Volume Xiii Part 8 (1/2)

It was not until 1852 or 1853, when Carlyle was fifty-eight, that he seriously set himself to write his Life of Frederic II., his last great work, on which he perseveringly labored for thirteen years. It is an exhaustive history of the Prussian hero, and is regarded in Germany as the standard work on that great monarch and general. The first volume came out in 1858, and the last in 1865. It is a marvel of industry and accuracy,--the most elaborate of all his works, but probably the least read because of its enormous length and scholastic pedantries. It might be said to bear the same relation to his ”French Revolution” that ”Romola” does to ”Adam Bede.” In this book Carlyle made no new revelations, as he did in his Life of Cromwell. He did not change essentially the opinion of mankind. Frederick the Great, in his hands, still stands out as an unscrupulous public enemy,--a robber and a tyrant. His crimes are only partially redeemed by his heroism, especially when Europe was in arms against him. There is the same defect in this great work that there is in the Life of Cromwell,--the inculcation of the doctrine that might makes right; that we may do evil that good may come,--thus putting expediency above eternal justice, and palliating crimes because of their success. It is difficult to account for Carlyle's decline in moral perceptions, when we consider that his personal life was so far above reproach.

Although the Life of Frederick is a work of transcendent industry, it did not add to Carlyle's popularity, which had been undermined by his bitter attacks on society in his various pamphlets. At this period he was still looked up to with reverence as a great intellectual giant; but that love for him which had been felt by those who were aroused to honest thinking by his earlier writings had pa.s.sed away. A new generation looked upon him as an embittered and surly old man. His services were not forgotten, but he was no longer a favorite,--no longer an inspiring guide. His writings continued to stimulate thought, but were no longer regarded as sound. Commonplace people never did like him, probably because they never understood him. His admirers were among the young, the enthusiastic, the hopeful, the inquiring; and when their veneration pa.s.sed away, there were few left to uphold his real greatness and n.o.ble character. One might suppose that Carlyle would have been unhappy to alienate so many persons, especially old admirers. In fact, I apprehend that he cared little for anybody's admiration or flattery. He lived in an atmosphere so infinitely above small and envious and detracting people that he was practically independent of human sympathies. Had he been doomed to live with commonplace persons, he might have sought to conciliate them; but he really lived in another sphere,--not perhaps higher than theirs, but eternally distinct,--in the sphere of abstract truth. To him most people were either babblers or bores. What did he care for their envious shafts, or even for their honest disapprobation!

Hence, the last days of this great man were not his best days, although he was not without honor. He was made Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh, and delivered a fine address on the occasion; and later, Disraeli, when prime minister, offered him knighthood, with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath and a pension, which he declined. The author of the ”Sartor Resartus” did not care for t.i.tles. He preferred to remain simply Thomas Carlyle.

While Carlyle was in the midst of honors in Edinburgh, his wife, who had long been in poor health, suddenly died, April 21, 1866. This affliction was a terrible blow to Carlyle, from which he never recovered. It filled out his measure of sorrow, deep and sad, and hard to be borne. His letters after this are full of pathos and plaintive sadness. He could not get resigned to his loss, for his wife had been more and more his staff and companion as years had advanced. The Queen sent her sympathy, but nothing could console him. He was then seventy-one years old, and his work was done. His remaining years were those of loneliness and sorrow and suffering. He visited friends, but they amused him not. He wrote reminiscences, but his isolation remained. He sought out charities when he himself was the object of compa.s.sion,--a sad old man who could not sleep. He tried to interest himself in politics, but time hung heavy on his hands. He read much and thought more, but a.s.sumed no fresh literary work. He had enough to do to correct proof-sheets of new editions of his works. His fiercest protests were now against atheism in its varied forms. In 1870, Mr. Erskine, his last Scotch friend, died. In 1873 he writes: ”More and more dreary, barren, base, and ugly seem to me all the aspects of this poor, diminis.h.i.+ng quack-world,--fallen openly anarchic, doomed to a death which one can wish to be speedy.”

Poor old man! He has survived his friends, his pleasures, his labors, almost his fame; he is sick, and weary of life, which to him has become a blank. Pity it is, he could not have died when ”Cromwell” was completed. He drags on his forlorn life, without wife or children, and with only a few friends, in disease and ennui and discontent, almost alone, until he is eighty-five.

”To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps on this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

The relief came at last. It was on a cold day in February, 1881, that Lecky, Froude, and Tyndall, alone of his London friends, accompanied his mortal remains to Ecclefechan, where he was buried by the graves of his father and mother. He might have rested in the vaults of Westminster; but he chose to lie in a humble churchyard, near where he was born.

