longer and more valuable article, a blended defence and eulogium of a
_terra incognita_, somewhat similar in spirit to that of Madame de
Staël's revelations twenty years before, and in which the writer shows
great admiration of German poetry and criticism. Perhaps no Englishman,
with the possible exceptions of Julius Hare and Coleridge,--the latter
then a broken-down old man,--had at that time so profound an
acquaintance as Carlyle with German literature, which was his food and
life during the seven years' retirement on his moorland farm. This essay
also was comparatively free from the involved, grotesque, but vivid
style of his later works; and it was religious in its tone. "It is
mournful," writes he, "to see so many noble, tender, and aspiring minds
deserted of that light which once guided all such; mourning in the
darkness because there is no home for the soul; or, what is worse,
pitching tents among the ashes, and kindling weak, earthly lamps which
we are to take for stars. But this darkness is very transitory. These
ashes are the soil of future herbage and richer harvests. Religion
dwells in the soul of man, and is as eternal as the being of man."
In this extract we see the optimism which runs through Carlyle's earlier
writings,--the faith in creation which is to succeed destruction, the
immortal hopes which sustain the soul. He believed in the God of
Abraham, and was as far from being a scoffer as the heavens are higher
than the earth. He had renounced historical Christianity, but he adhered
to its essential spirit.
The next article which Carlyle published seems to have been on Werner,
followed the same year, 1828, by one on Goethe's "Helena,"--a
continuation of his "Faust." This transcendent work of German art, which
should be studied rather than read, is commented on by the reviewer with
boundless admiration. If there was one human being whom Carlyle
worshipped it was the dictator of German literature, who reigned at
Weimar as Voltaire had reigned at Ferney. If he was not the first to
introduce the writings of Goethe into England, he was the great German's
warmest admirer. If Goethe had faults, they were to Carlyle the faults
of a god, and he exalted him as the greatest light of modern times,--a
new force in the world, a new fire in the soul, who inaugurated a new
era in literature which went to the heart of cultivated Europe, weary of
the doubts and denials that Voltaire had made fashionable. It seemed to
Carlyle that Goethe entered into the sorrows, the solemn questionings
and affirmations of the soul, seeking emancipation from dogmas and
denials alike, and, in the spirit of Plato, resting on the certitudes of
a higher life,--calm, self-poised, many-sided, having subdued passion as
he had outgrown cant; full of benignity, free from sarcasm; a man of
mighty and deep experiences, with knowledge of himself, of the world,
and the whole realm of literature; a great artist as well as a great
genius, seated on the throne of letters, not to scatter thunderbolts,
but to instruct the present and future generations.
The next great essay which Carlyle published, this time in the Edinburgh
Review, was on Burns,--a hackneyed subject, yet treated with masterly
ability. This article, in some respects his best, entirely free from
mannerisms and affectation of style, is just in its criticism, glowing
with eloquence, and full of sympathy with the infirmities of a great
poet, showing a remarkable insight into what is noblest and truest. This
essay is likely to live for style alone, aside from its various other
merits. It is complete, exhaustive, brilliant, such as only a Scotchman
could have written who was familiar with the laborious lives of the
peasantry, living in the realm of art and truth, careless of outward
circumstances and trappings, and exalting only what is immortal and
lofty. While Carlyle sees in Goethe the impersonation of human
wisdom,--in every aspect a success, outwardly and inwardly, serene and
potent as an Olympian deity,--he sees in Burns a highly gifted genius
also, but yet a wreck and a failure; a man broken down by the force of
that degrading habit which unfortunately and peculiarly and even
mysteriously robs a man of all dignity, all honor, and all sense of
shame. Amid the misfortunes, the mistakes, and the degradations of the
born poet, whom he alike admires and pities and mildly blames, he sees
also the noble elements of the poet's gifted soul, and loves him,
especially for his sincerity, which next to labor he uniformly praises.
