MacTutor
Thomas Carlyle
Times obituary
Thomas Carlyle died at half-past 9 on Saturday morning at his house in Cheyne-row, Cheshire. He had been for some years in poor health, and more than once in 1879 and 1880. His recovery seemed doubtful. Of late, however, his friends saw little of him. He could not bear the strain of prolonged or exciting conversation, and growing weakness, approaching, as he himself said, almost constant pain, had compelled him to give up very much his old habit of taking long walks every day. But since manhood, he had been frequently subject to ailments, dyspepsia and kindred weaknesses had been his scourge since his childhood; he had rallied more than once from severe attacks of ill-health; and it was not supposed until quite recently that his condition was near. The announcement of his death will bring home to every educated English its significance. A chasm opens between the present and the past of our literatures, a whole world of associations disappears. No recent man of letters has held in England a place comparable to that which for at least a quarter of a century has been his without dispute, and authors of all kinds and schools will feel that they have lost their venerable doyen. A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted, has passed away amid universal regret. The close has come of a well-ordered, full, stately, and complete life.
About eight months before Robert Burns died, and within but a few miles of Dumfries, the scene of his death, was born the most ponetrating and sympathetic interpreter of his genius. Carlyle's birthplace was Ecclefechan, an insignificant Dumfriesshire village, in the parish of Huddam, known by name, at least, to readers of Burns, and memorable for an alehouse which was loved only too well by the poet. There Carlyle was born on the 4th of December, 1795. He was the eldest son of a family of eight children; his brothers were all men of character and ability; one of them, Dr. John Carlyle, was destined to make a name in literature as the translator of Dante. Mr. Carlyle's father, James Carlyle, was the son of Thomas Carlyle, tenant of Brown-Knowes, a small farm in Annandale, and of Margaret Aitken. At the time of his eldest son's birth. James Carlyle was a stone mason, and resided in Ecclefechan; but he afterwards became tenant of Scotsberg, a farm of two or three hundred acres, which is now occupied by Mr. Carlyle's youngest and only surviving brother. James Carlyle was a man of rectitude, worth, and intelligence, and in many ways remarkable. His son once said, "I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people," and his own lineage might well have suggested this saying. Carlyle never spoke of his father and mother except with veneration and affection. Of the former specially he liked to talk, and he once made the remark that he thought his father, all things considered, the best man whom he had ever known. There were points of strong likeness between them. The father was a man of energy and strong will; and he had in no small measure the picturesque and vivid powers of speech of the son, and liked to use out-of-the-way, old-fashioned, sharp, and pungent words. His pithy sayings, occasionally prickly and sharp, ran through the country side. His favourite books were the Bible and an old Puritan divine. He was, said his son on one occasion to a friend, "a far cleverer man than I am, or will ever be." An elder in the Kirk, and a man of established character for probity, he was one who, to use again his son's description of him, "like Enoch of old, walked with God." All extant testimony goes to show that Mr. Carlyle's father and mother were of the finest type of Scotch country folk -- simple, upright, and with family traditions of honest worth.
Carlyle learnt to read and write in the parish school of Hoddam, where he remained until his ninth year. The parish minister, his father's friend, taught him the elements of Latin. From the parish school he passed to the Burgh School of Annan, six miles distant, where he saw Edward Irving, "his first friend," as he once called him, who was some years his senior. Lads still go very young to Scotch Universities; 60 years ago they went still younger, and were wont to quit them with their degree, if they cared to take any, which they rarely did, at an age when an English youth has not quitted a public school. Carlyle was barely 14 when he entered the University of Edinburgh. It was then in its glory. Some of its professors possessed a European reputation. The eloquent and acute Dr. Thomas Brown lectured on moral philosophy; Playfair held the chair of natural philosophy; the ingenious and quarrelsome Sir John Leslie taught mathematics; and Dunbar was professor of Greek. They were a group of men likely to impress much a susceptible lad of genius, and especially one who had a strong bias towards mathematical studies. But Carlyle was not so impressed. For Dr. Brown -- "Miss Brown," or "that little man who spouted poetry," as he derisively called him he had no liking, Against Playfair he had a grudge, because, after having worked bard at the class studies, on calling at Playfair's house for the certificate to which he was entitled, befound the document worded in a somewhat niggardly spirit. The only professor for whom he seems to have had much regard for was Sir John Leslie, who had some points of affinity to his pupil; and the feeling was returned. Carlyle made few friends at the University. He was lonely and contemplative in his habits. He took no part in the proceedings, and his name is not to be found on the list of members of the Speculative Society, which every clever student was then expected to join. In after years he laid it down that "the true University of these days is a collection of books," and on this principle he acted. Not content with ransacking the College Library, he read all that was duplicated in various circulating libraries — among others, one founded by Allan Ramsay — and acquired knowledge which extended far beyond the bounds of the University course. He left the University with no reprimand. "Had you anywhere in Crim Tartary," he observes with reference to the University which Tenfelsdröckh studied, but probably with a covert glance at his own Alma mater, "walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen library; and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years; certain persons, under the title of professors, being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable admission fees -- you had not, indeed, in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary." Still, Carlyle profited much by the four years spent at college. He read hard, even to the point of injuring his health; he acquired a sound and, for his years, unusual knowledge of mathematics, and might have boasted with Gibbon, but without the qualification which Gibbon appended, that he had attained a stock of erudition that would have puzzled a doctor. Having passed through the arts curriculum of the University, Carlyle ought rightly, in the natural course of things, to have proceeded to the study of theology, for be had been destined by his father to be a minister.
