other men, and, as the country people
say of good preaching, “comes bounce down into every pew.” Every
reader shall carry away something. The scholar shall read and write,
the farmer and mechanic shall toil, with new resolution, nor forget
the book when they resume their labor.
Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers a believer in
political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity of the
times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in good bills,
but the vice in false and superficial aims of the people, and the
remedy in honesty and insight. Like every work of genius, its great
value is in telling such simple truths. As we recall the topics, we
are struck with the force given to the plain truths; the picture of
the English nation all sitting enchanted, the poor, enchanted so that
they cannot work, the rich, enchanted so that they cannot enjoy, and
are rich in vain; the exposure of the progress of fraud into all arts
and social activities; the proposition that the laborer must have
a greater share in his earnings; that the principle of permanence
shall be admitted into all contracts of mutual service; that the
state shall provide at least schoolmaster’s education for all the
citizens; the exhortation to the workman that he shall respect the
work and not the wages; to the scholar that he shall be there for
light; to the idle, that no man shall sit idle; the picture of Abbot
Samson, the true governor, who “is not there to expect reason and
nobleness of others, he is there to give them of his own reason
and nobleness;” and the assumption throughout the book, that a new
chivalry and nobility, namely the dynasty of labor, is replacing the
old nobilities. These things strike us with a force which reminds
us of the morals of the Oriental or early Greek masters, and of no
modern book. Truly in these things is great reward. It is not by
sitting still at a grand distance and calling the human race _larvæ_,
that men are to be helped, nor by helping the depraved after their
own foolish fashion, but by doing unweariedly the particular work we
were born to do. Let no man think himself absolved because he does a
generous action and befriends the poor, but let him see whether he so
holds his property that a benefit goes from it to all. A man’s diet
should be what is simplest and readiest to be had, because it is
so private a good. His house should be better, because that is for
the use of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, and is the property of
the traveller. But his speech is a perpetual and public instrument;
let that always side with the race and yield neither a lie nor a
sneer. His manners,—let them be hospitable and civilizing, so that
no Phidias or Raphael shall have taught anything better in canvas or
stone; and his acts should be representative of the human race, as
one who makes them rich in his having, and poor in his want.
It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the
contemporary practical questions; not because he then has all men
for his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of the
problem, and the waste of strength in gathering unripe fruits. The
task is superhuman; and the poet knows well that a little time will
do more than the most puissant genius. Time stills the loud noise of
opinions, sinks the small, raises the great, so that the true emerges
without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but the truth of
the present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is
unattainable. Each man can very well know his own part of duty, if
he will; but to bring out the truth for beauty, and as literature,
surmounts the powers of art. The most elaborate history of to-day
will have the oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The
historian of to-day is yet three ages off. The poet cannot descend
into the turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts. Hence
that necessity of isolation which genius has always felt. He must
stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.
But when the political aspects are so calamitous that the sympathies
of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher than literary
inspiration may succor him. It is a costly proof of character, that
the most renowned scholar of England should take his reputation in
his hand and should descend into the ring; and he has added to his
love whatever honor his opinions may forfeit. To atone for this
departure from the vows of the scholar and his eternal duties to
this secular charity, we have at least this gain, that here is a
message which those to whom it was addressed cannot choose but hear.
Though they die, they must listen. It is plain that whether by hope
or by fear, or were it only by delight in this panorama of brilliant
images, all the great classes of English society must read, even
those whose existence it proscribes. Poor Queen Victoria,—poor Sir
Robert Peel, poor Primate and Bishops,—poor Dukes and Lords! There
is no help in place or pride or in looking another way; a grain of
wit is more penetrating than the lightning of the night-storm, which
no curtains or shutters will keep out. Here is a book which will be
read, no thanks to anybody but itself. What pains, what hopes, what
vows, shall come of the reading! Here is a book as full of treason as
an egg is full of meat, and every lordship and worship and high form
and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a foot-ball into the
air, and kept in the air, with merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet
not a word is punishable by statute. The wit has eluded all official
zeal; and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this flaming
sword of Cherubim waved high in air, illuminates the whole horizon,
and shows to the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts. Worst
of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all
sympathy, by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservatism,
and impressing the reader with the conviction that the satirist
himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent in
English land and institutions, and a genuine respect for the basis of
truth in those whom he exposes.