It was the truthfulness he saw in Burns which constrained Carlyle's
affection,--the poet's sympathy and humanity, speaking out of his heart
in unconscious earnestness and plaintive melody; sad and sorrowful, of
course, since his life was an unsuccessful battle with himself, but free
from egotism, and full of a love which no misery could crush,--so unlike
that other greatest poet of our century, "whose exemplar was Satan, the
hero of his poetry and the model of his life." In this most beautiful
and finished essay Carlyle paints the man in his true colors,--sinning
and sinned against, courageous while yielding, poor but proud, scornful
yet affectionate; singing in matchless lyrics the sentiments of the
people from whom he sprung and among whom he died, which lyrics, though
but fragments indeed, are precious and imperishable.
In the same year appeared the Life of Heyne,--the great German scholar,
pushing his way from the depths of poverty and obscurity, by force of
patient industry and genius, to a proud position and a national fame.
"Let no unfriended son of genius despair," exclaims Carlyle. "If he have
the will, the power will not be denied him. Like the acorn, carelessly
cast abroad in the wilderness, yet it rises to be an oak; on the wild
soil it nourishes itself; it defies the tempest, and lives for a
thousand years." The whole outward life of Carlyle himself, like that of
Heyne, was an example of heroism amid difficulties, and hope amid
the storms.
The next noticeable article which Carlyle published was on Voltaire, and
appeared in the Quarterly Review in 1829. It would appear that he hoped
to find in this great oracle and guide of the eighteenth century
something to admire and praise commensurate with his great fame. But
vainly. Voltaire, though fortunate beyond example in literary history,
versatile, laborious, brilliant in style,--poet, satirist, historian,
and essayist,--seemed to Carlyle to be superficial, irreligious, and
egotistical. The critic ascribes his power to ridicule,--a Lucian, who
destroyed but did not reconstruct; worldly, material, sceptical,
defiant, utterly lacking that earnestness without which nothing
permanently great can be effected. Carlyle says:--
"Voltaire read history, not with the eye of a devout seer, or even
critic, but through a pair of mere anti-Catholic spectacles. It is not a
mighty drama, enacted on the theatre of infinitude, with suns for lamps
and eternity as a background, whose author is God and whose purport
leads to the throne of God, but a poor, wearisome debating-club dispute,
spun through ten centuries, between the Encyclopédie and the Sorbonne."
Carlyle's essays for the next two years, chiefly on German literature,
which he admired and sought to introduce to his countrymen, were
published in various Reviews. I can only allude to one on Richter, whose
whimsicality of style he unconsciously copied, and whose original ideas
he made his own. In this essay Carlyle introduced to the English people
a great German, but a grotesque, whose writings will probably never be
read much out of Germany, excellent as they are, on account of the
"jarring combination of parentheses, dashes, hyphens, figures without
limit, one tissue of metaphors and similes, interlaced with epigrammatic
bursts and sardonic turns,--a heterogeneous, unparalleled imbroglio of
perplexity and extravagance." There was another, on Schiller, not an
idol to Carlyle as Goethe was, yet a great poet and a true man, with
deep insight and intense earnestness. "His works," said Carlyle, "and
the memory of what he was, will arise afar off, like a towering landmark
in the solitude of the past, when distance shall have dwarfed into
invisibility many lesser people that once encompassed him, and hid them
forever from the near beholder."
Thus far Carlyle had confined himself to biography and essays on German
literature, in which his extraordinary insight is seen; but now he
enters another field, and writes a strictly original essay, called
"Characteristics," published in the Edinburgh Review in the prolific
year of 1831, in which essay we see the germs of his philosophy. The
article is hard to read, and is disfigured by obscurities which leave a
doubt on the mind of the reader as to whether the author understood the
subject about which he was writing,--for Carlyle was not a philosopher,
but a painter and prose-poet. There is no stream of logic running
consistently through his writings. In "Characteristics" he seems to have
had merely glimpses of great truths which he could not clearly express,
and which won him the reputation of being a German transcendentalist.
Its leading idea is the commonplace one of the progress of society,
which no sane and Christian man has ever seriously questioned,--not an
uninterrupted progress, but a general advance, brought about by
Christian ideas. Any other view of progress is dreary and discouraging;
nor is this inconsistent with great catastrophes and national
backslidings, with the fall of empires, and French Revolutions.
