Part 78 (1/2)

The book is full of humor and wisdom, of stray lightenings, and deep growlings. There are glimpses of ”a story” to be caught to.

It is perhaps the most Carlylean book Carlyle ever wrote. But let it lie yet awhile on your bookshelf unread.

At the end of six years or so Carlyle decided that Craigenputtock was of no use to him. He wanted to get the ear of the world, to make the world listen to him. It would not listen to him when he spoke from a far-off wilderness. So he made the great plunge, and saying good-by to the quiet of barren rock and moorland he came to live in London. He took a house in Cheyne Row in Chelsea, and this for the rest of his life was his home. But at first London was hardly less lonely than Craigenputtock. It seemed impossible to make people want either Carlyle or his books. ”He had created no 'public' of his own,” says a friend who wrote his life,* ”the public which existed could not understand his writings and would not buy them, nor could he be induced so much as to attempt to please it; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more neglected than he had been in Scotland.”

*Froude.

Still in spite of neglect Carlyle worked on, now writing his great French Revolution. He labored for months at this book, and at length having finished the first volume of it he lent it to a friend to read. This friend left it lying about, and a servant thinking it waste paper destroyed it. In great distress he came to tell Carlyle what had happened. It was a terrible blow, for Carlyle had earned nothing for months, and money was growing scarce. But he bravely hid his consternation and comforted his friend. ”We must try to hide from him how very serious this business is to us,” were the first words he said to his wife when they were alone together. Long afterwards when asked how he felt when he heard the news, ”Well, I just felt like a man swimming without water,” he replied.*

*Life of Tennyson.

So once more he set to work rewriting all that had been lost. In 1837 the book was published, and from that time Carlyle took his place in the world as a man of genius. But money was still scarce, so as a means of making some, he gave several courses of lectures. But he hated it. ”O heaven!” he cries, ”I cannot speak. I can only gasp and write and stutter, a spectacle to G.o.ds and fas.h.i.+onables,--being forced to it by want of money.”

One course of these lectures--the last--was on Heroes and Her Wors.h.i.+p. This may be one of the first of Carlyle's book that you will care to read, and you may now like to hear what he has to say of Samuel Johnson in The Hero as a Man of Letters.

”As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of our great English souls. A strong and n.o.ble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last; in a kindlier element what might he not have been,--Poet, Priest, Sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain of his 'element,” or his 'time' or the like; it is thriftless work doing so. His time is bad; well then, he is there to make it better!--

”Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable.

Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any of the favourablest outward circ.u.mstances, Johnson's life could have been other than a painful one. The world might have had more profitable work out of him, or less; but his effort against the world's work could never have been a light one. Nature, in return for his n.o.bleness, had said to him, 'Live in an element of diseased sorrow.' Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the n.o.bleness were intimately and even inseparably connected with each other. . . .

”The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of 'fourpence halfpenny a day.' Yet a giant, invincible soul; a true man's. One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford; the rough, seamy-faced, raw-boned College Servitor stalking about, in winter season, with his shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door, and the raw-boned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thought,--pitches them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger, or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self- help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of n.o.bleness and manfulness withal.

”It is a type of the man's life, this pitching away of the shoes, an original man;--not a second hand, borrowing or begging man.

Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;--On the reality and substance which nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has give another than us!-

”And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small souls are otherwise. . . .

”It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. . . . Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his 'sincerity.' He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere,--of his being particularly anything!

A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or 'scholar' as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live,--without stealing! A n.o.ble unconsciousness is in him. He does not 'engrave Truth on his watch-seal'; no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is. . . .

”Johnson was a Prophet to his people: preached a Gospel to them,--as all like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe as a kind of moral Prudence: 'in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. 'A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' do not sink yourselves in boundless, bottomless abysses of Doubt. . . .

”Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught;--coupled with this other great Gospel. 'Clear your mind of Cant!' Have no trade with Cant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in your own real torn shoes: 'that will be better for you,' as Mahomet says! I call this, I call these two things joined together, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time.”

I give this quotation from Heroes because there is, in some ways a great likeness between Johnson and Carlyle. Both were sincere, and both after a time of poverty and struggle ruled the thought of their day. For Carlyle became known by degrees, and became, like Johnson before him, a great literary man. He was sought after by the other writers of his day, who came to listen to the growlings of the ”Sage of Chelsea.”

Carlyle, like Johnson, was a Prophet with a message. ”Carlyle,”

says a French writer, ”has taken up a mission; he is a prophet, the prophet of sincerity. This sincerity or earnestness he would have applied everywhere: he makes it the law, the healthy and holy law, of art, of morals, of politics.”* And through all Carlyle's exaggeration and waywardness of diction we find that note ring clear again and again. Be sincere, find the highest, and wors.h.i.+p it with all thy mind and heart and will.

*Scherer.

And although for us of to-day the light of Carlyle as a prophet may be somewhat dimmed, we may still find, as a great man of his own day found, that the good his writings do us, is ”not as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry to animate.”*

*J. S. Mill.

Carlyle went steadily on with his writing. In the summer he would have his table and tray of books brought out into the garden so that he could write in the open air, but much of his work, too, was done in a ”sound proof” room which he built at the top of the house in order to escape from the horror of noise.

The sound-proof room was not, however, a great success, for though it kept out some noises it let in others even worse.

When visitors came they were received either indoors or in the little garden which Carlyle found ”of admirable comfort in the smoking way.” In the garden they smoked and talked sitting on kitchen chairs, or on the quaint china barrels which Mrs. Carlyle named ”n.o.blemen's seats.”