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Finley Etc., Etc Thomas Carlyle THOMAS CARLYLE HOW TO KNOW HIM By BLISS PERRY A ui/ior of A Study of Prose Fiction, The Amateur Spirit Walt Whitman, Etc^ Etc. WITH PORTRAIT EQ INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS COPYRiGHT 1915 The Bobbs-Merrill Company 1 ?!>r preS9'OF braunworth & co. bookbinders and printers brooklyn. n. y. SEP 23 1915 CI.A41061 PRELIMINARY Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish peasant who be- came one of the great names of English literature. The story of that transformation and achievement has been told and retold by many a brilliant writer during the generation which has elapsed since Carlyle's death. No record of personal development and literary ac- complishment is more fascinating. Yet it is not the aim of this book to present one more biography of Car- lyle. It is rather to exhibit, as far as possible in Car- lyle's own words, the working of his mind. His books are intensely, supremely personal. They review his own struggles, his slowly-won mastery over himself and his circumstances, his entire theory of human life and conduct. With a vividness almost if not quite unrivalled in the whole history of literature, they describe his ancestry and early environment, his unsystematic education, his painful quest of a career, and the spiritual conflicts by which he came to an ultimate command of himself. This main battle once won, he perfected, between the ages of thirty and thir- ty-five, his theory of biography and history. It re- mained essentially unchanged throughout the rest of his long life. His epoch-making histories — The French Revolution, CromivelVs Letters and Speeches, and Frederick the Great — are the endeavors of an ex- traordinary literary artist to adjust this theory to PRELIMINARY the facts of a vanished European society. His social and political writings — like Chartism, Past and Pres- ent, and Latter-Day Pamphlets — apply his theory, as a surgeon applies his knife and caustic, to the ills of the England of his day. Carlyle the critic of books, Carlyle the biographer and historian of great men and great events, Carlyle the prophet and mystic, are thus essentially and radically one. To disbelieve this mes- sage or "gospel" of Carlyle is quite within the rights of any contemporary reader, but there is no longer any excuse for misunderstanding it. The present book is merely a fresh attempt to let Carlyle explain himself and his views, as adequately as the inexorable count of pages will permit. We must allow this prince of talkers to do almost all the talking; but be- fore he begins we must say a word about his Scotch accent — the rich accent of Annandale. B.P. CONTENTS CHAPTER ^^^^ I The Heritage 1 II The Making of the Man .... 8 III Babylon 17 IV Solitude 24 V The Reaction ^^ VI Our Own Problem 36 VII How He Wrote ^0 i VIII His Literary Theory .... 60 ^ IX The Theory Tested 68 - X Sartor Resartus 89 XI The French Revolution .... 121 XII Chartism 1^2 XIII Heroes and Hero-Worship ... 170 XIV Past and Present 1^5 XV Cromwell ^^^ XVI Latter-Day Pamphlets .... 223 XVII The Life of John Sterling ... 230 XVIII Frederick THE Great 241 Index 26S CARLYLE CARLYLE CHAPTER I THE HERITAGE TRAMPING into Ecclefechan one bright Au- gust morning with the village postman, I re- marked that most books about Carlyle gave the impression that he was born in a dreary and unat- tractive place. " 'Tis the sweetest spot in all Dumfriesshire," said the postman loyally; and indeed it was sweet enough, — a fine rolling country, with rich wood- lands and yellowing grain, and bright streams foam- ing down to the Solway. The straggling village, a Border town sixteen miles beyond Carlisle, on the Great North Road from London to Glasgow, has changed but little since Thomas Carlyle first opened his eyes in the upper chamber of the stone-arch house in 1795. Jhe tiny stream still flows through 2 CARLYLE the village street. A few rods from the house where Carlyle was born is the churchyard where he was buried, on that grim winter day of 1881. The care- taker of the "arch-house" will show you the relics, and confess that all that she and the other village children knew about Carlyle, in the height of his fame, was that an old man was wont to visit Eccle- fechan every summer and that the children would say : "I see old Tom Caerl is back." The guardian of the churchyard, an old woman, shrugs her shoul- ders at your comment upon the neglect of the grave. "I expect they'll be saving the money," is her Scotch explanation; and the ghost of the dead man gives, very possibly, an ironic chuckle. The whole country-side is full of ghosts, indeed, to the lover of Carlyle. Six miles to the south of Ecclefechan, on the Sol way, lies Annan, — whither the little fellow trudged off to school in 1806, his father by his side. To the northeast and north lie the farms of Scotsbrig and Mainhill. Farther to- ward the northeast is Dumfries, and beyond Dum- fries, on the moors, are Templand and Craigen- puttoch. The unlucky reader to whom, as yet, these names are only names, should steep himself >vithout delay in Carlyle's Reminiscences, and par- THE HERITAGE 3 ticularly in the first chapter, written in the week after his father's death in 1832. There is the un- forgetable portrait of James Carlyle, stone-mason, descended from a line of Borderers: — "pithy, bit- ter-speaking bodies and awfu' fighters/* — himself an austere man with deep inner springs of tender- ness, who taught his gifted son the power of phrase and the gospel of work. "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 or may become. . . . He was a man of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of any it has been my lot to converse with. None of us will forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphors (though he knew not what a meta- phor was) with all manner of potent words which he appropriated and applied with a surprising ac- curacy you often would not guess whence — brief, energetic, and which I should say conveyed the most perfect picture, definite, clear, not in ambitious colours but in full white sunlight, of all the dialects I have ever listened to. Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to render visible which did not be- come almost ocularly so. Never shall we again heai; 4 CARLYLE such speech as that was. The whole district knew of it and laughed joyfully over it, not knowing how otherwise to express the feeling it gave them; em- phatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths, his words were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that he exaggerated (which tendency I also in- herit ), yet only in description and for the sake chiefly of humourous effect. He was a man of rigid, even scrupulous veracity. I have often heard him turn back when he thought his strong words were mis- leading, and correct them into mensurative accuracy. . . . This great maxim of philosophy he had gath- ered by the teaching of nature alone — ^that man was created to work — ^not to speculate, or feel, or dream. Accordingly he set his whole heart thither- wards. He did work wisely and unweariedly ( Ohm Hast aber ohne Rast) and perhaps performed more with the tools he had than any man I now know. It should have made me sadder than it did to hear the young ones sometimes complaining of his slow punctuality and thoroughness. He would leave nothing till it was done. . . . On the whole ought I not to rejoice that God was pleased to give me such a father; that from earliest years I had the THE HERITAGE 5 example of a real Man of God*s own making con- tinually before me? Let me learn of /tiw. Let me write my books as he built his houses, and walk as blamelessly through this shadow world; if God so will, to rejoin him at last. Amen." Of Carlyle's mother, Margaret Aitken, the stone- mason's second wife, there is no full-length descrip- tion in the Reminiscences, but from the family let- ters it is easy to perceive what manner of person she was, — an affectionate, yearning, solicitous woman, loyal like all the Carlyle clan, and unspeakably proud of Tom. She learned painfully to write, in middle age, so that she might correspond with him; she tried to understand his books, and surely when, with his literary glory fairly won, son and mother sat smoking pipes together on her doorstep in the late-lingering Scottish twilights, she under- stood him and was happy. One and all, and until the very end of their long lives, the Carlyles were bound together by a fierce and sweet family affec- tion. Thomas and John, the two educated sons, put money in their purses at last, but even when they were poorest, some shillings out of every hard- won pound went freely to the less fortunate of the clan. 6 CARLYLE Their religious heritage was Dissent. James Car- lyle belonged to the sect of Burgher-Seceders, or "New Lichts." "A man who awoke to the belief that he actually had a soul to be saved or lost was apt to be found among the Dissenting people, and to have given up attendance on the Kirk," says Thomas. "Very remarkable are those old Seceder clergy to me now when I look back on them. Most of the chief figures among them in Irving's time and mine were hoary old men; men so like what one might call antique Evangelists in ruder vesture and 'poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ,' I have no- where met with in monasteries or churches, among Protestant or Papal clergy, in any country of the >vorld." It was among these gray heads in the Ecclefechan meeting-house — "that poor temple of my childhood" — that Carlyle first learned that sa- cred lesson of Reverence which he afterward dis- covered in Wilhelm Meister, The wish and inten- tion of his father and mother was that he should fit himself for the ministry. It was with this aim that the minister of the meeting-house first taught him Latin, as a preparation for Annan grammar school and the University of Edinburgh. This dream of a consecrated calling faded slowly, to his father's THE HERITAGE 7, silent bewilderment and his mother^s keen sorrow, but Carlyle never lost his sense of dedication to the highest things. He remained to the end, like Emer- son, but far more deeply than Emerson, a child of Calvinism, rejecting its formulas^ but faithful to its mandates to the soul. The law of Carlyle's childhood, then, was the old rule of poverty, chastity and obedience; of fam- ily love and loyalty ; the hard, narrow and vital ex- perience of a country-bred boy; and the provincial, racial stamp of the Scottish Border, with its rude face and its inner flashing pride. CHAPTER II THE MAKING OF THE MAN THE authentic facts as to Carlyle's education are found in the Reminiscences — particularly in the chapter on Irving — and in his Early Letters, He came but slowly and painfully to the finding of himself and his true path. The two years at Annan were wretched. The four years at Edinburgh, from his fifteenth to his nineteenth year, were not unlike the experience of most Scottish youth of his period. His satirical picture of the University in Sartor Re- sartus does scant justice to his own teachers, who were reputable, though not highly distinguished scholars. He was well nourished upon farm sup- plies from Ecclefechan, and he had no real troubles except "growing pains." He made warm friend- ships. His Latin and French were good, and his mathematics brilliant ; he learned little or no Greek, and art and science remained — as always— a sealed book to him. After four winters as "student in 8 lThe making of the man 9 5irts," he left Edinburgh, without a degree, but en- rolled as a student of divinity, with the duty of making an annual report of progress and handing in an essay. He had won the appointment of math- ematical tutor in his old school, Annan Academy. Two discontented years here were followed by two years of private tutoring at Kirkcaldy, where Irving lent him books. He now abandoned the prepara- tion for the ministry, and ended by taking private pupils in Edinburgh for four years more, — ^mean- while reading law a little, studying mineralogy, mas- tering German, and writing some hack articles for Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopedia. He was "drifting" in these years, much as Thack- eray, Tennyson and Walt Whitman drifted in their turn, until they found their bearings. Carlyle found his, toward the end of his Edinburgh tutoring, in the famous Leith Walk "Conversion," recorded in the "Everlasting No" chapter of Sartor Resartus. He had denied, in that moment of fierce insight, that the Devil — {'der Geisf der stets verneinf) the Great Denier, ruled his soul; and henceforward he was a free man. A tutorship in the Buller family ( 1822- 1824) left him leisure for enormous reading, chiefly in German literature, and for writing his first book, 10 CARLYLE the Life of Schiller. He visited London, where his friend Irving had become a fashionable preacher. He made a brief, but to him most valuable, trip to Paris. At a farm-house on Haddon Hill near his father's new farm at Mainhill, in the summer of 1825, he had the experience recorded in the "Ever- lasting Yea*' chapter of Sartor Resartus, — the ec- static moment of acceptance of the universe as God's world. "I lived very silent, diligent, had long solitary rides (on my wild Irish horse Larry, good for the dietetic part), my meditatings, musings, and re- flectings were continual ; my thoughts went wander- ing (or travelling) through eternity, through time, and through space, so far as poor I had scanned or known, and were now to my endless solacement coming back with tidings to me ! This year I found that I had conquered all my scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering Mud-gods of my epoch; had escaped as from a worse than Tartarus, with all its Phlegethons and Stygian quagmires, and was emerg- ing free in spirit into the eternal blue of the ether, where, blessed be heaven! I have for the spiritual part ever since lived, looking down upon the welter- lThe making of the man 11 ings of my poor fellow-mortals, in such multitudes and millions still stuck in that fatal element, and have had no concern whatever in their Puseyisms, ritualisms, metaphysical controversies and cob- webberies, and no feeling of my own except honest silent pity for the serious or religious part of them, and occasional indignation, for the poor world's sake, at the frivolous secular and impious part, w;ith their universal suffrages, their Nigger emancipa- tions, sluggard and scoundrel Protection societies, and 'unexampled prosperities' for the time