We note at this time in Carlyle's writings, on the whole, a cheerful
view of human life in spite of sorrows, hardships, and disappointments,
which are made by Divine Providence to act as healthy discipline. We see
nothing of the angry pessimism of his later writings. Those years at
Craigenputtock were healthy and wholesome; he labored in hope, and had
great intellectual and artistic enjoyment, which reconciled him to
solitude,--the chief evil with which he had to contend, after dyspepsia.
His habits were frugal, but poverty did not stare him in the face, since
he had the income of the farm. It does not appear that the deep gloom
which subsequently came over his soul oppressed him in his moorland
retreat. He did not sympathize with any religion of denials, but felt
that out of the jargon of false and pretentious philosophies would come
at last a positive belief which would once more enthrone God in
the world.
After writing another characteristic article, on Biography, he furnished
for Fraser's Magazine one of the finest biographical portraits ever
painted,--that of Dr. Johnson, in which that cyclopean worker stands
out, with even more distinctness than in Boswell's "Life," as one of the
most honest, earnest, patient laborers in the whole field of literature.
Carlyle makes us almost love this man, in spite of his awkwardness,
dogmatism, and petulance. Johnson in his day was an acknowledged
dictator on all literary questions, surrounded by admirers of the
highest gifts, who did homage to his learning,--a man of more striking
individuality than any other celebrity in England, and a man of intense
religious convictions in an age of religious indifference. We now wonder
why this struggling, poorly paid, and disagreeable man of letters should
have had such an ascendency over men superior to himself in learning,
genius, and culture, as Burke and Gibbon doubtless were. Even Goldsmith,
whom he snubbed and loved, is now more popular than he. It was the
heroism of his character which Carlyle so much admired and so vividly
described,--contending with so many difficulties, yet surmounting them
all by his persistent industry and noble aspirations; never losing faith
in himself or his Maker, never servilely bowing down to rank and wealth,
as others did, and maintaining his self-respect in whatever condition he
was placed. In this delightful biography we are made to see the
superiority of character to genius, and the dignity of labor when
idleness was the coveted desire of most fortunate men, as well as the
almost universal vice of the magnates of the land. Labor, to the mind of
Johnson as well as to that of Carlyle, is not only honorable, but is a
necessity which Nature imposes as the condition of happiness and
usefulness. Nor does Carlyle sneer at the wedded life of Johnson, made
up of "drizzle and dry weather," but reverences his fidelity to his best
friend, uninteresting as she was to the world, and his plaintive and
touching grief when she passed away.
Carlyle in this essay exalts a life of letters, however poorly paid
(which Pope in his "Dunciad" did so much to depreciate), showing how it
contributes to the elevation of a nation, and to those lofty pleasures
which no wealth can purchase. But it is the moral dignity of Johnson
which the essay makes to shine most conspicuously in his character,
supported as he was by the truths of religion, in which under all
circumstances he proudly glories, and without which he must have made
shipwreck of himself amid so many discouragements, maladies, and
embarrassments,--for his greatest labors were made with poverty,
distress, and obscurity for his companions,--until at last, victorious
over every external evil and vile temptation, he emerged into the realm
of peace and light, and became an oracle and a sage wherever he chose
to go.
Johnson was the greatest master of conversation in his day, whose
detached sayings are still quoted more often than his most elaborate
periods. I apprehend that there was a great contrast between Johnson's
writings and his conversation. While the former are Ciceronian, his talk
was epigrammatic, terse, and direct; and its charm and power were in his
pointed and vehement Saxon style. Had he talked as he wrote, he would
have been wearisome and pedantic. Still, like Coleridge and Robert Hall,
he preached rather than conversed, thinking what he himself should say
rather than paying attention to what others said, except to combat and
rebuke them,--a discourser, as Macaulay was; not one to suggest
interchange of ideas, as Addison did. But neither power of conversation
nor learning would have made Johnson a literary dictator. His power was
in the force of his character, his earnestness, and sincerity, even more
than in his genius.