We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of
this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the talent
displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special criticism in the
wrong. And we may easily fail in expressing the general objection
which we feel. It appears to us as a certain disproportion in the
picture, caused by the obtrusion of the whims of the painter. In
this work, as in his former labors, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick
giant. His humors are expressed with so much force of constitution
that his fancies are more attractive and more credible than the
sanity of duller men. But the habitual exaggeration of the tone
wearies whilst it stimulates. It is felt to be so much deduction
from the universality of the picture. It is not serene sunshine, but
everything is seen in lurid storm-lights. Every object attitudinizes,
to the very mountains and stars almost, under the refraction of this
wonderful humorist; and instead of the common earth and sky, we have
a Martin’s Creation or Judgment Day. A crisis has always arrived
which requires a _deus ex machinâ_. One can hardly credit, whilst
under the spell of this magician, that the world always had the same
bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us,—as of a failed world just
re-collecting its old withered forces to begin again and try to do a
little business. It was perhaps inseparable from the attempt to write
a book of wit and imagination on English politics, that a certain
local emphasis and love of effect, such as is the vice of preaching,
should appear,—producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by
the excess of value attributed to circumstances. But the splendor
of wit cannot outdazzle the calm daylight, which always shows every
individual man in balance with his age, and able to work out his own
salvation from all the follies of that, and no such glaring contrasts
or severalties in that or this. Each age has its own follies, as its
majority is made up of foolish young people; its superstitions appear
no superstitions to itself; and if you should ask the contemporary,
he would tell you, with pride or with regret, (according as he was
practical or poetic), that he had none. But after a short time, down
go its follies and weakness and the memory of them; its virtues alone
remain, and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful
superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in the
horizon with mist and color. The revelation of Reason is this of the
unchangeableness of the fact of humanity under all its subjective
aspects; that to the cowering it always cowers, to the daring it
opens great avenues. The ancients are only venerable to us because
distance has destroyed what was trivial; as the sun and stars affect
us only grandly, because we cannot reach to their smoke and surfaces
and say, Is that all?
And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing dangers
of the English State, may easily excuse some over-coloring of the
picture; and we at this distance are not so far removed from any of
the specific evils, and are deeply participant in too many, not to
share the gloom and thank the love and courage of the counsellor.
This book is full of humanity, and nothing is more excellent in
this as in all Mr. Carlyle’s works, than the attitude of the writer.
He has the dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to
him, and never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of the great
line of scholars, he sustains their office in the highest credit
and honor. If the good heaven have any good word to impart to this
unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for its
occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of criticism,
that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close. Let who will be
the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye off from that gracious
Infinite which embosoms us.
As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main
one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how adroit,
what thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his expedient
for expressing those unproven opinions which he entertains but
will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of straw from the
cell,—and the respectable Sauerteig, or Teufelsdröckh, or Dryasdust,
or Picturesque Traveller, says what is put into his mouth, and
disappears. That morbid temperament has given his rhetoric a somewhat
bloated character; a luxury to many imaginative and learned persons,
like a showery south-wind with its sun-bursts and rapid chasing of
lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to
multitudes of reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession
were possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it must not be
forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes with
a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,—in all this glad and
needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet ever and anon,
as if catching the glance of one wise man in the crowd, quit his
tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level tone the very word,
and then with new glee return to his game. He is like a lover or an
outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade, which is nonsense to
the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is meant. He does
not dodge the question, but gives sincerity where it is due.
One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in literature
few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple ancient, and
Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains. Burke sometimes
reaches to that exuberant fulness, though deficient in depth.
Carlyle, in his strange, half-mad way, has entered the Field of the
Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigor and wealth of resource which has no
rival in the tourney-play of these times;—the indubitable champion
of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the modern system,
with its infinity of details, into style. We have been civilizing
very fast, building London and Paris, and now planting New England
and India, New Holland and Oregon,—and it has not appeared in
literature; there has been no analogous expansion and recomposition
in books. Carlyle’s style is the first emergence of all this wealth
and labor with which the world has gone with child so long. London
and Europe, tunnelled, graded, corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and
East and West Indies for dependencies; and America, with the Rocky
Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in literature.
This is the first invasion and conquest. How like an air-balloon or
bird of Jove does he seem to float over the continent, and stooping
here and there pounce on a fact as a symbol which was never a symbol
before. This is the first experiment, and something of rudeness
and haste must be pardoned to so great an achievement. It will be
done again and again, sharper, simpler; but fortunate is he who did
it first, though never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose
character pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had
anything in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of
Carlyle. He “shakes with his mountain mirth.” It is like the laughter
of the Genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house
and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo the
dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in his
rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his frame
and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full of rhythm,
not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but in the burdens,
refrains, and grand returns of his sense and music. Whatever thought
or motto has once appeared to him fraught with meaning, becomes an
omen to him henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper tones and
weightier import, now as threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic
reverberation, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next ages
returned the sound.
VII.
A LETTER.[11]
As we are very liable, in common with the letter-writing world, to
fall behindhand in our correspondence; and a little more liable
because in consequence of our editorial function we receive more
epistles than our individual share, we have thought that we might
clear our account by writing a quarterly catholic letter to all
and several who have honored us, in verse or prose, with their
confidence, and expressed a curiosity to know our opinion. We shall
be compelled to dispose very rapidly of quite miscellaneous topics.