being! .What my pious joy and gratitude then was, let the pious soul figure. In a fine and veritable sense, I, poor, obscure, without outlook, almost without worldly hope, had become independent of the world. What was death itself, from the world, to what I had come through? I understood well what the old Christian people meant by conversion, by God's in- finite mercy to them. I had, in effect, gained an im- mense victory, and for a number of years had, in spite of nerves and chagrins, a constant inward hap- piness that was quite royal and supreme, in which all temporal evil was transient and insignificant, and which essentially remains with me still, though far oftener eclipsed and lying deeper down than then. 12 CARLYLE Once more, thank Heaven for its highest gift. I then felt, and still feel, endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep rocky road before me, the first of the moderns." . . . He had already begun to correspond with Goethe. But there is another series of letters, far more sig- nificant even than the Goethe correspondence, in revealing the character of the young Carlyle. In May, 1821, he had been introduced by Irving to Miss Jane Welsh of Haddington, and had promptly fallen in love with this brilliant and ambitious girl. The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh are among the most veracious and illuminat- ing documents of the crucial period of Carlyle's life. His unselfishness of spirit, wide-ranging play of in- tellect, and nobleness of aspiration, are revealed throughout. No wonder that she wrote to a woman friend, when all the occasional misunderstandings and reluctances of her engagement drew to a close : '*He possesses all the qualities I deem essential in my Husband, a warm true heart to love me, a towering intellect to command me, and a spirit of fire to be the guiding star of my life." ... They were married in 1826, and after two win- p:he making of the man 13 ters in Edinburgh, where Carlyle was occupied witK writing articles for the Reviews, they removed to the Welshes farm-house by Craigenputtoch — the "Hill of the Hawks" — on the moorland north of Dumfries. In the six solitary years at Craigenputtoch — 1828 to 183^1 — broken indeed by long visits to London and Edinburgh — Carlyle grew to his full mental stature. Mrs. Carlyle, always delicate in health, profited by the keen moorland air and the long rides on horseback. Housekeeping, in that remote district, brought its natural trials, but occasionally they had charming guests, like Jeffrey and Emerson, ("our quiet night of clear fine talk") , and they enjoyed un- burdened leisure for reading and writing. "We had trouble with servants, with many paltry elements and objects, and were very poor ; but I do not think our days were sad, and certainly not hers in especial, but mine rather. We read together at night, one >vinter, through *Don Quixote* in the original; Tasso in ditto had come before; but that did not last very long. I was diligently writing and read- ing there; wrote most of the 'Miscellanies' there, for Foreign, Edinburgh, etc., Reviews (obliged to 14 CARLYLE keep several strings to my bow), and took serious thought about every part of every one of them. After finishing an article, we used to get on horse- back, or mount into our soft old rig, and drive away, either to her mother's (Tempi and, fourteen miles off), or to my father and mother's (Scotsbrig, seven or six-and-thirty miles) ; the pleasantest jour- neys I ever made, and the pleasantest visits. Stay perhaps three days; hardly ever more than four; then back to work and silence . . . We were not unhappy at Craigenputtoch ; perhaps these were our happiest days. Useful, continual labour, essentially successful; that makes even the moor green. I found I could do fully twice as much work in a given time there, as with my best effort was possible in London, such the interruptions, etc. Once, in the winter time, I remember counting that for three months, there had not been any stranger, not even a beggar, called at Craigenputtoch door." The intellectual results of the Craigenputtoch period were threefold. Here Carlyle brought to an end his critical studies of German literature, devel- oped his own theory of biography and history (which was also capable of being turned into a theory of conduct), and made in Count Cagliostro^ JHE MAKING OF THE MAN 15 and The 'Diamond Necklace his preparatory studies for The French Revolution. Sartor Resartus, which was completed in 1831, precisely midway in the Craigenputtoch epoch, has been described as a moun- tain pool draining the great upland of German lit- erature. But it is also a personal document of the highest significance in revealing the manner of man Carlyle had become. "It was the best I had in me," he said stoically when the three London publishers, Fraser, Longman and Murray, had in turn rejected the manuscript, and Carlyle had tied it up and laid it away in a box. "I did my best," and Craigen- puttoch had likewise done its best for him, and he had to choose between going on to London and its fuller life, or remaining a mere provincial figure. The German studies, continued now for ten years, had taught him many things. He had become the foremost British authority in that field, and though he never completed his outlined History of German Literature, nor even began his projected Life of Luther — for him a far better subject than Fred' erick — ^his critical essays upon Schiller and Goethe, Novalis and Richter, and the other German philoso- phers and poets have remained one of the enduring treasures of our own literature. Slowly he turned 16 CARLYLE from eighteenth century Germany to eighteenth century France — a more natural field for a Scotch- man, since the Scottish type of education had been, since the days of Queen Mary, largely French, — and revealed in his essays upon Diderot and Voltaire an astonishing familiarity with the ways of the Old Regime. But his "trial flights'* as a story-teller of the Pre-Revolutionary epoch taught him that the books essential for a history of the Revolution itself were not then accessible in Scotland; and thus this road, too, led to London. But the valuable literary lesson of the Craigen- puttoch exile, after all, is as clearly written in Car- lyle's essays on Burns and Johnson, and on History and Biography, as it is in any of his studies of European events or European figures. This lesson, .which we must presently examine in his own words, is the cardinal point of his creed as an historian and biographer: namely, that all art of portrayal depends upon preliminary imaginative insight, and that the secret of insight is sympathy. To find your man, to love him, then to paint him as he is : this is the law — Carlyle thought — for all truly creative >vork in biography and history. London, in 1834, yras slow to believe it. CHAPTER III BABYLON NO private house in London is so well known to Americans as 24 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, where Carlyle lived from 1834 until his death in 1881. "Chelsea," he wrote his wife, who had re- mained in Scotland while he was househunting, **is a singular heterogeneous kind of a spot, very dirty and confused in some places, quite beautiful in others, abounding with antiquities and the traces of great men — Sir Thomas More, Steele, Smollett, etc. Our row, which for the last three doors or so is a street, and none of the noblest, runs out upon a Tarade' (perhaps they call it) running along the shore of the river, a broad highway with large shady trees, boats lying moored, and a smell of shipping and tan." A letter to his mother is no less pic- turesque : "We lie safe at a bend of the river, away from all the great roads, have air and quiet hardly inferior to Craigenputtoch, an outlook from the 17 18 CARLYLE back windows into mere leafy regions with here and there a red high-peaked old roof looking through; and see nothing of London, except by day the sum- mits of St. PauFs Cathedral and Westminster Ab- bey, and by night the gleam of the great Babylon affronting the peaceful skies. The house itself is probably the best we have ever lived in — a right old, strong, roomy brick house, built near one hundred fifty years ago, and likely to see three races of these modern fashionables fall before it comes down." This brick house, — now a Carlyle museum, rich in relics and in memories, — sheltered as strange and brilliant a man and woman as were to be found in London. Carlyle was now thirty-nine: noticeably tall, with touzled black hair, wonderful violet-blue eyes, and the fresh red cheeks of a peasant. His :wife was six years younger: a fascinating, self- willed creature, endowed with brains, beauty and a tongue. Like her husband, she suffered from chronic dyspepsia; like him, she was proud, sensi^ tive, affectionate in a Spartan fashion, and a fiery Scot. They were both aliens in London, as the Scotch have ever been; and they conquered their London in due time, as the Scotch are wont to do. Finely loyal to each other in all essential ways, there BABYLON IS! was in each an overlying vein of hardness, more pronounced in the wife than in the husband. The tenderness which each felt often remained unuttered. "Only think of my husband having given me a little present!" Mrs. Carlyle wrote in 1842; "he who never attends to such nonsense as birthdays. . . . I can not tell you how wae his little gift made me, as well as glad; it was the first thing of the kind he ever gave me in his life. In great matters he is al- ways kind and considerate ; but these little attentions, which we women attach so much importance to, he was never in the habit of rendering to any one; his up-bringing, and the severe turn of mind he has from nature, had alike indisposed him toward them." Their marriage was, to their disappointment, child- less. As the years of fierce intellectual labor went by, Carlyle grew increasingly preoccupied with his tasks; though he did not realize how completely they had absorbed him until the tragic clearness of self-examination, in the solitary years following his wife's death, revealed his error when it was too late. Mrs. Carlyle had her own circle of friends and ad- mirers, and though she renounced — no doubt with jvisdom — ^the literary ambitions which had dom- 20 CARLYLE inated her girlhood, she led her own intellectual life, with sympathies and antipathies which her hus- band did not share. To think, however, of their marriage as an unhappy one, is to do it less than justice. Neither the husband nor the wife was of a "happy" temperament; both were nervous invalids, thin-skinned and unreasonable and equipped with biting tongues; but, all things considered, it would have been difficult to discover in all London a better mate for either of them. Tennyson's robust com- mon-sense judgment has often been quoted : "Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle on the whole enjoyed life together, else they would not have chaffed one another so heartily." The story of Carlyle's life in London has been told with consummate art by Froude, and far more briefly and with greater justice by Richard Garnett. As a record of the production of books, it is a tale of triumph after triumph. It will be remembered that Carlyle's only writings, up to 1834, had been the Life of Schiller, some translations from the Ger- man, — of which Goethe's Wilhelm Meister was the most significant, — reviews and articles and essays, and Sartor Resartus, which had been printed as a BABYLON 21 serial in Fraser's, but which no publisher had the courage to issue as a book. His first task in Lon- don, attempted with the encouragement and help of John Stuart Mill, was The History of the French Revolution. This astounding performance, whose method and technique must be the subject of later comment, was published in 1837. It marked Car- lyle, at once, as one of the greatest writers of his epoch. Sartor Resartus, first printed in book form in Boston in 1836, under Emerson's supervision, was now reissued in London (1838), and it was followed in the next year by a collection of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays in four volumes. Then came Chartism, and the brilliant London lectures on Heroes and Hero-Worship, delivered to notable au- diences in 1840, and printed, after revision, in 1841. Carlyle was already busy with one of his most gigantic tasks, a life of Cromwell, which ultimately restricted itself to an annotated edition of Crom- well's Letters and Speeches, published in 1845. He had paused, in a kind of rage over the social condi- tions of England, two years before, to paint the contrasting pictures of Past and Present. In 1850 came the furious Latter-Day Pamphlets denouncing the age in which he lived; yet in 1851 this was fol- 22 CARLYLE lowed by one of Carlyle*s most quiet and per fecit per- formances in pure literature, The Life of Sterling. Five or six years earlier than this, he had begun to read in preparation for the last and most difficult of his Herculean labors, The History of Frederick the Great. The first two volumes appeared in 1858. The last page of the sixth and final volume was writ- ten in January, 1865. "Sunday night, January 5, 1865, went out to post-office with my last leaf of 'Frederick' MS. Evening still vivid to me. I was not joyful of mood; sad rather, mournfully thank- ful, but indeed half killed, and utterly wearing out and sinking into stupefied collapse after my 'coma- tose' eflforts to continue the long flight of thirteen years to finis. On her face, too, when I went out, there was a silent, faint, and pathetic smile, which I well felt at the moment, and better now ! Often enough had it cut me to the heart to think what she was suffering by this book, in which she had no share, no interest, nor any word at all; and with what noble and perfect constancy of silence she bore it all. My own heroic little woman !" It was in the following spring of 1866 that Car- lyle, now a tired old man of seventy-one, elected BABYLON 23 Lord Rector of his own University of Edinburgh by a large majority over his opponent Disraeli, deliv- ered his last public utterance, the noble and touch- ing Edinburgh Address. It was a day of bound- less triumph, won among his own people; but before he could return to London he was stricken with the tidings of Mrs. Carlyle's sudden death. She had never been more proud of him nor more fond of him than in that high moment. "It seems so long," she wrote in her last letter, "since you went away." "By the calamity of April last," Carlyle wrote to Emerson in the following January, "I lost my little all in this world; and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a home for me any more. Bright, heroic, tender, true and noble was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings ; and I am forever poor without her. She was snatched from me in a moment, — as by a death from the gods. Very beautiful her death was; radiantly beautiful (to those who understood it) had all her life been : quid plura? I should be among the dull- est and stupidest, if I were not among the saddest of all men. But not a word more on all this." CHAPTER IV SOLITUDE CARLYLE survived his wife fifteen years: a solitary, broken figure of a man, familiar to the world in Whistler^s portrait. But the truth is that he had always been solitary in spirit : "infinitely solitary," as he had written to Emerson in 1852. Emerson's tests of capacity for friendship, it may be remembered, were truth, tenderness, and the ability to do without friendship. Carlyle possessed these qualifications to a singular degree. His rough sincerity, his deep wells of tenderness, his passionate family affection, characterize him from first to last. He seems to have had no warm friends in childhood, but he won them in college, and held them through- out the long years when he was seeking his true career. His friendliness of disposition is proved by his correspondence with Irving, Emerson, Sterling and Mill; and by his intercourse with his London neighbors like the Hunts and the Gilchrists. He 24 SOLITUDE 2S had admiring acquaintances in every walk of life : aristocrats like Milnes and the Ashburtons, Radicals like the Bullers, Mazzini and John Forster, church- men like Thirlwall and Wilberforce, men of science like Tyndall and Huxley, men of letters like Tenny- son, Fitzgerald, Browning, Thackeray, Ruskin, Nor- ton, counted themselves among his intimates. But they all knew well enough that in the recesses of his soul he dwelt apart. It was his nature, and he was incapable of change. More than most men, he had a sense of what Swift called the transiency and vanity of all earthly things. With Andrew Marvell he could say : "At my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near.