I will not dwell on the other Review articles which Carlyle wrote in his
isolated retreat, since published as "Miscellanies," on which his fame
in no small degree rests,--even as the essays of Macaulay may be read
when his more elaborate History will lie neglected on the shelves of
libraries. Carlyle put his soul into these miscellanies, and the labor
and enjoyment of writing made him partially forget his ailments. I look
upon those years at Craigenputtock as the brightest and healthiest of
his life, removed as he was from the sight of levities and follies which
tormented his soul and irritated his temper.
Carlyle contrived to save about £200 from his literary earnings, so
frugal was his life and so free from temptations. His recreation was in
wandering on foot or horseback over the silent moors and unending hills,
watered by nameless rills and shadowed by mists and vapors. His life was
solitary, but not more so than that of Moses amid the deserts of
Midian,--isolation, indeed, but in which the highest wisdom is matured.
Into this retreat Emerson penetrated, a young man, with boundless
enthusiasm for his teacher,--for Carlyle was a teacher to him as to
hundreds of others in this country. Carlyle never had a truer and better
friend than Emerson, who opened to him the great reward of recognition
in distant America while yet his own land refused to take knowledge of
him; and this friendship continued to the end, an honor to both,--for
Carlyle never saw in Emerson's writings the genius and wisdom which his
American friend admired in the Scottish sage. Nor were their opinions so
harmonious as some suppose. Emerson despised Calvinism, and had no
definite opinions on any theological subject; Carlyle was a Calvinist
without the theology of Calvinism, if that be possible. He did not,
indeed, believe in historical Christianity, but he had the profoundest
convictions of an overruling God, reigning in justice, and making the
wrath of man to praise Him. Carlyle, too, despised everything visionary
and indefinite, and had more respect for what is brought about by
revolution than by evolution. But of all things he held in profoundest
abhorrence the dreary theories of materialists and political economists.
It was the spirit and not the body which stood out in his eyes as of
most importance; it was the manly virtues which he reverenced in man,
not his clothes and surroundings. And it was on this lofty spiritual
plane that Carlyle and Emerson stood in complete harmony together.
I cannot quit this part of Carlyle's life without mention of what I
conceive to be his most original and remarkable production,--"Sartor
Resartus,"--The Stitcher Restitched: or, The Tailor Done Over,--the
title of an old Scotch song. It is a quaintly conceived reproduction of
the work of an imaginary German professor on "The Philosophy of
Clothes,"--under which external figure he includes all institutions,
customs, beliefs, in which humanity has draped itself, as distinguished
from the inner reality of man himself. "The beginning of all Wisdom," he
says, "is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till
they become _transparent_." And thus, in grotesque fashion, with amazing
vigor he ranges the universe in search of the Real. In one of his
letters to Emerson, Carlyle, discussing a project of lecturing in
America, takes on his sartorial professor's name, and writes: "Could any
one but appoint me Lecturing Professor of Teufelsdröckh's
Science,--'Things in General'!" This work was written in his remote
solitude, yet not published for years after it was finished,--and for
the best of reasons, because with all his literary repute Carlyle could
not find a publisher. The "Sartor" was not appreciated; and Carlyle,
knowing its value, locked it up in his drawer, and waited for his time.
The "Sartor Resartus" is a sort of prose poem, written with the heart's
blood, vivid as fire in a dark night; a Dantean production; a revelation
probably of the author's own struggles and experiences from the dark
gulf of the "Everlasting Nay" to the clear and serene heights of the
"Everlasting Yea." To me the book is full of consolation and
encouragement,--a battle of the spirit with infernal doubts, a victory
over despair, over all external evils and all spiritual foes. It is also
a bold and grotesque but scorching sarcasm of the conventionalities and
hypocrisies of society, and a savage thrust at those quackeries which
seem to reign in this world in spite of their falsity and shallowness.
