Part 5 (1/2)
The question whether Cardinal Newman or Carlyle has been the most influential personality in Victorian literature will be largely decided by the temperament of the critic. Mr Swinburne, looking at them both from a standpoint of antagonism to the priestly proclivities of the one and to the tyrannical proclivities of the other, apostrophised them jointly in the well-known lines:--
”With all our hearts we praise you whom ye hate, High souls that hate us; for our hopes are higher, And higher than yours the goal of our desire, Though high your ends be as your hearts are great.”
Newman, indeed, left England more dominated by ritual than in any other period of its history, the Roman Church more powerful than ever before, the new High Church party in the Establishment a great inst.i.tution, with the rival Prime Ministers, Mr Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, among its supporters, and a taste for ritual conspicuous in the chapels of the Nonconformists. And yet with all this Carlyle was the more dominant personality.
=Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)= was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriess.h.i.+re, on the 4th of December 1795. His father was a stonemason, at whose death Carlyle thus tenderly wrote in his Diary:--”I owe him much more than existence. I owe him a n.o.ble inspiring example. It was he _exclusively_ that determined on educating me; that from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I am and may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So shall he still live, even here in me, and his worth plant itself honourably forth into new generations.” From Annan Grammar School the young Carlyle went to Edinburgh University, where he became a voracious reader, although never a great cla.s.sical scholar. He then took the post of mathematical tutor at Annan school, and afterwards at Kirkcaldy, where he was friendly with Edward Irving, afterwards the famous preacher. Disgusted with this life he flung up his appointment, and determined to study for the law. For some time he eked out a scanty subsistence in Edinburgh by writing biographies for Brewster's _Encyclopaedia_. It was at this period that he obtained some measure of mental and moral stimulus from his German studies. Goethe opened a new world to him. He began to study German in 1819, induced thereto by Madame de Stael's interesting account of the German poets and philosophers. Goethe was seventy-five years old when in 1824 he received from Carlyle an English translation of ”Wilhelm Meister,” with a letter, saying, ”Four years ago, when I read your 'Faust' among the mountains of my native Scotland, I could not but fancy I might one day see you, and pour out before you, as before a father, the woes and wanderings of a heart whose mysteries you seemed so thoroughly to comprehend, and could so beautifully represent.” Two years later Carlyle sent Goethe his ”Life of Schiller,” and once again he expressed his intense devotion to one ”whose voice came to me from afar, with counsel and help, in my utmost need.” ”For if,” he continues, ”I have been delivered from darkness into any measure of light, if I know aught of myself and my destination, it is to the study of your writings more than to any other circ.u.mstance that I owe this; it is you more than any other man that I should always thank and reverence with the feeling of a disciple to his Master, nay, of a son to his spiritual Father.” In the meantime Carlyle had married Jane Welsh, the daughter of a doctor in Haddington, and had settled at the lonely farm-house of Craigenputtock, in Dumfriess.h.i.+re. There he was visited by Emerson, and there he remained for six years, before removing to London. Not only had Carlyle then translated ”Wilhelm Meister” and written the ”Life of Schiller,” but he had made numerous translations from Musaeus, Tieck, and Richter, and had published essays on these and other German authors. Jean Paul Richter had a peculiar attraction for him, and there can be no doubt that Carlyle owed his extraordinary style, in some degree, to his study of the German humorist.
The forty-seven years of Carlyle's London life (1834-1881) were years of incessant literary activity. The thirty volumes which came from his pen during that time not only secured for him a permanent place amongst the historians, biographers, and essayists of our literature, but they kindled for him a glow of intense personal enthusiasm amongst the best of his contemporaries, such as, perhaps, no other English author has enjoyed. At his death on the 5th of February, 1881, the world knew Carlyle, apart from his books, as a man of simple tastes, content, in spite of the wealth which literary success had brought, to reside amidst unostentatious surroundings, ever ready to help the distressed and needy, refusing a t.i.tle and the like official recognitions, and carrying out to the letter the reverence, earnestness, and un.o.btrusive manliness which he had inculcated in his writings; devotedly attached to his wife, whom he described on her tombstone as having ”unweariedly forwarded him as none else could, in all of good that he did or attempted;” and, in short, worthy of the address presented to him on his eightieth birthday, by nearly all the men of literary and scientific eminence in England, including, amongst others, Lord Tennyson and George Eliot, Robert Browning and Professor Huxley. ”A whole generation has elapsed,” they said, ”since you described for us the hero as a man of letters. We congratulate you and ourselves on the s.p.a.cious fulness of years which has enabled you to sustain this rare dignity amongst mankind in all its possible splendour and completeness.” The publication of Mr Froude's nine volumes of memorials caused a considerable revulsion of feeling.