There is some tradition that matters had gone so for that is had been arranged in what church Carlyle should appear as a "probationer." But he did not carry on his father's intentions. "Now that one bad gained man's estate," to quote his own account of this crisis in his life, "I was not sure that I believed the doctrines of my father's church; and it was necessary I should now settle it. And so I entered my chamber and closed the door, and around me there came a trooping throng of phantasms dire from the abysmal depths of nethermost perdition, doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing were there; and I wrestled with them in agony of spirit." The end of all this storm was the settled conviction that he could not enter the Church. Carlyle at once turned his hand to work by which he could earn his bread, and for a year or two he taught mathematics in the burgh school of Annan, where he had but lately been a pupil. He remained there only two years; at their close he was appointed teacher of mathematics and classics in the burgh school of Kirkcaldy. At the other end of "the lang toun" was a private adventure school, called the Academy, where Edward Irving taught some of the well-known tongues and mathematics. The two young men of genius were already acquainted with each other; indeed, it was at Irving's instigation, and with view to be near him, that Carlyle went to Kirkcaldy. There, however, were riveted the bonds of a friendship destined to be tested by trials, some of them of a very personal character. These bonds were sometimes stretched, but never broken, not even when Carlyle saw with sorrowfulness his gifted friend pass into the regions of darkness and chaos whence he never returned. Teaching Fifeshire boys was not Carlyle's vocation. After staying about two years in Kirkcaldy, he quit it, leaving behind him the reputation of a too stern discplinarian, to begin in Edinburgh the task of his life as a writer of books.
At that date the capital of Scotland was still another Weimar. Men of letters had not yet deserted it for London. "Mags" was in its glory. Lockhart, John Wilson, Magion, were in their brilliant prime; Jeffrey was at the head of the Edinburgh, and the stalwart form of Scott, not yet beset by the load of misfortune and toll, might be seen occasionally in the streets. Carlyle tried his prentice-hand in Brewster's "Edinburgh Encyclopaedia," to which he contributed many articles on geographical and biographical subjects; among others, articles on Sir John Moore, Dr. Moore, Nelson, the older and younger Pitt, Montaigne, and Montesquieu. These first essays on authorship have never been republished, and they do not, perhaps, deserve to be so. They give but faint, uncertain promise of the author's genius and of those gifts which made his later works as individual as a picture by Albert Dürer or Rembrandt. But they indicate patient industry and research and minute attention to details; and they show that the author was consulting those stores of varied knowledge upon which his imagination was to work in after years. Here and there is a stroke of force and felicity. Occasionally the confidence of his later style is suspected, as, for example, when he refutes Montesquieu's theory of the influence of climate on race and history. We recognise the author of "The French Revolution" in the vivid description of the philosopher as a cheery and benign sage, talking with the peasant under the oak at La Brède. At the instances of Sir David Brewster be translated Legendre's "Geometry and Trigonometry," prefixing to the treatise a short and modest introduction on proportion. Brewster's name was put to the translation. Carlyle received £30 for his work, a sum not unimportant in those days. He was always proud of his essay on Proportion, and with good reason. De Morgan pronounced it "a thoughtful and ingenious essay, as good a substitute for the fifth book of Euclid as could be given in speech," and it is certainly clear, concise, and direct. Carlyle about this time mastered German; his brother was studying in Germany, and the letters from Dr. Carlyle heightened his interest in its language and its literature, which was then in full blossom. The first fruits of this knowledge was an article contributed to the New Edinburgh on "Faust," a subject to which he was so often to return.