** He wrote in his Journal for 1854 : "Time ! Death ! All-devouring Time! This thought ^Exeunt om- nes/ and how the generations are like crops of grass, temporary, very, and all vanishes, as it were an apparition and a ghost : these things, though half a century old in me, possess my mind as they never did before." Many of Carlyle's sublimest passages in Sartor and elsewhere, sound this note of trans- iency: "Time's winged chariot hurrying near," perceived by the supersensitive ear of a solitary. 26 CARLYLE His literary work was essentially done, when the final loneliness began in 1866. It lasted until his death in 1881. In the first shock of his bereavement he spent his days in meditation upon the happiness that had been so close to him while he had been too often unaware of it. With meditation there was swiftly mingled a passionate regret for all his blind- ness to the little things that make up the sum of a woman's happiness, and he reproached himself bit- terly, now that it was too late. He set himself to the mournful task of writing a memoir of his wife, and then of annotating her letters, in heart-broken phrases which reveal all his old literary power, but which were tempered by no restraint. This memoir, and the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Car- lyle, prepared in tragic expiation of a guilt of blind- ness which few persons would have been cruel enough to impute to him, became after his death, and through the deliberate choice of his executor, Froude, a scourge to Carlyle's memory. In all outward ways, the old man's closi;ig years were tranquil. The income from his books had long been larger than the frugal life of Chelsea de- manded, leaving a generous margin for charities. His niece Mary Aitken, afterward Mrs. Alexander SOLITUDE 27 Carlyle, kept House for him. The stream of dis- ciples and friends still flowed without cessation to- 3vard Cheyne Row. Germany conferred upon him the splendid order Pour le Merite, founded by his hero Frederick, and Queen Victoria, through her premier Disraeli, offered him the Grand Cross of the Bath. His eightieth birthday, in 1875, was com- memorated by a gold medal and an address signed by more than one hundred of the foremost names in Great Britain. Slowly he lost strength, thereafter, though his spirit did not pass until February 5, 1881. It had been known for weeks that he was dying, and the words that Walt Whitman wrote in his Camden diary will remind some Americans of their own emotions in that hour : "... In the fine cold night, unusually clear, (February 5, '81) as I walked some open grounds adjacent, the condition of Carlyle, and his approach- ing — perhaps even then actual — death, filled me with thoughts eluding statement, and curiously blending with the scene. The planet Venus, an hour high in the west, with all her volume and lustre re- covered, (she has been shorn and languid for nearly a year,) including an additional sentiment I never noticed before — not merely voluptuous, Paphian, 28 CARLYLE steeping, fascinating— now with calm commanding seriousness and hauteur — the Milo Venus now. Up- ward to the zenith, Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon past her quarter, trailing in procession, with the Pleiades following, and the constellation Taurus, and rjfd Aldebaran. Not a cloud in heaven. Orion strode through the southeast, with his glittering belt — and a trifle below hung the sun of the night, Sirius. Every star dilated, more vitreous, nearer than usual. Not as in some clear nights when the larger stars entirely outshine the rest. Every little star or cluster just as distinctly visible, and just as nigh. Berenice's hair showing every gem, and new ones. To the northeast and north the Sickle, the Goat and kids, Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dippers. While through the whole of this silent indescribable show, inclosing and bathing my whole receptivity, ran the thought of Carlyle dying. '(To soothe and spiritualize, and, as far as may be, solve the mysteries of death and genius, consider them under the stars at midnight.) "And now that he has gone hence, can it be that Thomas Carlyle, soon to chemically dissolve in ashes and by winds, remains an identity still? In ways perhaps eluding all the statements, lore and specula- SOLITUDE 29 tlons of ten thousand years — eluding all possible statements to mortal sense — does he yet exist, a definite, vital being, a spirit, an individual — ^perhaps now wafted in space among those stellar systems, which, suggestive and limitless as they are, merely edge more limitless, far more suggestive systems? I have no doubt of it. In silence, of a fine night, such questions are answer'd to the soul, the best answers that can be given. With me, too, when de- pressed by some specially sad event, or tearing prob- lem, I wait till I go out under the stars for the last voiceless satisfaction." Carlyle was buried in Ecclefechan on that "cold dreary February morning" so touchingly described by Froude. CHAPTER V THE REACTION SOON the storm of detraction broke. The blame for it lies fairly on the shoulders of James Anthony Froude, Carlyle's friend and lit- erary executor. But Froude^si action was not so much a betrayal of a trust — as has been bitterly asseverated — as it was an error of judgment : error in reading the characters of b)oth Mr. and Mrs. Car- lyle, error in interpreting Carlyle's wishes, error in artistic presentation of the outstanding features of his personality. The facts must be briefly stated here. Carlyle's original executors were his brother, Doctor John Carlyle, the Dante scholar, and John Forster. After Forster's death, Froude's name was substituted for his, in 1878. John Carlyle died in 1879, two years before his brother. In 1881, then, Froude had the responsibility of deciding what manuscript remains of Thomas Carlyle should be published. Jen years 30 THE REACTION 31 earlier Carlyle had placed in Froude's hands a col- lection of manuscripts, including the memoir of Mrs. Carlyle written immediately after her death, memoirs of Irving and Jeffrey, notes upon Wordsworth and Southey, and a sketch of Carlyle's father written after his death in 1832. This ma- terial Froude decided to issue as Carlyle's Rem- iniscences. He stated clearly in the preface that "perhaps most of it was not intended for publica- tion." But he did not print the solemn injunction which Carlyle had written at the end of the manu- script volume: "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 in- dolent excuse, 'Not yet; wait, any day that can be done !' and then it is possible the thing may be left behind me, legible to interested survivors — friends only. I will hope, and with worthy curiosity, not unworthy! 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 editing of per- haps nine-tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become impossible. T. C, 28 July, 1866" 32 CARLYLE Froude's omission of this postscript was a grave error of judgment, as it proved, although he un- questionably supposed that Carlyle had changed his mind about the matter, and that Carlyle's verbal directions to him, authorizing him to use his dis- cretion, when the manuscripts were given to his keeping in 1871, superseded the postscript of 1866. To have stated this with frankness, would have been Froude's wiser course. But he could not have an- ticipated the violence of the criticism provoked by the publication of these intimate records of Car- lyle*s impressions of his contemporaries. It is likely that Carlyle himself never recognized how blistering his own words were. In private talk his extreme expressions were often accompanied by a hearty hu- morous laugh at his own extravagance of speech, and the laugh corrected and humanized the total im- pression made upon his hearers. But now, in 1881, the readers of the Reminiscences could not hear the dead man's delighted chuckle at his hyperboles ; they felt the harshness, the vindictiveness of Carlyle's attitude toward many honored names, and they blamed Froude for these improprieties. The pain- ful impression as to Carlyle's true nature was in- creased by Froude*s publication of The Letters ani THE REACTION 33 Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, prepared, as we have seen, in the husband's agony of sorrow and contrition, and surely not intended by him to be given unrevised to the eye of the great public. These books were soon accompanied by Froude's massive Life of Carlyle, in four volumes : a superb and en- during monument to his hero, and nevertheless a biography whose immediate and obvious influence was to emphasize certain flaws in Carlyle's char- acter. In the light of facts subsequently revealed, it is now certain that Froude's admiration for Mrs. Car- lyle and his chivalrous desire to present her as a woman "misunderstood" — even by her husband — •■ led him into exaggeration. He overestimated her sacrifice "of ambition and fortune" in marrying him, Jane Welsh did not possess the social station, nor the property, and it is fairly clear that she did not possess the original intellectual force, which Froude attributed to her. What was far more sinister than this, he magnified her very natural jealousy of Carlyle's friendship for the first Lady Ashburton in such a way as to make many readers of the biography imagine that Carlyle was guilty, not merely of wilful cruelty leading to estrange- 34 CARLYLE ment, but of actual infidelity. AH this seems ab- surd enough now, but the immediate result was to deal Carlyle's personal character a blow from which it was not easy to recover. Was not Froude a close friend, the possessor of thousands of letters and other manuscript documents, and was he not among the most eminent of historians, skilled in collecting and weighing evidence? The most loyal of Car- lyle's admirers felt a sinking of the heart. Very slowly the scales of public opinion began to turn. The Alexander Carlyles, greatly offended by Froude's methods, regained possession of the orig- inal manuscripts utilized by the literary executor. Charles Eliot Norton now had access to them, and in a vigorous article in the New Princeton Review (July, 1886) exposed Froude's characteristic care- lessness and inaccuracy in dealing with manuscript sources, particularly with regard to the Reminis- cences. Norton also edited Carlyle's correspondence with Emerson and with Goethe, and his early let- ters. Here was evidence as to Carlyle's real nature, not to be gainsaid. Then, twenty years after the first storm, appeared a series of volumes which cleared the air. In 1903 Mr. Alexander Carlyle printed the New^ Letters and Memorials of Jane, THE REACTION 35 Welsh Carlyle, with an introduction by Sir James Crichton-Browne, setting forth Froude's defects as a biographer. Froude replied in his My Relations with Carlyle (1903). Crichton-Browne made a re- joinder in The Nemesis of Froude ( 1903), to which Froude, who died in 1904, did not reply. In that year Alexander Carlyle issued the New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, and in 1909 The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, The complete facts were at last made manifest, and Froude's bril- liant and somewhat misleading "Life" of his hero stands corrected at the points where the unwary reader needed to be put upon his guard. Save for these defects arising from partiality of vision and artistic exaggeration, Froude's masterly perform- ances will not be superseded. CHAPTER VI OUR OWN PROBLEM IT REMAINS to be said that a new generation of readers must find its own methods of approach to Carlyle. None of the great Victorian writers like Thackeray, Dickens, Newman, Ruskin, can be read by an American in the second decade of the twentieth century as they were read by their con- temporaries. No vividness of historical imagination can transport us completely backward into that by- gone epoch. Its literary, social and ethical atmos- phere can not be reproduced. Much of the present reaction against the Early and Middle Victorians is stupid : it is what Doctor Johnson would call "pure ignorance." But some of it is the result of in- evitable social change. Even during the forty years of Carlyle' s living activity in the world of letters, there were profound alterations in the structure of English thought and in the conditions of English society. In 1832 he stood, or thought he stood, by 36 OUR OWN PROBLEM 37. the