”In future years,” says his able and interesting biographer, ”Scotland will have raised a monument over his remains; but no monument is needed for one who has made an eternal memorial for himself in the hearts of all to whom truth is the dearest possession.

”'For, giving his soul to the common cause, he won for himself a wreath which will not fade, and a tomb the most honorable,--not where his dust is decaying, but where his glory lives in everlasting remembrance. For of ill.u.s.trious men all the earth is the sepulchre; and it is not the inscribed column in their own land which is the record of their virtues, but the unwritten memories of them in the hearts and minds of all mankind.'” [1]

[Footnote 1: Quoted by Froude from the Funeral Oration of Pericles in honor of the Athenians slain during the first summer of the Peloponnesian War, as given by Thucydides,--”their,” ”they,” etc. being changed to ”his,” ”he,” etc.]

Thomas Carlyle will always have an honorable place among the great men of his time. He was pre-eminently a profound thinker, a severe critic, a great word-painter,--a man of uncommon original gifts, who aroused and instructed his generation. In the literal sense, he was neither philosopher nor poet nor statesman, but a man of genius, who cast his searching and fearless glance into all creeds, systems, and public movements, denouncing hypocrisies, shams, and lies with such power that he lost friends almost as fast as he made them,--without, however, losing the respect and admiration of his literary rivals, or of the ablest and best men both in England and America. Although no believer in the scientific philosophies of our time, he was a great breaker of ground for them, having been a pioneer in the cause of honest thinking and plain speaking. His pa.s.sion for truth, and courage in declaring his own vision of it, were potent for spiritual liberty. He stands as one of the earliest and stoutest champions of that revolt against authority in religious, intellectual, and social matters which has chiefly marked the Nineteenth Century.

LORD MACAULAY.

1800-1859.

ARTISTIC HISTORICAL WRITING.

Among the eminent men of letters of the present century, Thomas Babington Macaulay takes a very high position. In original genius he was inferior to Carlyle, but was greater in learning, in judgment, and especially in felicity of style. He was an historical artist of the foremost rank, the like of whom has not appeared since Voltaire; and he was, moreover, no mean poet, and might have been distinguished as such, had poetry been his highest pleasure and ambition. The same may be said of him as a political orator. Very few men in the House of Commons ever surpa.s.sed him in the power of making an eloquent speech. He was too impetuous and dogmatic to be a great debater, like Fox or Pitt or Peel or Gladstone; but he might have reached a more exalted and influential position as a statesman had he confined his remarkable talents to politics.

But letters were the pa.s.sion of Macaulay, from his youth up; and his remarkably tenacious memory--abnormal, as it seems to me--enabled him to bring his vast store of facts to support plausibly any position he chose to take. At fifty years of age, he had probably read more books than any man in Europe since Gibbon and Niebuhr; he literally devoured everything he could put his hands upon, without cramming for a special object,--especially the Greek and Latin Cla.s.sics, which he read over and over again, not so much for knowledge as for the pleasure it gave him as a literary critic and a student of artistic excellence.

Macaulay was of Scotch descent, like so many eminent historians, poets, critics, and statesmen who adorned the early and middle part of the nineteenth century,--Scott, Burns, Carlyle, Jeffrey, Dundas, Playfair, Wilson, Napier, Mackintosh, Robertson, Alison; a group of geniuses that lived in Edinburgh, and made its society famous,--to say nothing of great divines and philosophers like Chalmers and Stewart and Hamilton.

Macaulay belonged to a good family, the most distinguished members of which were clergymen,--with the exception of his uncle, General Macaulay, who made a fortune in India; and his father, the celebrated merchant and philanthropist, Zachary Macaulay, who did more than any other man, Wilberforce excepted, to do away with the slave-trade, and to abolish slavery in the West India Islands.

Zachary Macaulay was the most modest and religious of men, and after an eventful life in Africa as governor of the colony of Sierra Leone, settled in Clapham, near London, with a handsome fortune. He belonged to that famous evangelical set who made Clapham famous, and whose extraordinary piety and philanthropy are commemorated by Sir James Stephen in one of his most interesting essays. They resembled in peculiarities the early Quakers and primitive Methodists, and though very narrow were much respected for their unostentatious benevolence, blended with public spirit.

Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple, in Leicesters.h.i.+re, Oct. 25, 1800, but it was at Clapham that his boyhood was chiefly spent. His precocity startled every one who visited his father's hospitable home. At the age of three he would lie at full length on the carpet eagerly reading. He was never seen without an open book in his hands, even during his walks.