For some time after leaving Kirkcaldy, and until a year or two before his marriage, he served as tutor to the brilliant, amiable Charles Buller, teaching him, if not then, at least afterwards, some other things besides mathematics, as those who remember Buller's views on pauperism, emigration, and colonization will admit. About this period of Carlyle's life, the once famous John Scott was editing the London Magazine and gathered around him a group of enthusiastic writers; Lazlitt, Lamb, Croly, Cary, and Allan Cunningham were a few of them. Carlyle joined them. Here appeared, in 1823, the first part of the "Life of Schiller." No name was attached to it. Those who knew that it was Carlyle's work predicted great things from a writer who, in youth, exhibited noble simplicity and maturity of style, and who had conceptions of criticism very rare in those times. In the following year he published, again anonymously, a translation of "Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre," with misgivings, not strange or unjustified, as to how his countrymen would receive a book so repugnant in many ways to the dominent taste. Goethe was then no prophet out of his own country. He was known to no Englishman but De Quincey, Coleridge, and a few students of German literature. The novel was sneered at, and the savage, elaborate invectives which De Quincey hurled at Goethe did not spare the translator. Carlyle's style was sharply criticised. Magina, in after years, complained that Gosthe had been translated from the Fatherlandish dialect of High Dutch to the Allgemeine Mid Lothianish of Auld Reekie, and that Carlyle was seeking to acclimatize the roundabout, hubble-bubble, rumfustianish (hübble-bubblen, rüm-fästeanischen), roly-poly, gromerly of style, dear to the heart of a son of the Fatherland. Undeterred by listeners and remonstrances, Carlyle published in 1827 several volumes entitled "German Romance," containing translations from the chief writers of the Romantic school, such as Musaeus, La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Hofmann, and Richter, with short biographical notices. This work was, as he himself admitted, "mere journey-work," not of his own suggesting or desiring -- mere preparation for the work of his genius. Before putting out his full strength he seems to have felt the necessity of retiring to some secluded place where he might mature and arrange his seething and tumultuous thoughts. The occasion for doing so presented itself. In 1827 he married Miss Jane Welsh, the only daughter of Dr. Welsh, of Haddington, a descendant of John Knox. She had inherited a farm lying remote and high up among the hills of Dumfriesshire; and there Carlyle found the Patmos which his perturbed spirit needed. To the farmhouse of Craigenputtock -- a plain, gaunt two-story dwelling, with its face blankly looking towards the hill, up which the little gooseberry garden runs, partly sheltered from the fierce wind by a few badly-grown ash trees, almost cut off from the world by a morass, and reached only by a rough cart-road -- to this peaceful and simple abode, some 15 miles from town or market, came Carlyle and his bride in 1828. Here for six years he lived with this one friend and companion—a companion worthy of him; a woman of much character and practical wisdom, given to silence when he talked, but a talker scarcely inferior to himself, as those who know her well could testify; a woman, as he himself termed her, of "bright invincibility of spirit." Here for these years he wrote and read much -- "a whole cartload of French, German, American and English journals and periodicals piled upon his little library table" -- meditating or holding much high converse with his wife as they wandered on foot or horseback over the black and silent moors and unending hills -- an expanse of bleak, sour uplands, watered by nameless rills and shadowed by mist and rolling vapours, yet not wholly wanting in rugged and tender beanties congenial to his spirit. In a well-known letter to Goethe, Carlyle describes his life at Craigenputtock. He says:
notion of sending to his master at Weimar a birthday present as a token of gratitude and silence on the part of himself and a few other English admirers of Goethe. The momento was a seal, designed by Mrs. Carlyle; it was followed by a letter written by Carlyle himself. The epistle runs:-
"Sartor Resartus", that unique collection of meditations and confessions, passionate invective, solemn reflection, and romantic episodes from his own life, was composed at Craigenputtock in 1831. It had a difficulty in seeing the light. It is not a little astonishing that this book, every page of which is stamped with genius of the highest order, failed at first to find admirers or appreciators. The publishers would have nothing to do with it. We declared that the author lacked "tact," which was probably true. Another pronounced the humour too Teutonic and heavy -- a piece of criticism not without point. Even John Stuart Mill, who, afterward, delighted in the book, admitted that when he saw it in manuscript he thought little of it. The general impression seemed to be that much genius and German had made the author mad. He himself was at times a little disheartened by repeated rebuffs." "I have given up the notion," he says of "Sartor," in 1832, "of hawking my little manuscript book about any further: for a long time it bas lain quiet in a drawer waiting for a better day. The bookselling trade seems on the verge of dissolution; the force of puffing can go no further, yet bankruptcy clamours at every door: sad fate! I have to serve the Devil, and get no wages even from him! The poor Bookselling Guild, I often predict to myself, will ere long be found unfit to be the strange part now plays in our European world; and will give place to new and higher arrangements, of which the coming shadows are already becoming visible." Not for seven years after its composition did "Sartor" appear as a volume. "It had at last," says its successor, "to clip itself in pieces, and be contingent to struggle out, bit by bit, in some courageous magazine that offered."