side of John Stuart Mill, the Radical; but they parted forever over the question of American slavery, and Carlyle stood frankly, in the eighteen- sixties, for the program of the "beneficent whip." This cost him the allegiance of many American ad- mirers, and his tardy admission, after the close of the Civil War, that he might have been mistaken as to its real issue, left his general attitude toward democracy and liberty unchanged. He distrusted both. Anticipating Ruskin in his advocacy of pop- ular education and of many social and administra- tive reforms, Carlyle would nevertheless be as dis- gruntled by the program of contemporary British Liberalism as he was by the Liberalism of the eighteen- forties. He would dislike no less the for- ward movements of contemporary thought in the United States. What then are we to search for in the twenty-five volumes of this typical mid- Victo- rian, most of whose work was finished — and by many, even then, thought antiquated — more than half a century ago ? What go we out again into this wilderness to see? Well, we shall see first of all a literary artist, a master of word and phrase. An eccentric, a "bar- barian," a gesticulator, a lover of the extravagant 38 CARLYLE and the grotesque, Carlyle was nevertheless one of the most cunning and effective workmen who have .wrought in the medium of human speech. He knew; precisely what he was doing, and he liked to ex- pound the secrets of his profession. As realist, hu- morist, portrait painter and story-teller, his place is with the very greatest of men of letters, and he won that place by understanding himself and his task, and by following what was, for him, precisely the right method. To watch this artist at his work is to learn something of the immutable laws of literature. It may well be granted that Carlyle' s eye and hand are marvellous, but how about his mind? What are his leading ideas ? What is the ethical validity of his famous gospels of "work" and of "sincerity" ? What is the philosophical value of his mysticism, of the transcendental significance which he gives to the terms "silence" and "nature of things" ? What shall be said to-day of his political views, his theory of the "hero," his diagnosis of the "condition of England," and the social remedies which he pro- poses? Has he trust in progress, in the education of the race? Does he believe that a democracy de- velops leadership or promotes fellowship? With OUR OWN PROBLEM 39 the word "faith" so often upon his eloquent lips, has he himself a living faith in man and in God, and m the co-operation of man with God? It is the problem of this book to answer these questions if possible, and to answer them as far as possible in Carlyle's own words. The task will jus- tify itself as we proceed, and perhaps there is no need of foreshadowing the result in this preliminary chapter. Yet there would be little excuse for an- other book about Carlyle if it were not fairly cer- tain, at the outset, that we are dealing with a writer who perceived in an extraordinary way, the worth of the individual man, and who had an overwhelm- ing sense of the infinite background of human life; and who therefore, in spite of his pessimism, became a seer and a prophet of idealism. CHAPTER VII HOW HE WROTE CARLYLE'S marvellous faculty for expres- sion was the result of mental qualities which made the facile prose composition of many profes- sional writers impossible to him. He had to toil over each one of his tasks, as if he were writing a book for the first time, and almost as if he were writing for the first time in English. Like a Cana- dian wood-chopper, he grunted with each stroke of the ax; but if there was a grunt with every stroke, there was also a stroke for every grunt. His im- patient or despairing exclamations give picturesque- ness to his letters; his daily task on his Cromwell becomes, in the Carlylese vocabulary, "a real descent to Hades, to Golgotha and Chaos!" But he never stopped chopping for all that. A few of his comments upon his French Revolu- tiofij as the work progressed, illuminate the truly artistic instinct of this toiler, who usually had only 40 HOW HE WROTE 41 iWorHs of scorn for "Art." Before attempting to portray the Revolution itself, he had tried his hand, it will be remembered, at The Diamond Necklace, in order "to prove myself in the narrative style." One would say to-day that the proof was tolerably clear ! Yet he thought his own style, in this period, "far from the right;" The Diamond Necklace "is very far from pleasing me." He began writing The French Revolution in September, 1834, "with a kind of trembling hope," but after two weeks of labor he had produced but two pages of copy, and even these, "alas ! not in the right style, not in the style that can stand." After a few months he reports that his book is proceeding "dreadfully slowly" but is "otherwise better than anything that I have done." The burning of the manuscript, through the care- lessness of John Stuart Mill's maid, destroyed the result of five months' labor; but it was character- istic of the indomitable Scotchman that he straight- >vay purchased a better quality of writing paper, and after a week's holiday, set himself to the task of making a better book. But the style still gave him "great uneasiness" : it seemed to him full of affecta- tion. He writes on nevertheless, "with the force of fire, above all with the speed of fire." "Nor do 42 CARLYLE I mean to investigate much more about it," he writes to his wife in 1836, "but to splash down what I know, in large masses of colours; that it may look like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance, 1 — ^which it is." How well this canny Scot knew >vrhat he was doing, after all ! "It is a wild savage Book," he wrote to Sterling when it was finished; "born in blackness, whirlwind and sorrow." "One of the savagest written for several centuries," he said to his brother John ; and then he added coolly and shrewdly, in his next letter: "It will stand a great deal of beating; the critics are welcome to lay on; there is a kind of Orson life in it which they will not kill." Pleasantest of all is his quiet sentence to his mother in September, 1837: "They make a great talk about the Book ; which seems to have suc- ceeded in a far higher degree than I had looked for." Carlyle's attitude toward his task is equally clear in his comments upon the annotation of CromweWs Letters and Speeches. Here are a few sentences from his correspondence with Emerson (the italics are Carlyle's) : "I know no method of much consequence, except that of believing, of being sincere; from Homer and HOW HE WROTE 43 the Bible down to the poorest Burns's song, I find no other art which promises to be perennial. "I grow daily to honor Facts more and more, and Theory less and less. A Fact, it seems to me, is a great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then at least by the Devil. "I have often thought of Cromwell and Puritans; but do not see how the subject can be presented still alive. A subject dead is not worth presenting. "I am now over head and ears in Cromwellian books; studying, for perhaps the fourth time in my life, to see if it be possible to get any creditable face-to-face acquaintance with our English Puritan period; or whether it must be left forever a mere hearsay and echo to one. Books equal in dulness were at no epoch of the world penned by unassisted man. Nevertheless, courage! I have got, within the last twelve months, actually as it were, to see that Cromwell was one of the greatest souls born of the English Kin; a great amorphous semi-articulate Baresark; very interesting to me. I grope in the dark vacuity of Baxters, Neales; thankful for here a glimpse, there a glimpse. *T had begun to write some book on Cromwell. . . . There is risk yet, that with the loss of still 44 CARLYLE farther labour, I may have to abandon It; and then the great dumb Oliver may lie unspoken for- ever; gathered to the mighty Silent of the earth; for, I think, there will hardly ever live another man that will believe in him and his Puritanism as I do. Xo him small matter. "You ask after Cromwell: ask not of him; he is like to drive me mad. There he lies, shining clear enough to me, nay glowing, or painfully burning; but far down; sunk under the hundred years of Cant, Oblivion, Unbelief, and Triviality of every kind; through all which, and to the top of all which, what mortal industry or energy will avail to raise him! A thousand times I have rued that my poor activity ever took that direction. The likelihood still is that I may abandon the task undone. . . . There is no use of writing of things past, unless they can be made in fact things present." In all these passages Carlyle emphasizes an intense vision of the Fact, and intense belief in it, as the cardinal laws of historical writing. Generally speak- ing, he had a contempt for all formal methods of literary composition. Froude quotes a character- istic utterance : "Of Dramatic Art, though I have eagerly listened HOW HE WROTE 45 to a Goethe speaking of it, and to several hundreds of others mumbling and trying to speak of it, I find that I, practically speaking, know yet almost as good as nothing. Indeed, of Art generally {Kunst, so called), I can almost know nothing. My first and last secret of Kunst is to get a thorough intelligence of the fact to be painted, represented, or, in what ever way, set forth — the fact deep as Hades, high as heaven, and written so, as to the visual face of it on our poor earth. This once blazing within me, if it will ever get to blaze, and bursting to be out, one has to take the whole dexterity of adaptation ona is master of, and with tremendous struggling, con- trive to exhibit it, one way or the other. This is not Art. I know well. It is Robinson Crusoe, and not the master of Woolwich, building a ship. Yet at bottom is there any Woolwich builder for such kinds of craft? What Kunst had Homer? What Kunst had Shakespeare ? Patient, docile, valiant in- telligence, conscious and unconscious, gathered from all winds, of these two things — their own faculty of utterance, and the audience they had to utter to, rude theater, Ithacan Farm Hall, or whatever it was — add only to which as the soul of the whole, the above-said blazing, radiant insight into the fact. 46 CARLYLE blazing, burning interest about it, and we have the whole Art of Shakespeare and Homer." It should be added that in the composition of Cromwell, and of The French Revolution, Carlyle >vas unable, through the very defects of his extra- ordinary qualities, to avail himself of conventional methods of note-taking; he had to carry his notes "in the living mind," however great might be the strain of the constantly focused attention. He wrote to the Reverend Alexander Scott in 1845 : "You ask me how I proceed in taking notes on such occasions. I would very gladly tell you all my methods if I had any; but really I have as it were none. I go into the business with all the intelligence, patience, silence, and other gifts and virtues that I have ; find that ten or a hundred times as many could be profitably expended there, and still prove insuffi- cient : and as for plan, I find that every new business; requires as it were a new scheme of operations, which amid infinite bungling and plunging unfolds itself at intervals (very scantily after all) as I get along. The great thing is. Not to stop and break down ; to know that virtue is very indispensable, that one must not stop because new and ever new drafts upon one's virtue must be honoured ! But as to the HOW HE WROTE 47 special point of taking Excerpts, I think I univer- sally, from habit or otherwise, rather avoid writing beyond the very minimum; mark in pencil the very smallest indication that will direct me to the thing again ; and on the whole try to keep the whole mat- ter simmering in the living mind and memory rather than laid up in paper bundles or otherwise laid up in the inert way. For this certainly turns out to be a truth : Only what you at last have living in your own memory and heart is worth putting down to be printed; this alone has much chance to get into the living heart and memory of other men. And here indeed, I believe, is the essence of all the rules I have ever been able to devise for myself. I have tried various schemes of arrangement and artificial helps to remembrance ; paper-bags with labels, little paper-books, paper-bundles, etc., etc.; but the use of such things, I take it, depends on the habits and humours of the individual; what can be recom- mended universally seems to me mainly the above. My paper-bags (filled with little scraps all in pencil) have often enough come to little for me; and indeed in general when writing, 1 am surrounded with a rubbish of papers that have come to little : — this only will come to much for all of us, — To keep the thing 48 CARLYLE you are elaborating as much as possible actually in your living mind; in order that this same mind, as much awake as possible, may have a chance to make something of it ! — ^And so I will shut up my lumber shop again; and wish you right good speed in yours." When this letter was written, Carlyle had already begun to read in preparation for his Frederick the Great, although many years were to pass before he actually began writing. Again we listen to the per- perpetual groanings that accompany his steady toil : he has no "sufficient love for lean Frederick and his heroisms"; he faces "by far the heaviest job ever laid upon me" ; "I make no way in my Prussian his- tory"; he has no "motive to go on, except the sad negative one, 'Shall we be beaten in our old days then?' " Of course he did make his way, in spite of impatience and disillusionment, and he was not beaten, because it was not in his nature to be beaten. But from his first book to his last, the inner strug- gle and the confessions of it remained much the same. There was always the agonizing effort to "see" the "fact," to penetrate to its real significance, to "believe" in its validity; and then to express the HOW HE WROTE 49 fact "sincerely," vividly, audibly, — as it were with the speaking voice. In sheer visualizing power Carlyle surpassed any of his contemporaries, except possibly Dickens. Often of course, he had to set himself consciously to work to reconstruct a vanished scene. When, for instance, he visited the ancient battlefield of Dunbar in September, 1843, he wrote to his wife: "Having time to spare (for dinner was at six), I surveyed the old Castle, washed my feet in the sea, — smoking the while — took an image of