The Carlyle of these ”Letters” and ”Reminiscences” appeared to be over-censorious in his estimate of his contemporaries, not too considerate in his relations with his wife, and, however admirable he might find contentment in Richter or Heyne, not content without much murmuring to accept a life of restricted means.
To give too much emphasis to this view of Carlyle's character is to ignore certain peculiarities of Mr Froude's biographical and historical style, to which reference has already been made. It will suffice to point out here that there are other sources of information about Carlyle than the books of his accredited biographer. Sir Henry Taylor, Mrs Oliphant, Mr Charles Eliot Norton, Mrs Gilchrist, and other friends of Carlyle's later life have published much additional matter, and have shown, as it were, the other side of the s.h.i.+eld. To Sir Henry Taylor, who knew him well, he seemed ”the most faithful and true-hearted of men,” and from many sources we learn that Mr Froude's picture is not that of the true Carlyle; that he was not a selfish husband, that his married life was not unhappy, that he was not altogether dumb to the heroes living, whilst eloquent over heroes dead, and that, in spite of many faults, he was a n.o.ble high-minded man, a ”kingly soul,” as Longfellow called him. Writing in his Diary during his second visit to England in 1847, Emerson says:--”Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms. Their ways are very engaging, and in her bookcase all his books are inscribed to her as they came from year to year, each with some significant lines.”
The letters which Carlyle wrote to his wife at the time she lost her mother are most touchingly affectionate. This is what she wrote to a friend at that time:--”In great matters he is always kind and considerate, but these little attentions which we women attach so much importance to, he was never in the habit of rendering to anyone. And, now, the desire to replace the irreplaceable makes him as good in little things as he used to be in great.” And to Carlyle himself she writes:--”G.o.d keep you, my dear husband, and bring you safe back to me.
The house looks very desolate without you, and my mind feels empty too.
I expect, with impatience, the letter that is to fix your return.”
On another occasion, writing to her husband's mother, she says:--”You have others behind and I have only him--only him in the whole wide world to love me and take care of me--poor little wretch that I am. Not but that numbers of people love me, after their fas.h.i.+on, far more than I deserve, but then his fas.h.i.+on is so different from theirs, and seems alone to suit the crotchety creature that I am.” And then her pride in her husband is well exemplified by an experience related in a letter to him, which shows also how wide and deep is that mysterious impersonal influence of great authors on men who are totally unknown to them:--”A man of the people mounted the platform and spoke; a youngish, intelligent-looking man, who alone, of all the speakers, seemed to understand the question, and to have feelings as well as notions about it. He spoke with a heart-eloquence that left me warm. I never was more affected by public speaking.... A sudden thought struck me: this man would like to know you. I would give him my address in London. I borrowed a piece of paper and handed him my address. When he looked at it he started as if I had sent a bullet into him, caught my hand, and said, 'Oh, it is your husband! Mr Carlyle has been my teacher and master! I have owed everything to him for years and years!' I felt it a credit to you really to have had a hand in turning out this man, was prouder of that heart-tribute to your genius than any amount of reviewers' praises or aristocratic invitations to dinner.”