And first, in regard to the writer who has given us his speculations
on Rail-roads and Air-roads, our correspondent shall have his own
way. To the railway, we must say,—like the courageous lord mayor at
his first hunting, when told the hare was coming,—“Let it come, in
Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.” Very unlooked-for political and
social effects of the iron road are fast appearing. It will require
an expansion of the police of the old world. When a railroad train
shoots through Europe every day from Brussels to Vienna, from Vienna
to Constantinople, it cannot stop every twenty or thirty miles at a
German custom-house, for examination of property and passports. But
when our correspondent proceeds to flying-machines, we have no longer
the smallest taper-light of credible information and experience left,
and must speak on _a priori_ grounds.
Shortly then, we think the population is not yet quite fit for
them, and therefore there will be none. Our friend suggests so many
inconveniences from piracy out of the high air to orchards and lone
houses, and also to other high fliers; and the total inadequacy of
the present system of defence, that we have not the heart to break
the sleep of the good public by the repetition of these details. When
children come into the library, we put the inkstand and the watch on
the high shelf until they be a little older; and Nature has set the
sun and moon in plain sight and use, but laid them on the high shelf
where her roystering boys may not in some mad Saturday afternoon pull
them down or burn their fingers. The sea and the iron road are safer
toys for such ungrown people; we are not yet ripe to be birds.
In the next place, to fifteen letters on Communities, and the
Prospects of Culture, and the destinies of the cultivated class,—what
answer? Excellent reasons have been shown us why the writers,
obviously persons of sincerity and elegance, should be dissatisfied
with the life they lead, and with their company. They have exhausted
all its benefit, and will not bear it much longer. Excellent reasons
they have shown why something better should be tried. They want a
friend to whom they can speak and from whom they may hear now and
then a reasonable word. They are willing to work, so it be with
friends. They do not entertain anything absurd or even difficult.
They do not wish to force society into hated reforms, nor to break
with society. They do not wish a township, or any large expenditure,
or incorporated association, but simply a concentration of chosen
people. By the slightest possible concert, persevered in through
four or five years, they think that a neighborhood might be formed
of friends who would provoke each other to the best activity. They
believe that this society would fill up the terrific chasm of ennui,
and would give their genius that inspiration which it seems to wait
in vain.
But, “the selfishness!” One of the writers relentingly says, “What
shall my uncles and aunts do without me?” and desires distinctly to
be understood not to propose the Indian mode of giving decrepit
relatives as much of the mud of holy Ganges as they can swallow, and
more, but to begin the enterprise of concentration by concentrating
all uncles and aunts in one delightful village by themselves!—so
heedless is our correspondent of putting all the dough into one
pan, and all the leaven into another. Another objection seems to
have occurred to a subtle but ardent advocate. Is it, he writes, a
too great wilfulness and intermeddling with life,—with life, which
is better accepted than calculated? Perhaps so; but let us not be
too curiously good. The Buddhist is a practical Necessitarian; the
Yankee is not. We do a great many selfish things every day; among
them all let us do one thing of enlightened selfishness. It were fit
to forbid concert and calculation in this particular, if that were
our system, if we were up to the mark of self-denial and faith in
our general activity. But to be prudent in all the particulars of
life, and in this one thing alone religiously forbearing; prudent to
secure to ourselves an injurious society, temptations to folly and
despair, degrading examples, and enemies; and only abstinent when it
is proposed to provide ourselves with guides, examples, lovers!
We shall hardly trust ourselves to reply to arguments by which we
would too gladly be persuaded. The more discontent, the better we
like it. It is not for nothing, we assure ourselves, that our people
are busied with these projects of a better social state, and that
sincere persons of all parties are demanding somewhat vital and
poetic of our stagnant society. How fantastic and unpresentable
soever the theory has hitherto seemed, how swiftly shrinking from the
examination of practical men, let us not lose the warning of that
most significant dream. How joyfully we have felt the admonition of
larger natures which despised our aims and pursuits, conscious that
a voice out of heaven spoke to us in that scorn. But it would be
unjust not to remind our younger friends that whilst this aspiration
has always made its mark in the lives of men of thought, in vigorous
individuals it does not remain a detached object, but is satisfied
along with the satisfaction of other aims. To live solitary and
unexpressed, is painful,—painful in proportion to one’s consciousness
of ripeness and equality to the offices of friendship. But herein we
are never quite forsaken by the Divine Providence. The loneliest man,
after twenty years, discovers that he stood in a circle of friends,
who will then show like a close fraternity held by some masonic tie.
But we are impatient of the tedious introductions of Destiny, and a
little faithless, and would venture something to accelerate them. One
thing is plain, that discontent and the luxury of tears will bring
nothing to pass. Regrets and Bohemian castles and æsthetic villages
are not a very self-helping class of productions, but are the voices
of debility. Especially to one importunate correspondent we must say
that there is no chance for the æsthetic village. Every one of the
villagers has committed his several blunder; his genius was good, his
stars consenting, but he was a marplot. And though the recuperative
force in every man may be relied on infinitely, it must be relied on
before it will exert itself. As long as he sleeps in the shade of the
present error, the after-nature does not betray its resources. Whilst
he dwells in the old sin, he will pay the old fine.