Dunbar with me as I could, and then set my face to the wind and the storm." He "takes" the image, it will be observed, precisely as a photographer might "take" a picture, except that Carlyle is really looking at the swift confused masses of charging men, dead two hundred years before. Another phrase, illuminating the dramatic, dyna- mic quality of Carlyle's visualization, occurs in his essay on Diderot : "As to this Diderot, had we once got so far that we could, in the faintest degree, per- sonate him; take upon ourselves his character and his environment of circumstances, and act his Life over again, in that small Private Theater of ours '50 CARLYLE (under our Hat), — that were what, in conformity with common speech, we should name understanding him, and could be abundantly content with." The two passages just quoted are concerned with conscious professional effort to "see" the object imaginatively. But there are hundreds of pen-por- traits in Carlyle's published works which seem to have resulted from the mere unconscious exposure of a highly sensitized retina: Carlyle sees and re- members and describes, as it were automatically. "At the corner of Cockspur Street we paused for a moment, meeting Sir John Sinclair (Statistical Account of Scotland, etc.), whom I had never seen before and never saw again. A lean old man, tall but stooping, in tartan cloak, face very wrinkly, nose blue, physiognomy vague and with distinction as one might have expected it to be." His single picture-making epithets are famous. "Lion" Mirabeau, "sea-green" Robespierre, "Grand- ison-Cromwell" Lafayette are familiar examples. But his nick-naming skill is matched by his ability to hit off a character with a volley of unexpected adjectives. "Jemmy Belcher was a smirking little dumpy Unitarian bookseller." "Coleridge, a puffy, anxious, obstructed-looking, fattish old man." HOW HE WROTE 51 The student of Carlyle's craftsmanship can not spend a few days more profitably than in collecting for himself such examples of Carlyle's instantaneous photography. He should notice how the portraits etched with a line or two compare in technique and in effectiveness with the half-length and full-length figures which crowd the Carlyle gallery. Here is Southey, described in a single sentence for the benefit of Emerson : "Southey's complexion is still healthy mahogany- brown, with a fleece of white hair, and eyes that seem running at full gallop." Three years earlier, in 1835, Carlyle had entered this fuller description of Southey in his diary : "A lean, grey, whiteheaded man of dusky com- plexion, unexpectedly tall when he rises and still leaner then — the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small carelined brow, huge bush of white grey hair on high crown and projecting on all sides, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen — a well-read, honest, limited (straight-laced even), kindly-hearted, most irritable man." Thirty-two years later, Carlyle sketched Southey once more, in his Reminiscences: 52 CARLYLE "Southey was a man towards well up in the fifties ; hair grey, not yet hoary, well setting off his fine clear brown complexion ; head and face both small- ish, as indeed the figure was while seated ; features finely cut; eyes, brow, mouth, good in their kind- expressive all, even vehemently so, but betokening rather keenness than depth either of intellect or character; a serious, human, honest, but sharp, al- most fierce-looking thin man, with very much of the militant in his aspect, — in the eyes especially was visible a mixture of sorrow and of anger, or of angry contempt, as if his indignant fight with the world had not yet ended in victory, but also never should in defeat." Here are two portraits of Alfred Tennyson, drawn in the eighteen- forties : "One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; bright-laugh- ing hazel eyes ; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, al- most Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free- and-easy; — smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic, — fit for loud laughter and piercing >vail, and all that may lie between; speech and HOW HE WROTE 53 speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe ! — We shall see what he will grow to." "A fine, large- featured, dim-eyed, bronze-col- oured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred ; dusty, smoky, free and easy, who swims outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke. Great now and then when he does emerge — a most restful, broth- erly, solid-hearted man." The picture of DeQuincey, in the Reminiscences, is unforgetable : "He was a pretty little creature, full of wire- drawn ingenuities, bankrupt enthusiasms, bankrupt pride, with the finest silver-toned low voice, and most elaborate gently winding courtesies and in- genuities in conversation. 'What wouldn't one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk!' That was Her criticism of him, and it was right good. A bright, ready, and melodious talker, but in the end an inclusive and long-winded. One of the smallest man figures I ever saw; shaped like a pair of tongs, and hardly above five feet in all. When he sate, you would have taken him, by candlelight. 54 CARLYLE for the beauti fullest little child; blue-eyed, spark- ling face, had there not been a something, too, which said 'Eccovi — this child has been in hell' '* Here is another proof of Carlyle's possession of the detective's eyesight and memory. In visiting the Model Prison described in one of The Latter-Day Pamphlets he recognized a man whom he had seen once on the street a year before : *Trom an upper room or gallery, we looked down into a range of private courts, where certain Char- tist Notabilities were undergoing their term. Char- tist Notability First struck me very much; I had seen him about a year before, by involuntary acci- dent and much to my disgust, magnetizing a silly young person; and had noted well the unlovely voracious look of him, his thick oily skin, his heavy dull-burning eyes, his greedy mouth, the dusky po- tent insatiable animalism that looked out of every feature of him: a fellow adequate to animal-mag- netize most things, I did suppose; — and here was the post I now found him arrived at." For a final example of Carlyle's descriptive power let us turn from the world of men to the world of apes, and read this parable from Past and Present: "Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology HOW HE WROTE 55 are more significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions, — verging indeed toward a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no : the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses ; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grin- ning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified in short, that they found him a humbug and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. "Moses, withdrew ; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all 'changed into Apes'; sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most wnaff ected manner ; gibber- 56 CARLYLE ing and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a most indisputable Hum- bug. The Universe has become a Humbug to these Apes who thought it one. There they sit and chat- ter, to this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half -conscious- ness, half-reminiscence ; and they sit, with their wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonder fulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelliglbllity, they and It; and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmu- sical chatter or mew : — truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape ! They made no use of their souls ; and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half remember that they had souls. "Didst thou never, O Traveller, fall in with par- ties of this tribe? Meseems they are grown some- what numerous in our day." To print examples of Carlyle's manner of writing is no doubt easier than to explain how he came to HOW HE WROTE 57, write as he did. Yet certain extracts of his work- manship are plainly to be accounted for. The oral characteristics of his style, its exaggeration and its humor, are in part an inheritance and imitation of his father's talk in Annandale. Richter and other German romanticists encouraged him, no doubt, in a restless wilfulness, a dislike of the beaten paths. But his choice of words and sentence-structure, like his whole method of composition, was really necessi- tated by his physical organization. He exhibited, in an extraordinary degree, a combination of what are known as the "visual," the "audile" and the "motor" types of imagination. H his sensitiveness to visual impressions resembles that of Dickens, as we have said, in his nervous response to stimuli of sound he is like Walt Whitman, and in his motor type of imaginative energy he is another Tolstoi. Artists of this motor type think with their whole body. Their nerve centers compel them, whether they will or no, to a perpetual dynamic activity. They can not help creating a "Private Theater un- der their own Hat" and turning actors in it. They write in terms of bodily sensation. An illustration may make this clearer. One of my pupils once marked four hundred and thirty-two 58 CARLYLE passages in Carlyle's French Revolution as being "striking." When he was asked to analyse these passages and to discover, if possible, the reason for the impression they had made upon him, he found that nineteen per cent, of them — nearly one passage in every five — contained images of fire. Sixteen per cent, had images founded upon discordant noises, sixteen per cent., also, contained color terms, fif- teen per cent, presented images of storm, wind and other violent physical changes in Nature, eleven per cent, had terms of confusion and chaos, and nearly eight per cent, were marked by metaphors drawn from the animal world. It may be added that thirty- five per cent, of the four hundred and thirty-two passages contained the "triad" construction — a three- fold grouping of words, clauses or sentences, familiar in the Bible and in many classical writers. Of course it should be remembered that this par- ticular pupil, in marking passages which appealed to him, betrayed, no doubt, something of his own type of physical organization and his own imagina- tive response to verbal imagery. It should also be borne in mind that Carlyle produced, especially in his letters and early essays, hundreds of pages which were not composed in the heightened "Car- HOW HE WROTE 59 lylese" manner, and which are not easily to be dis- tinguished, save by experts in EngHsh style, from other good writing of the Victorian period. Yet it remains true that he will continue to be judged as a writer by the passages which bear most intimately the mark of his temperament. At once a realist and a mystic, he was forced by the laws of his na- ture to see things in a certain way, and having per- ceived this vision, he had no rest in his soul or body until he had told what he had seen. CHAPTER VIII HIS LITERARY THEORY CARLYLE'S method — instinctive and acquired — can be understood more easily if it is studied in connection with certain passages of his early critical essays, and with the theory of biog- raphy and history which he had evolved, long be- fore he had attempted the great books which gave him fame. It will be remembered that Carlyle began to study German in 1819, and that for a decade thereafter he busied himself chiefly with German literature. One of the results of his German studies was a quickening of his critical faculties, particularly in relation to the question of the nature of literature itself. In his Life of Schiller, his translations of German Romance, and above all in his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the young Scotchman was compelled to grapple with some of the funda- mental questions concerning poetry and prose. 60 HIS LITERARY THEORY 61 His conception of the mood of the typical poet and of the function of genius was deeply influenced by Schiller. Though he came later, like so many other men, to discover that Goethe was greater than Schiller, — a "Bishop" in the diocese where Schiller remained merely a high-minded "Priest," — Schiller*s unconditional idealism became Carlyle's. In Rich- ter he found "something splendid, wonderful, dar- ing" ; and his clear-cut portrayal of the singularities of Richter's style proves that Carlyle himself imi- tated Richter with his eyes wide open, — if he may fairly be said to have imitated him at all. Richter, said Carlyle, "in adopting his own extraordinary style, did it with clear knowledge of what excellence in style, and the various kinds and degrees of ex- cellence therein, properly signified." In closing a remarkable essay on The State of German Litera- ture Carlyle confesses that the spiritual aspect of Europe is melancholy, deserted of religious light: and yet he asserts that religion and poetry are eter- nal in the soul of man. In the essay on Novalis he frankly adopts the philosophy and the terminology of Transcendental- ^ ism: to Novalis "Nature is no longer dead hostile ^ Matter, but the veil and mysterious garment of the ' 62 CARLYLE unseen." This doctrine was to become later the key-note of unforgetable passages in Sartor Re- sarins. Carlyle admits that Novalis was a Mystic, but he goes on to assert that "the Plummet of French or Scotch logic . . . will not sound the deep-seas of human Inquiry." Many a page was Carlyle destined to compose upon that theme ! But the notable essay on Goethe {Foreign Re- view, 1828), written four years after Carlyle's per- sonal correspondence with the Olympian had begun, and four years before Goethe's death, affords the clearest demonstration of what Carlyle had learned from the master. Carlyle presents Goethe as "a clear and universal man." His "poetry is no separate faculty, no mental handicraft; but the voice of the whole harmonious manhood." There is embodied in Goethe "the Wisdom which is proper to this time; the beautiful, the religious Wisdom, which may still, with something of its old impressiveness, speak to the whole soul; still, in these hard, unbelieving days, reveal to us glimpses of the Unseen but not Unreal World, that so the Actual and the Ideal may again meet together, and clear Knowledge be again wedded to Religion, in the life and business of men." Goethe's poetry is thus "the poetry of our own day HIS LITERARY THEORY 63 and generation. No demands are made on our credulity; the light, the science, the