He cared nothing for the sports of his companions. He could neither ride, nor drive, nor swim, nor row a boat, nor play a game of tennis or foot-ball. He cared only for books of all sorts, which he seized upon with inextinguishable curiosity, and stored their contents in his memory. When a boy, he had learned the ”Paradise Lost” by heart. He did not care to go to school, because it interrupted his reading. Hannah More, a frequent visitor at Clapham and a warm friend of the family, gazed upon him with amazement, but was too wise and conscientious to spoil him by her commendations. At eight years of age he also had great facility in making verses, which were more than tolerable.

Zachary Macaulay objected to his son being educated in one of the great schools in England, like Westminster and Harrow, and he was therefore sent to a private school kept by an evangelical divine who had been a fellow at Cambridge,--a good scholar, but narrow in his theological views. Indeed, Macaulay got enough of Calvinism before he went to college, and was so unwisely crammed with it at home and at school, that through life he had a repugnance to the evangelical doctrines of the Low Church, with which, much to the grief of his father, he a.s.sociated cant, always his especial abhorrence and disgust. While Macaulay venerated his father, he had little sympathy with his views, and never loved him as he did his own sisters. He did his filial duty, and that was all,--contributed largely to his father's support in later life, treated him with profound respect, but was never drawn to him in affectionate frankness and confidence.

It cannot be disguised that Macaulay was worldly in his turn of mind, intensely practical, and ambitious of distinction as soon as he became conscious of his great powers, although in his school-days he was very modest and retiring. He was not religiously inclined, nor at all spiritually minded. An omnivorous reader seldom is narrow, and seldom is profound. Macaulay was no exception. He admired Pascal, but only for his exquisite style and his trenchant irony. He saw little in Augustine except his vast acquaintance with Latin authors. He carefully avoided writing on the Schoolmen, or Calvin, or the great divines of the seventeenth century. Bunyan he admired for his genius and perspicuous style rather than for his sentiments. Even his famous article on Bacon is deficient in spiritual insight; it is a description of the man rather than a dissertation on his philosophy. Macaulay's greatness was intellectual rather than moral; and his mental power was that of the scholar and the rhetorical artist rather than the thinker. In his masterly way of arraying facts he has never been surpa.s.sed; and in this he was so skilful that it mattered little which side he took. Like Daniel Webster, he could make any side appear plausible. Doubtless in the law he might have become a great advocate, had he not preferred literary composition instead. Had he lived in the times of the Grecian Sophists, he might have baffled Socrates,--not by his logic, but by his learning and his aptness of ill.u.s.tration.

Macaulay entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1818, being a healthy, robust young man of eighteen, after five years' training in Greek and Latin, having the eldest son of Wilberforce for a school companion.

Among his contemporaries and friends at Cambridge were Charles Austin, Praed, Derwent Coleridge, Hyde Villiers, and Romilly; but I infer from his Life by Trevelyan that his circle of intimate friends was not so large as it would have been had he been fitted for college at Westminster or Eton. Nor at this time were his pecuniary circ.u.mstances encouraging. After he had obtained his first degree he supported himself, while studying for a fellows.h.i.+p, by taking a couple of pupils for 100 a year. Eventually he gained a fellows.h.i.+p worth 300 a year, which was his main support for seven years, until he obtained a government office in London. He probably would have found it easier to get a fellows.h.i.+p at Oxford than at Cambridge, since mathematics were uncongenial to him, his forte being languages. He was most distinguished at college for English composition and Latin declamation. In 1819 he wrote a poem, ”Pompeii,” which gained him the chancellor's medal,--a distinction won again in 1821 by a poem on ”Evening,” while the same year gave him the Craven scholars.h.i.+p for his cla.s.sical attainments. He took his bachelor's degree in 1822, and was made a fellow of Trinity College. He did not obtain his fellows.h.i.+p, however, until his third trial, being no favorite with those who had prizes and honors to bestow, because of his neglect of science and mathematics.

As a profession, Macaulay made choice of the law, being called to the bar in 1826, and at Leeds joined the Northern Circuit, of which Brougham was the leading star. But the law was not his delight. He did not like its technicalities. He spent most of his time in his chambers in literary composition, or in the galleries of the House of Commons listening to the debates. He never applied himself seriously to anything which ”went against the grain.” At Court he got no briefs, but his fellows.h.i.+p enabled him to live by practising economy. He also wrote occasional essays--excellent but not remarkable--for Knight's Quarterly Magazine. It was in this periodical, too, that his early poems were published; but he did not devote much time to this field of letters, although, as we have said, he might undoubtedly have succeeded in it.

His poetry, if he had never written anything else, would not be considered much inferior to that of Sir Walter Scott, being full of life and action, and, like most everything else he did, winning him applause.