It is because the spirit which breathes in the words of this young workman has been the guiding moral force of numbers of men and women in all stations of life, during the last sixty years, that I have devoted so much s.p.a.ce to Carlyle. It is of the greatest importance to literature that the man whose eloquent preaching of justice, sincerity, and reverence has turned the hearts of thousands of his fellowmen towards n.o.bility and simplicity of life, should not himself have been out of harmony with all that he taught. ”The world,” says Thackeray's gifted daughter, ”has pointed its moral finger of late at the old man in his great old age, accusing himself in the face of all, and confessing the overpowering irritations which the suffering of a lifetime had laid upon him and upon her he loved. That old caustic man of deepest feeling, with an ill-temper and a tender heart, and a racking imagination, speaking from the grave, and bearing unto it that cross of pa.s.sionate remorse which few among us dare to face, seems to some of us now a figure n.o.bler and truer, a teacher greater far than in the days when all his pain and love and remorse were still hidden from us all.”[14]
Of the ”Reminiscences” which excited so much criticism on account of their references to persons still living, Carlyle wrote on the last page:--”I still mainly mean to _burn_ this book before my own departure, but feel that I shall always have a kind of grudge to do it, and an indolent excuse. 'Not _yet_; wait, any day that can be done!' and that it is possible the thing _may_ be left behind me, legible to interested survivors--_friends_ only, I will hope, and with _worthy_ curiosity, not _un_worthy! In which event, I solemnly forbid them, each and all, to _publish_ this bit of writing _as it stands here_, and warn them that _without fit editing_ no _part_ of it should be printed (nor so far as I can order _shall_ ever be), and that the 'fit editing' of perhaps nine-tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become _impossible_.”[15]
The only editing which Mr Froude deemed ”fit” was the omission of this paragraph from his edition of the work. And yet to read, with the ”worthy curiosity” of which he speaks, of his love for father and wife, and of his kindly solicitude for brothers and sisters, whom he constantly a.s.sisted, is to make him nearer and dearer to those who care to remember that he was after all but human. Carlyle spoke with too little kindness, it must be owned, of Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Lamb, because he saw only the palpable weaknesses of their characters, and was blinded by forbidding externals to the sterling worth of these great men; but he loved Emerson, and Tennyson, and Ruskin, and he profoundly revered Goethe, who, after all, was the only one of his contemporaries who could take rank anywhere near him.[16] Carlyle recognised that Goethe was incomparably his superior in every way; that he was, as Matthew Arnold calls him, ”the greatest poet of the present age, and the greatest critic of all ages,” the one man of transcendent genius whom Europe has produced since Dante and Shakspere. To have first led England to appreciate Goethe is not the least of Carlyle's many services to his country. To have acted as an inspiring and helpful prophet is perhaps his greatest. ”Sartor Resartus” first appeared in _Fraser's Magazine_ for 1833, where it met with but scanty recognition, and, indeed, half-ruined the editor, whose subscribers anxiously asked when the ”tailor sketches” were coming to an end. It is surely something more than a pa.s.sing fas.h.i.+on in literature which leads us now to take up these well-worn pages with so much of tenderness and sympathy. ”There is in man,” he says, ”a Higher than Love of Happiness; he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the G.o.dlike that is in Man, and how, in the G.o.dlike only, has he Strength and Freedom?” How can it be said that Carlyle did not love humanity when we read the lines in which he expresses reverence for the ”toilworn Craftsman that, with earth-made Implement, laboriously conquers the Earth and makes her man's?”
”Venerable to me,” he continues, ”is the hard Hand; crooked, coa.r.s.e; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our Conscript on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred.”
It is impossible to exaggerate the effect upon the younger minds of his age of Carlyle's stirring words, inciting to worthy and ever worthier effort:--”Do the duty which lies nearest to thee, which thou knowest to be a duty. In all situations out of the pit of Tophet, wherein a living man has stood, there is actually a prize of quite infinite value placed within his reach, namely a duty for him to do; this highest of Gospels forms the basis and worth of all other gospels whatever.” ”Brother,” he says elsewhere, ”thou hast possibility in thee for much, the possibility of writing on the eternal skies the record of a heroic life. Is not every man, G.o.d be thanked, a potential hero? The measure of a nation's greatness, of its worth under the sky to G.o.d and to man, is not the quant.i.ty of bullion it has realised, but the quant.i.ty of heroisms it has achieved, of n.o.ble pieties and valiant wisdoms that were in it, that still are in it.”
Little less valuable than ”Sartor Resartus” is ”Past and Present,” which was published in 1843. The reverence and delicacy with which it touches the monasticism of a bygone age are as remarkable as the prophetic vision with which it deals with the social problems of our latter-day life. State-aided emigration, co-operation and national education, are some of the many changes advocated here and elsewhere. Not till the ”Latter-day Pamphlets” (1850) did Carlyle become an eloquent advocate of ”force” as a guide in politics, thereby alienating John Stuart Mill and many of his old friends. His language then seemed to degenerate into mere shrieking and scolding. The world must be governed, he declared, by men of heroic mould, who know what is good for the inferior natures around them. Let such inferior natures, if need be, be scourged into silence. Parliaments he spoke of contemptuously as ”talking shops,” and his sympathies went out heartily to Governor Eyre at the time of the Jamaica riots, and to the Southern States at the time of the American Civil War. An admiration for ”heaven-sent heroes” had always been strong in Carlyle, although it certainly had not its after meaning when he wrote in early life, ”Not brute force, but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.” In ”Heroes and Hero-wors.h.i.+p,” a course of lectures delivered in 1840, he had waxed eloquent over Mahomet, Luther, and Napoleon, and three years earlier, in 1837, he had published in his ”French Revolution” a brilliant eulogy of Mirabeau. His vindication of Cromwell was brought about perhaps mainly by his appreciation of the Protector's high-handed resoluteness, and his ”Life of Frederick II. of Prussia” was the apology for a man who was the very embodiment of despotic ideals.