scepticism of our age, is not hid from us. . . . Poetry, as he views it, exists not in time or place, but in the spirit of man." The Poetry written by the Masters "aims not at 'furnishing a languid mind with fan- tastic shows and indolent emotions,* but at incor- porating the everlasting Reason of man in forms visible to his Sense, and suitable to it." This belief in the reality of Poetry, and in its high and enduring significance to man, was an es- sential article of Carlyle's literary creed. To pro- duce literature worthy of the name one must con- form to those conditions which are requisite for the production of poetry. One must possess a pene- trating vision into facts and into those spiritual causes which lie back of facts; and one must be capable of that transforming imaginative power which incorporates the everlasting Reason into forms visible to the senses. He gave a classic expression of this conviction in a passage of the lecture on The Hero as Poet: "Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a dif- ference between true Poetry and true Speech not poetical: what is the difference? On this point 64 CARLYLE many things have been written, especially by late German Critics, some of which are not very in- telligible at first. They say, for example, that the Poet has an infinitude in him; communicates an Unendlichkeif, a certain character of 'infinitude,* to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remem- bering: if well meditated, some meaning will grad- ually be found in it. For my own part, I find con- siderable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of Poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say this as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically musical, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be poetical ; if not, not. — Musical : how much lies in that ! A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it ; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally HIS LITERARY THEORY 65 utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of in- articulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for the moment gaze into that! "Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of the song in it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent ; — the r3^hm or tune to which the people sing what they have to say ! Ac- cent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of their own, — though they only notice that of others. Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical, — with a finer music than mere accent; the speech of a man in zealous anger be- comes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us. Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings and hulls! The primal element of us; of us and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature ; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call mtisical Thought, The Poet is he who thinks in e(i CARLYLE that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature heing everywhere music, if you can only reach it." As for the mere "art" of writing in verse, or for that matter in prose, Carlyle, as we have seen, troubled himself but little. If he could once see his facts "blazing," and was sure of their spiritual sig- nificance, the outward dress of words became to him a negligible detail. This was a dangerous laxity upon his part, no doubt; but his extraordinary na- tive gift for expression made him reckless of all theories of style. But in his theory of the function of the imagination he is at one with most of the great creative artists who have tried to communi- cate in words their sense of the significant in art. The particular form of literary art which Car- lyle chose to follow led him straight to the fields of history and biography, and it happened that while he was writing some of his most memorable his- torical and biographical sketches, he also ventured to set forth his views as to the essential nature of the task which he had undertaken. A brief examina- HIS LITERARY THEORY 67 tion of his theory and practise, just before and after the Sartor Resartus period, will show the inner con- sistency of his method, — a method which may be traced in every one of his subsequent books. CHAPTER IX THE THEORY TESTED IET US select, then, a half dozen essays written ^by Carlyle during the years immediately pre- ceding and following the writing of Sartor Resartus in 1831. In these review articles, no one of which seems to have made a very profound impression at the moment, there will be found a summary of the working ideas which were soon to win for Carlyle his distinctive place in the world of letters. Perhaps the best known essay of the group is the Edinburgh Review article on Burns (1828). Written ostensibly as a notice of Lockhart's Life of Burns, it passes without much delay to a funda- mental discussion of the aim of Biography. Car- lyle insists that if a man's life be written at all, "the public ought to be made acquainted with all the in- ward springs and relations of his character. Ho\/ did coexisting circumstances modify him from with- out; how did he modify these from within? With 68 THE THEORY TESTED 69 what endeavors and what efficacy rule over them; with what resistance and what suffering sink under them? In one word, what and how produced was the effect of society on him; what and how pro- duced was his effect on society? He who should answer these questions, in regard to any individual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in Biography." He then proceeds to a sympathetic sketch of a poet in a prosaic age. The excellence of Burns lay in his "Sincerity, his indisputable air of Truth" He sees his object. His love and his in- dignation are genuine. The Jolly Beggars is thus the most strictly poetical of Burns's "poems;" it is "complete, a real self-supporting Whole;" but the same wholeness, and an even truer inspiration is to be found in his Songs. Burns failed, it is true, in two indisputable matters : he had no Religion, and he had no singleness of aim. Yet the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men as Burns and Byron. "Granted the ship comes into harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged ; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all- powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs." 70 CARLYLE The sternness and tenderness and rich eloquence of this essay make it the most familiar example of what is sometimes termed Carlyle's "first manner." It is written in conformity with the best English eighteenth century style, only with more freedom and warmth and depth of coloring. Yet its im- portance is not as a pattern of writing, but in its typical Carlylese attitude toward the deep problems of life and literature. The essay on History (1830) shows the same intimate sense of the difficulties in reaching an ade- quate judgment upon either the individual or the col- lective life. "Let any one who has examined the cur- rent of human affairs, and how intricate, perplexed, unfathomable, even when seen into with our own eyes, are their thousand- fold blending movements, say whether the true representing of it is easy or impossible. Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men's Lives who constitute society; His- tory is the essence of innumerable Biographies. But if one Biography, nay our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible to us; how much more must these million, the very facts of which, to say noth- THE THEORY TESTED 71 ing of the purport of them, we know not, and can not know !" How rare, Carlyle goes on to argue, is the faculty of insight into passing things ! How much has been "passed over unnoticed, because no Seer, but only mere Onlookers, chanced to be there!'' It is only the Seers who have a chance to become the true Artists in History, as distinguished from the artizans and mere recorders. In the essay on Biography {Fraser^s Magazine, April, 1832) Carlyle uses again his axiom : "History is the essence of innumerable Biographies." Biog- raphy combines ^oeti£ and scientific interest. Imag- inative picture, for instance, is essentially bio- graphic ; and for all true biographic writing there is needed a Poet, — that is to say, not a verse-writer, but a man who can perceive and set forth the inex-' haustible meanings of Reality. Here we reach the central point of Carlyle's theory: according to him all Reality, every Fact, is full of these inexhaustible meanings, waiting to be interpreted. Hence the in- finite worth of Truth, the omnipotence of Belief. ^ If Truth and Belief are there, how impressive be- comes the smallest historical fact ! And then come 72 CARLYLE the marvellous pages in which Carlyle illustrates his creed : ". . . We ourselves can remember reading, in Lord Clarendon, with feelings perhaps somehow accidentally opened to it, — certainly with a depth of impression strange to us then and now, — that insig- nificant-looking passage, where Charles, after the battle of Worcester, glides down, with Squire Care- less, from the Royal Oak, at nightfall, being hungry : how, 'making a shift to get over hedges and ditches, after walking at least eight or nine miles, which were the more grievous to the King by the weight of his boots (for he could not put them off when he cut off his hair, for want of shoes), before morning they came to a poor cottage, the owner whereof, being a Roman Catholic, was known to Careless/ How this poor drudge, being knocked up from his snoring, 'carried them into a little barn full of hay, which was a better lodging than he had for himself* ; and by and by, not without difficulty, brought his Majesty *a piece of bread and a great pot of butter- milk,' saying candidly that *he himself lived by his daily labor, and that what he had brought him was the fare he and his wife had' : on which nourishing diet his Majesty, 'staying upon the hay-mow,' feeds THE THEORY TESTED 73 thankfully for two days; and then departs, under new guidance, having first changed clothes, down to the very shirt and 'old pair of shoes,' with his land- lord ; and so, as worthy Bunyan has it, 'goes on his way and sees him no more/ Singular enough, if we will think of it! This, then, was a genuine flesh-and-blood Rustic of the year 1651 : he did ac- tually swallow bread and buttermilk (not having ale and bacon), and do field-labor: with these hob- nailed 'shoes* has sprawled through mud-roads in winter, and, jocund or not, driven his team a-field in summer: he made bargains; had chaff erings and higglings, now a sore heart, now a glad one; was born ; was a son ; was a father ; toiled in many ways, being forced to it, till the strength was all worn out of him; and then — lay down 'to rest his galled back,' and sleep there till the long-distant morning ! How; comes it, that he alone of all the British rustics who tilled and lived along with him, on whom the blessed sun on that same 'fifth day of September* was shining, should have chanced to rise on us ; that this poor pair of clouted Shoes, out of the million mil- lion hides that have been tanned, and cut, and worn, should still subsist, and hang visibly together ? We see him but for a moment; for one moment, the 74 CARLYLE blanket of the Night is rent asunder, so that we be- hold and see, and then closes over him — forever. "So too, in some BoswelVs Life of Johnson, how indelible and magically bright does many a little Reality dwell in our remembrance! There is no need that the personages on the scene be a King and Clown; that the scene be the Forest of the Royal Oak, 'on the borders of Staffordshire': need only that the scene lie on this old firm Earth of ours, where we also have so surprisingly arrived ; that the personages be men, and seen with the eyes of a man. Foolish enough, how some slight, perhaps mean and even ugly incident, if real and well presented, will fix itself in a susceptive memory, and lie ennobled there; silvered over with the pale cast of thought, with the pathos which belongs only to the Dead. For the Past is all holy to us; the Dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked when alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not They, was but the heavy and unmanageable Environment that lay round them, with which they fought unprevailing : they (the ethereal god-given Force that dwelt in them, and was their Self) have now shuffled off that heavy Environment, and are free and pure: their lifelong Battle, go how it might, is all ended, with THE THEORY TESTED 75 many wounds or with fewer; they have been re- called from it, and the once harsh- jarring battlefield has become a silent awe-inspiring Golgotha, and Gottesacker (Field of God) ! — Boswell relates this in itself smallest and poorest of occurrences : *As we walked along the Strand to-night, arm in arm, a woman of the town accosted us in the usual enticing manner. *No, no, my girl,' said Johnson ; *it won't do/ He, however, did not treat her with harshness ; and we talked of the wretched life of such women/ Strange power of Reality! Not even this poorest of occurrences, but now, after seventy years are come and gone, has a meaning for us. Do but con- sider that it is true; that it did in very deed occur ! That unhappy Outcast, with all her sins and woes, her lawless desires, too complex mischances, her wailings and her riotings, has departed utterly ; alas ! her siren finery has got all besmutched, ground, generations since, into dust and smoke; of her de- graded body, and whole miserable earthly existence, all is away : she is no longer here, but far from us, in the bosom of Eternity, — whence we too came, whither we too are bound ! Johnson said, 'No, no, my girl; it won't do'; and then *we talked'; — and herewith the wretched one, seen but for the twink- 76 CARLYLE ling of an eye, passes on into the utter Darkness. No high Calista, that ever issued from story-teller*s brain, will impress us more deeply than this mean- est of the mean; and for a good reason: That she issued from the Maker of Men. "It is well worth the Artist's while to examine for himself what it is that gives such pitiful incidents their memorableness ; his aim likewise is, above all things, to be memorable. Half the effect, we already perceive, depends on the object; on its being real, on its being really seen. The other half will depend on the observer, and the question now is : How are real objects to be so seen, on what quality of ob- iserving, or of style in describing, does this so in- tense pictorial power depend? Often a slight cir- cumstance contributes curiously to the result — some little, and perhaps to appearance accidental, feature is presented; a light-gleam, which instantaneously excites the mind, and urges it to complete the pic- ture and evolve the meaning thereof for itself. By critics, such light-gleams and their almost magical influence have frequently been noted : but the power to produce such, to select such features as will pro- duce them, is generally treated as a knack, or trick of the trade, a secret for being 'graphic'; whereas JUE THEORY TESTED 77^ these magical feats are, in truth, rather inspirations ; and the gift of performing them, which acts uncon- sciously, without forethought, and as if by nature alone, is properly a genius for description. "One grand, invaluable secret there is, however, which includes all the rest, and, what is comfortable, lies clearly in every man's power : To have an open, loving heart, and what follows from the possession of such. Truly it has been said, emphatically in these days ought it to be repeated, A loving Heart is the beginning of all Knowledge. This it is that opens the whole mind, quickens every faculty of the intellect to do its fit work, that of knowing; and therefrom, by sure consequence, of vividly uttering- forth. Other secret for being 'graphic* is there none, worth having : but this is an all-sufficient one. See, for example, what a small Boswell can do! Hereby, indeed, is the whole man made a living mirror, wherein the wonders of this ever-wonderful Universe are, in their true light (which is ever a magical, miraculous one) represented, and re- flected back on us. It has been said, *the heart sees farther than the head'; but, indeed, without the seeing heart, there is no true seeing for the head so much as possible ; all is mere oversight, hallucina- 78 CARLYLE tion and vain superficial phantasmagoria, which can permanently profit no one. "Here, too, may we not pause for an instant and make a practical reflection ? Considering the multi- tude of mortals that handle the Pen in these days, and can mostly spell and write without glaring viola- tions of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no Work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence; of worth for more than one day? Shiploads of Fashionable Novels, Sentimental Rhymes, Trag- edies, Farces, Diaries of Travel, Tales by flood and field, are swallowed monthly into the bottomless Pool. Still does the Press toil : innumerable Paper- makers, Compositors, Printers* Devils, Bookbinders and Hawkers grown hoarse with loud proclaiming, rest not from their labour: and still, in torrents, rushes on the great array of Publications, unpaus- ing, to their final home; and still Oblivion, like the Grave, cries. Give ! give ! How is it that of all these countless multitudes, no one can attain to the small- est mark of excellence, or produce aught that shall endure longer than *snow-flake on the river* or the foam of penny beer ? We answer : Because they are foam; because there is no Reality in them. These THE THEORY TESTED 79 three thousand men, women and children that make up the army of British Authors do not, if we will con- sider it, see anything whatever, consequently have nothing that they can record and utter, only more or fewer things that they can plausibly pretend to record. The Universe, of Man and Nature, is still quite shut up from them, the 'open secret' still ut- terly a secret; because no sympathy with Man or Nature, no love and free simplicity of heart has yet unfolded the same. Nothing but a pitiful Image of their own pitiful Self, with its vanities and grudg- ings and ravenous hunger of all kinds, hangs for- ever painted in the retina of these unfortunate per- sons ; so that the starry All, with whatsoever it em- braces, does not appear as some expanded magic- lantern shadow of that same Image, — and naturally looks pitiful enough. **It is vain for these persons to allege that they are naturally without gift, naturally stupid and sightless, and so can attain to no knowledge of any- thing; therefore, in writing of anything, must need write falsehoods of it, there being in it no truth for them. Not so, good friends. The stupidest of you has a certain faculty; were it but that of articulate speech (say, in the Scottish, the Irish, the Cockney 80 CARLYLE dialect, or even in 'Governess-English'), and of physically discerning what lies under your nose. The stupidest of you would perhaps grudge to be com- pared in faculty with James Boswell; yet see what he has produced ! You do not use your faculty hon- estly; your heart is shut up; full of greediness, ma- lice, discontent; so your intellectual sense can not be open. It is vain also to urge that James Boswell had opportunities ; saw great men and great things, such as you can never hope to look on. What make ye of Parson White in Selborne? He had not only no great men to look on, but not even men ; merely sparrows and cock-chafers: yet he has left us a Biography of these; which, under its title. Natural History of Selborne, still remains valuable to us, which has copied a little sentence or two faithfully from the Inspired Volume of Nature, and so is itself not without inspiration. Go ye and do likewise. Sweep away utterly all frothiness and falsehood from your heart; struggle unweariedly to acquire, what is possible for every God-created man, a free, open, humble soul ; speak not at all, in any wise, till \ you have somewhat to speak; care not for the re- ward of your speaking; but simply and with un- THE THEORY TESTED 81 divided mind for the truth of your speaking : then be placed in what section of Space and of Time so- ever, do but open your eyes, and they shall actually see, and bring you real knowledge, wondrous, worthy of belief; and instead of one Boswell and one White, the world will rejoice in a thousand, stationed on their thousand several watch-towers, — * to instruct us by indubitable documents, of what- soever in our so stupendous World comes to light and is! Oh, had the Editor of this Magazine but a magic rod to turn all that not inconsiderable In- tellect, which now deluges us with artificial ficti- tious soap-lather and mere Lying, into the faithful study of Reality, — what knowledge of great, ever- lasting Nature, and of Man's ways and doings therein, would not every year bring us in ! Can we but change one single soap-latherer and mountebank Juggler, into a true Thinker and Doer, who even tries honestly to think and do, — great will be our reward." No passage that Carlyle ever wrote deserves closer study, for it sets forth not only his theory as to the writing of History and Biography, and his underly- ing philosophy of Reality, but also the personal 82 CARLYLE qualities which he deemed essential to the perform- ance of the work which was to fill the remainder of his life. The closing paragraphs of the essay on Biography are devoted to Boswell's Life of Johnson, which had been re-edited by Croker in 1831. Carlyle promises an extended review of the five volumes in the fol- lowing number of Fraser's Magazine (May, 1832). This essay, which is probably more familiar to the general reader than any of Carlyle's essays except the Burns, is devoted to a concrete demonstration of the theoretical principle laid down in the essay on Biography. Boswell, it appears, had the "open, loving heart," the spirit of discipleship and of hero- worship. And this was the secret of his insight: "The heart sees further than the head." This book, therefore, was True, and possessing Reality, it was for that reason genuine Poetry. In the pages of Boswell men can still see the immortal figure of "great-souled Samuel,'* the "prophet of the Eng- lish," the "last genuine Tory." Johnson was a "Brave Man," endowed with the talent of Silence; a lover of Truth, a hater of Cant. "His Doings and Writings are not shows but performances : you may weigh them in the balance, and they will stand THE THEORY TESTED 83 weight." And Mercy dwells with Johnson's Valor ; "a true brother of men is he; and fihal lover of the Earth." He had of course his prejudices, his blind- ness to the European movement of ideas. But, as Browning was to say long afterward, "So we half-men struggle." Could we but combine, — Carlyle declares in clos- ing, — the Candor and Clearness of Hume with the Reverence, the Love and devout Humility of John- son, we should have "the whole man of a new time." "The whole man of a new time" : those words are a sort of pivot on which the Carlyle theory of history and biography swings into the Carlyle theory of conduct. Endowed with a strong ethical sense and an acute social consciousness, it was as natural for this man as it was for Count Tolstoi to ask "What then is to be done?" In Sartor^ in Heroes, in Chartism'sind in The Latter-Day Pam- phlets we shall see this vision of the "new time," — the epoch chanted by Tennyson in his first Locks- ley Hall, and described in the novels of Charles Dickens. All of Carlyle's books, in fact, might be characterized as "Tracts for the Times." The end of life is not Thought, but Action; this is the key 84 CARLYLE in which the motor-minded Scotchman was to write for thirty years. In the revelatory group of essays which we are now reviewing, the clearest confession of Carlyle's theory of conduct will be found in Signs of the Times (1829) and Characteristics (1831). The first of these essays preceded the composition of Sartor, and the second was Carlyle's first piece of writing after Sartor was finished. Taken together, they contain almost every article of Carlyle's ethi- cal and social creed. He begins Signs of the Times, for example, by declaring that "Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." The Age of Machinery in which men are living has led to a loss of faith in individual endeavor. It is not merely Science and Philosophy that are conducted on mechanical prin- ciples, the same faith in mere mechanism is visible in Politics. But since human love and fear are in- finite, no finite mechanism can be a source of happi- ness. Profit and loss are not final agents. "Dyna- mic" as well as "mechanical" forces are needed for the true conduct of life. Faith counts for more than "logic." "One man that has a higher Wisdom, THE THEORY TESTED 85 a hitherto unknown spiritual truth in him, is stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than ten thousand, but than all men that have it not." And Carlyle closes by asserting his ** faith in the im- perishable dignity of man." The world is still "plastic, infinite, divine." Though the time is sick and out of joint, and the thinking minds of all na- tions call for change, there is nevertheless hope for humanity under a higher guidance than ours. The only solid reformation is what each man "begins and perfects on himself." Characteristics — a title borrowed from the fa- mous essay of Fichte — is even more rich than Signs of the Times in those pregnant thoughts and phrases which were destined to become the burden of Car- lyle*s teaching to his generation. Nowhere has he explained more suggestively that doctrine of "Si- lence" which has often been misunderstood even by Carlyle's followers. Let us see how he develops it. The test of the right working of all vital powers, he asserts, is unconsciousness. Unity is always silent; it is discord that is loud. Unconsciousness is the sign of health. "Of our thinking, we might say, it is but the mere upper surface that we shape into articulate thoughts ; — underneath the region of 86 CARLYLE argument and conscious discourse, lies the region of meditation; here, in its quiet mysterious depths, dwells what vital force is in us; here, if aught is to be created, and not merely manufactured and com- municated, must the work go on." ("£/aw vital/^ as Bergson might say!) Hence the distinction, touched upon in an earlier essay, between the "man of logic" and the "man of insight." But this dis- tinction is equally true of conduct, and of the life of society. The Body Politic must be Unconscious, if it is to perform its functions rightly. This uncon- scious performance of function is "Silence," "Har- mony," "Life" itself. But our actual contemporary society, says Carlyle, is intensely self-conscious, or, in other words, diseased. "Man remains unserved, he has subdued this Planet, his habitation and in- heritance; yet reaps no profit from the victory. . . . Countries are rich, prosperous in all man- ner of increase, beyond example: but the Men of those countries are poor, needier than ever of all sustenance outward and inward; of Belief, of Money, of Food." It will be noticed that Carlyle, the child of Cal- vinism, puts "Belief" first in this list of wants. He finds that vitality has fled from religion : with self- THE THEORY TESTED 87 consciousness it has become less potent and more mechanical. Inspiration is disappearing from litera- ture. And the remedy, if there be a remedy for these social ills ? It lies in the Aristotelian maxim : "The end of man is an Action, not a Thought." We are to be saved through Work, and there can be no creative labor without Faith. New captains of men must be sought after, and they must govern by loyalty. "The Age of Miracles, as it ever was, nowi is'\' the deep, vital, unconscious forces of the world beat through the pulses of every man who labors in faith. Whatsoever, then, thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. Carlyle never wrote with more moving power, and rarely did he write, in his later days, with such as- surance of social faith. He had just worked out, in Sartor, the problem of the individual; and now, as we re-read Characteristics, we can trace the high- water mark of his hopes for the communal life. For undeniably, these hopes were fated to ebb. Carlyle thundered and lightened in book after book his magnificent antiphonals of Silence and Labor and Loyalty; but his new Captains of humanity not be- ing discoverable — by him — he gradually lost faith in the progress of society, and after glorifying 88 CARLYLE Cromwell and Mahomet and Mirabeau he ended by chanting the praises of the "beneficent whip" and of lean Frederick of Prussia. We must turn now to this series of famous books, and note in them the reappearance and the modifica- tion of those fundamental thoughts and those in- stinctive modes of workmanship which we have just been observing in the Essays. CHAPTER X SARTOR RESARTUS SARTOR RESARTUS ("The Tailor Patched") is, as Garnett has said, a "book spun from a single metaphor." It professes to deal with the Philosophy of Clothes: the inner meaning is that man and society are only vestures, — transient wrappings