It is not, I grant, easy to read. It is full of conceits and
affectations of style,--a puzzle to some, a rebuke to others. "Every
page of this unique collection of confessions and meditations, of
passionate invective and solemn reflection," is stamped with the seal of
genius, and yet was the last of Carlyle's writings to be appreciated. I
believe that this is the ordinary fate of truly original works, those
that are destined to live the longest, especially if they burn no
incense to the idols of prevailing worship, and be characterized by a
style which, to say the least, is extraordinary. Flashy, brilliant,
witty, yet superficial pictures of external life which everybody has
seen and knows, are the soonest to find admirers; but a revelation of
what is not seen, this is the work of seers and prophets whose ordinary
destiny has been anything other than to wear soft raiment and sit in
king's palaces. The "Sartor" was at last, in 1833-1834, printed in
Fraser's Magazine, meeting no appreciation in England, but very
enthusiastically received by Emerson, Channing, Ripley, and a group of
advanced thinkers in New England, through whose efforts it was published
here in book form. And so, in spite of timid London publishers, it
drifted back to London and a slow-growing fame. In our time, sixty years
later, it sells by scores of thousands annually, in cheap and in
luxurious editions, throughout the English-speaking world.
In respect of early recognition and popularity, Carlyle differs from his
great contemporary Macaulay, who was so immediately and so magnificently
rewarded, and yet received no more than his due as the finest prose
writer of his day. Macaulay's Essays are generally word-pictures of
remarkable men and remarkable events, but of men of action rather than
of quiet meditation. His heroes are such men as Clive and Hastings and
Pitt, not such men as Pascal or Augustine or Leibnitz or Goethe. But
Carlyle in his heroes paints the struggling soul in its deepest
aspirations, and the truths evolved by profound meditations. These are
not such as gain instant popular acceptance; yet they are the
longer-lived.
The time came at last for Carlyle to leave his retirement among moors
and hills, and in 1831 he directed his steps to London, spending the
winter with his wife in the great centre of English life and thought,
and being well received; so that in 1834 he removed permanently to the
metropolis. But he was scarcely less buried at his modest house in
Chelsea than he had been on his farm, for he came to London with only
£200, and was obliged to practise the most rigid economy. For two years
he labored in his London workshop without earning a shilling, and with
a limited acquaintance. Not yet was his society sought by the great
world which he mocked and despised. He fortunately had the genial and
agreeable Leigh Hunt for a neighbor, and Edward Irving for his friend.
He was known to the critics by his writings, but his circle of personal
friends was small. He was more or less intimate with John Stuart Mill,
Charles Austin, Sir William Molesworth, and the advanced section of the
philosophical radicals,--the very class of men from whom he afterwards
was most estranged. None of these men forwarded his fortunes; but they
lent him books, and helped him at the libraries, for no carpenter can
work without tools.
The work to which Carlyle now devoted himself was a history of the
French Revolution, the principal characters of which he had already
studied and written about. It was a subject adapted to his genius for
dramatic writing, and for the presentation of his views as to
retribution. His whole theology, according to Froude, was underlaid by
the belief in punishment for sin, which was impressed upon his mind by
his God-fearing parents, and was one of his firmest convictions. The
French were to his mind the greatest sinners among Christian nations,
and therefore were to reap a fearful penalty. To paint in a new and
impressive form the inevitable calamities attendant on violated law and
justice, was the aspiration of Carlyle. He had money enough to last him
with economy for two years. In this time he hoped to complete his work.
The possibility was due to the intelligent thrift of his wife.
Commenting on one of her letters describing their snug little house,
he writes:--
"From birth upwards she had lived in opulence; and now, for my sake, had
become poor,--so nobly poor. Truly, her pretty little brag [in this
letter] was well founded. No such house, for beautiful thrift, quiet,
spontaneous, nay, as it were, unconscious--minimum of money reconciled
to human comfort and human dignity--have I anywhere looked upon."
He devoted himself to his task with intense interest, and was completely
preoccupied.
In the winter of 1835, after a year of general study, collection of
material and writing, and at last "by dint of continual endeavor for
many weary weeks," the first volume was completed and submitted to his
friend Mill. The valuable manuscript was accidentally and ignorantly
destroyed by a servant, and Mill was in despair. Carlyle bore the loss
like a hero. He did not chide or repine. If his spirit sunk within him,
it was when he was alone in his library or in the society of his
sympathizing wife. He generously writes to Emerson,--
"I could not complain, or the poor man would have shot himself: we had
to gather ourselves together, and show a smooth front to it,--which
happily, though difficult, was not impossible to do. I began again at
the beginning, to such a wretched, paralyzing torpedo of a task as my
hand never found to do."