But quite apart from Carlyle's worth as a moral teacher or as a controversialist, his place in literature is very high. His short biography of Schiller was an epoch-making book, because of the influence it has exercised upon the study of German literature: but it bears little evidence of the genius of its author, and, in consequence of the abundance of Schiller correspondence subsequently brought to light, it has been superseded by the biographies of Palleskie and Duntzer.
Carlyle's ”Life of John Sterling” is, however, a work of great power, a kind of prose ”Lycidas,” which, like that great elegy, has rescued from oblivion a man in whom the world would soon have ceased to be interested. Carlyle, again, was an essayist of striking individuality.
Few literary sketches are more picturesque than his ”Count Cagliostro”
and ”The Diamond Necklace,” and the essays on Johnson and Burns are models of generous human insight. With literary insight, however, Carlyle was not too well endowed, at least, when purely imaginative literature was concerned, and he once expressed the opinion that Shakspere had better have written in prose. ”It is part of my creed,” he wrote to Emerson, ”that the only poetry is history could we tell it right.” His method of telling it gives him a place by himself among historians, a place so singular that it is impossible to cla.s.sify him.
”Carlyle's 'French Revolution,'” said John Stuart Mill, ”is one of those productions of genius which is above all rule, and is a law to itself.”
The deathbed of Louis XV., the taking of the Bastille, and the execution of Danton, are never-to-be-forgotten descriptions, and the poetical pa.s.sage which follows the relation of the b.l.o.o.d.y horrors of 1789 cannot be too often quoted:--”O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on s.h.i.+ps far out in the silent main; on b.a.l.l.s at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-Officers;--and also on this roaring h.e.l.l-porch of a Hotel-de-Ville!”
The scientific history of the French Revolution has yet to be written; and even to appreciate Carlyle's prose epic adequately we should know something of Mignet, Thiers, Morse Stephens, and von Sybel, but neither the acc.u.mulation of fresh facts, nor a philosophical deduction from such facts, can impair the value of Carlyle's work. That, in spite of all his fire and pa.s.sion, Carlyle could delineate character with most judicial fairness, may be demonstrated by turning to Mr John Morley's essays on Robespierre and the other revolutionists, and observing how his calm and unprejudiced intellect has p.r.o.nounced judgments in every way endorsing Carlyle's.
Carlyle's ”Cromwell” has less attraction for us to-day than the ”French Revolution”; but the service to historical study was even greater.
Opinions will always differ as to the wisdom of the Protector's policy and the righteousness of his deeds, but since the publication of these letters and speeches, ”edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a poet,”[17] Cromwell's sincerity and genuine piety have been unimpugned. There are others beside Mr Froude who esteem the ”History of Frederick II.” Carlyle's greatest work. The humour of the book is wonderful, for Carlyle is the greatest humorist since Sterne, and nowhere is this humour more conspicuous than in ”Frederick.” The splendid portraits of all the most important figures in the eighteenth century fix themselves indelibly in the memory, and it is even said that German soldiers study the art of war from the descriptions of Frederick's campaigns. Nevertheless, the book has much in it that is unsatisfying to Englishmen. Frederick and his father could not easily excite the hero-wors.h.i.+pping inclinations of a free people, and even Carlyle became disillusioned as he proceeded with his task, and finally admitted that Frederick was not worth the trouble he had given to him.
He commenced it as a ”History of Frederick the Great,” and concluded it as a ”History of Frederick, _called_ the Great.”
Carlyle is surely the greatest figure in our modern literature. He wrote no poetry worth consideration, it is true. His verse would long since have been forgotten had it not been for his effectiveness as a prose writer. But although we are accustomed to the claim for poetry that it ranks higher than prose, it must be conceded that in Victorian literature this is not the case, and that Carlyle's enormous personality, his capacity for influencing others for good and ill, have made him the greatest moral and intellectual force of his age. To him we owe the indifference to mere political s.h.i.+bboleths, the lull in party warfare, which is the note of our age. He gave no definite answer to any question, but he gave us the impetus which led others to seek for solutions. His literary influence on Froude and Mill, Mr Ruskin and Mr Lecky, and numbers of others was tremendous. The place which was occupied by Swift in the eighteenth century is held by Carlyle in the nineteenth, and though every line that he has written should cease to be read, he will still be remembered as the greatest of literary figures in an age of great men of letters.
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