and symbols of the one Reality, God. Carlyle found the framework of his idea in Swift's Tale of a Tub. At first, he played with this notion of Vestures ( — "I am going to write — Nonsense") intending a mere magazine article, but the thought took possession of him, and he wrote on impetuously during the first six months of 1831 until, as Pro- fessor MacMechan says in his admirable edition of Sartor, he had drawn "into the compass of a single volume all the best that he had thought in his past life." In outward form, the book is a literary hoax. It claims to be an account by an "English editor" of 89 90 CARLYLE a singular book on "Clothes, their Origin and In- fluence" ("Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken") which had just been published in Germany. The author was a certain Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (**God-Born Devirs-Dung" ) , Professor of Things in General at the University of Weiss-nicht-wo, that is to say "Nowhere,"— "Utopia." The Pro- fessor's book, which the "editor" can present only in fragments, is in three parts. The first and third are devoted to various aspects of clothes-philosophy/ but the second professes to be an autobiography of Teufelsdrockh himself. Carlyle utilizes this second part to tell the epoch-making phases of his own de- velopment, from earliest childhood. The imaginary German village of Entepfuhl ("Duck-pond") is really Ecclefechan; "Hinterschlag" Academy is Annan, and the "nameless" University is Edin- burgh. But this actual autobiography of Carlyle is mingled throughout with pure fantasy, with pass- ages from Carlyle's abortive romance Wotton Rein- fred, and with grave circumstantial descriptions of German life, in the manner of Defoe and Swift. Sartor, therefore, conforms to Dryden's definition of Satire in that it is "full of various matter" ; and it also takes the full liberty of Satire in its range of SARTOR RESARTUS 91 style. Inventing a "German" book for the English public of the eighteen-thirties, — whose sole notion of things "German" was that they were likely to be queer, — Carlyle gave full rein to his talent for fool- ery and for grotesque extravagance. At bottom, as in all his books, there is a perfectly clear and sim- ple plan, evolved by a cunning literary artist, but the surface of Sartor is ruffled and blown this way and that by the whimsical, bedevilling humors of a master satirist. We must limit ourselves to five passages from Sartor, Each is very famous and needs little or no elucidation. The first is the description (Book I, Chapter 3) of Teufelsdrockh's watch-tower, in the city of Weissnichtwo. The Watch-Tower "To the Editor of these sheets, as to a young en- thusiastic Englishman, however unworthy, Teufels- drockh opened himself perhaps more than to the most. Pity only that we could not then half guess his importance, and scrutinise him with due power of vision! We enjoyed, what not three men in Weissnichtwo could boast of, a certain degree of access to the Professor's private domicile. It was the 92 CARLYLE attic floor of the highest house in the Wahngasse; and might truly be called the pinnacle of Weiss- nichtwo, for it rose sheer up above the contiguous roofs, themselves rising from elevated ground. Moreover, with its windows, it looked towards all the four Orte, or as the Scotch say, and we ought to say, Airts: the Sitting-room itself commanded three; another came to view in the Schlafgemach (Bed-room) at the opposite end; to say nothing of the Kitchen, which offered two, as it were duplicates, and showing nothing new. So that it was in fact the speculum or watch-tower of Teufelsdrockh; where from, sitting at ease, he might see the whole life-circulation of that considerable City; the streets and lanes of which, with all their doing and driving (Thun und Treiben), were for the most part visible there. " *I look down into all that wasp-nest or bee-hive,' have we heard him say, *and witness their wax-lay- ing and honey-making, and poison-brewing, and choking by sulphur. From the Palace esplanade, where music plays while Serene Highness is pleased to eat his victuals, down to the low lane, where in her door-sill the aged widow, knitting for a thin live- lihood, sits to feel the afternoon sun, I see it all; for, SARTOR RESARTUS 93 except the Schlosskirche weathercock, no biped stands so high. Couriers arrive bestrapped and be- booted, bearing Joy and Sorrow bagged-up in pouches of leather; there, topladen, and with four swift horses, rolls-in the country Baron and his household; here, on timber-leg, the lamed Soldier hops painfully along, begging alms : a thousand car- riages, and wains, and cars, come tumbling-in with Food, with young Rusticity, and other Raw Pro- duce, inanimate or animate, and go tumbling out again with Produce manufactured. That living flood, pouring through these streets, of all quali- ties and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, whither it is going ? Aus der Ewigkeit, zu der Ewig- keit hin: From Eternity, onward to Eternity ! These are Apparitions: what else? Are they not souls rendered visible ; in Bodies, that took shape and will lose it, melting into air? Their solid pavement is a Picture of the Sense; they walk on the bosom of Nothing, blank Time is behind them and before them. Or fanciest thou, the red and yellow Clothes- screen yonder, with spurs on its heels, and feather in its crown, is but of Today, without a Yesterday or a Tomorrow; and had not rather its Ancestor alive when Hengst and Horsa overran thy Island? 94 CARLYLE Friend, thou seest here a living link in that Tissue of History, which inweaves all Being : watch well, or it will be past thee, and seen no more. " 'Ach, mein Lieherf said he once, at midnight, when he had returned from the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, *it is a true sublimity to dwell here. These fringes of lamp-light, struggling up through smoke and thousandfold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith, in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still roll- ing here and there through distant streets, are bear- ing her to Halls roofed-in, and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like nightbirds, are abroad; that hum I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life; is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapors, and putrefactions, and unimag- inable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born, men are praying, — on the other side of a brick partition, men SARTOR RESARTUS 95 are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud Grandee still lingers in his per- fumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw: in obscure cellars, Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its voice-of- destiny to haggard hungry Villains; while Council- lors of State sit plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are Men. The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready ; and she, full of hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders : the Thief, still more si- lently, sets-to his picklocks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms, and dancing- rooms, are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts; but, in the Condemned Cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes look out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow: comes no hammering from the Rahenstein? — their gallows must even now be o' building. Upwards of five-hun- dred-thousand two-legged animals without feathers 96 CARLYLE lie around us, in horizontal positions; their heads all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with stream- ing hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten. — All these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them; — crammed in, like salted fish, in their barrel ; or wel- tering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed Vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others : such work goes on under that smoke-coun- terpane! — But I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the Stars/ "We looked in his face to see whether, in the utter- ance of such extraordinary Night-thoughts, no feel- ing might be traced there ; but with the light we had, which indeed was only a single tallow-light, and far enough from the window, nothing save that old calmness and fixedness was visible." The second must be the well-known parable of Carlyle's own moment of revolt and illumination on Leith Walk, Edinburgh, in the summer of 1821 or 1822. (Book 2, Chapter 7.) SARTOR RESARTUS 97 The Everlasting No " *So had it lasted/ concludes the Wanderer, 'so had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony, through long years. The heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sul- phurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since ear- liest memory I had shed no tear ; or one only when I, murmuring half -audibly, recited Faust's Deathsong, that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle's splendour), and thought that of this last Friend even I was not for- saken, that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die. Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of Devil: nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing, could the Arch-Devil him- self, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise to me, that I might tell him a little of my mind. And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured. 98 CARLYLE ** 'Full of such humour, and perhaps the misera- blest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog-day, after much perambula- tion, toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint-Thomas de VEnfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchad- nezzar's Furnace ; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered ; when all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself : 'What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee ! Hast thou not a heart ; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be ; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, tram- ple Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it !' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul ; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed: not SARTOR RESARTUS 99 Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. " *Thus had the Everlasting No (das ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychologi- cal point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said : 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's) ;' to which my whole Me now made answer: */ am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee !' " Tt is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.' " The picture of War (Book 2, Chapter 7) is as ghastly true for the battle-summer of 1915 as it was for the campaigns of Napoleon. War " *E[orrible enough ! A whole March f eld strewed with shell-splinters, cannon-shot, ruined tumbrils, 100 CARLYLE and dead men and horses ; stragglers still remaining not so much as buried. And those red mould heaps : ay, there lie the Shells of Men, out of which all the Life and Virtue has been blown; and now they are swept together, and crammed-down out of sight, like blown Egg-shells ! — Did Nature, when she bade the Donau bring down his mould-cargoes from the Ca- rinthian and Carpathian Heights, and spread them out here into the softest, richest level, — intend thee, O March f eld, for a corn-bearing Nursery, whereon her children might be nursed; or for a Cockpit, wherein they might the more commodiously be throt- tled and tattered ? Were thy three broad highways, meeting here from the ends of Europe, made for Ammunition- wagons, then? Were thy Wagrams and Stillfrieds but so many ready-built Casemates^ wherein the house of Hapsburg might batter with artillery, and with artillery be battered? Konig Ottokar, amid yonder hillocks, dies under Rodolf's truncheon; here Kaiser Franz falls a-swoon undef Napoleon's : within which five centuries, to omit the others, how hast thy breast, fair Plain, been defaced and defiled! The greensward is torn-up and tram- pled-down; man's fond care of it, his fruit-trees, hedge-rows, and pleasant dwellings, blown-away SARTOR RESARTUS 101 with gunpowder ; and the kind seedfield Hes a deso- late, hideous Place of Sculls. — Nevertheless, Nature is at work; neither shall these Powder-Devilkins with their utmost devilry gainsay her: but all that gore and carnage will be shrouded-in, absorbed into manure; and next year the March f eld will be green, nay greener. Thrifty unwearied Nature, ever out of our great waste educing some little profit of thy own, — how dost thou, from the very carcass of the Killer, bring Life for the Living! ** 'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain 'Natural Enemies* of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able- bodied men: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them ; she has, not without diffi- culty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected ; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public 102 CARLYLE charges, some two-thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain ; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending : till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposi- tion; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word *Fire !' is given: and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quar- rel? Busy as the Devil is, not. the smallest! They lived far enough apart ; were the entirest strangers ; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even uncon- sciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness be- tween them. How then? Simpleton! their Gover- nors had fallen-out; and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor block- heads shoot. — Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old, *what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!' — In that fiction of the English Smollett, it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps pro- phetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural SARTOR RESARTUS 103 Enemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another's faces till the weaker gives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era, what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us T " The chapter called "The Everlasting Yea" (Book 2, Chapter 9) is, as we have already seen in the quotation from Carlyle's Reminiscences, a transcript of his own experience in the summer of 1825. The Everlasting Yea tt