Strengthening, helpful, and rich in fruit, were these yours in his Nithsdale hermitage. They were the seedbed of his fateful deeds. There he unravelled the tangled skein of his thoughts. There he laid up stores of knowledge, of health, of high resolutions for the work lying before him. There, in a solitude peopled only by books and thoughts and the companionship of his wife, and conversations with some congenial stranger, he inherited the sure foundations of a life which was destined to be so complete. But the time came for him to leave Craigenputtock. A historian, a critic, a biographer must have libraries within easy reach. He must know men if he is to instruct them; and on a hillside or bleak moor he cannot find to his hand all the materials which were necessary when he essays to write the history of the French Revolution. Some ties which bound Carlyle to Dumfriesshire had been severed. His father had passed away full of years, and it became fit, and even necessary, that Carlyle should leave his mountain seclusion and take himself to London. He settled in Cheyne-row, in a small three-storied house, which he never afterwards quitted. The part of Chelsea which he chose had associations interesting to him as a man of letters. Dr. Smollett's old house, Don Saltero's coffee-house, and Nell Gwynne's boudoir were close at hand. He had Leigh Hunt as a neighbor. He was, as he himself say in a letter written shortly after he went to his new home, encompassed by a cloud of witnesses -- good, bad, and indifferent. Chelsea has changed much since 1834. Let any one recall the enthusiastic term in which Leigh Hunt speaks of escape from the noise and dust of the New Road to the repose and quietude of a corner of Chelsea, where the air of the country came to refresh him, and where only pastoral cries of primroses and cow parsnip were to be heard in the streets. Carlyle lived to know Chelsea in very altered circumstances. The fields which he could see from the window of the attic, which was his study and place of work, were swarmed up by all-devouring brick and mortar, and hideous noises which came with increase of population vexed and distracted him, and were among the most serious discomforts of his life.
Carlyle was a man of mature years when he removed to London. He had then done comparatively little. His intellectual growth had been far from surprisingly fast. He was born a few months before Keats, and by 1821 Keats had sung his last song, and was at rest in his grave at Rome; Shelley, born only three years before Carlyle, had made himself an immortal name and passed away in 1823. Had Carlyle died so sadly, what would he have left but the memory among a few friends of brilliant but uncertain promise! His genius was a fire which, slowly lit, slowly died. The first years after his coming to London were the most fruitful of his literary life. Essays, histories, lectures, biographies poured from his brain with surprising rapidity. No buck-back could have surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked, late and early, in his small attic A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties. At 10 o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he took up his pen and laboured hard until 3 o'clock; nothing, not even the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends. One of his favourite relaxations was riding in an omnibus. In the evening he read and prepared for the work of the morrow. Success did not visit him at once. His form of worship, not being readily classified under any of the established categories, repelled ordinary readers of the time; he was not the mere popularizor of ideas already accepted; he had a gospel of his own to preach and disciples to convert and tease before it could be spread abroad. His best books were by no means instantaneously successful. Even the "French Revolution," with all its brilliancy and captivating élan, had to wait for a publisher. His "broad Brobdingnagian grin of true humour" was not relished. One North British Reviewer seemed inclined to take southern opinion before committing himself to being amused. Another writer pronounced "Sartor Resortas" a "heap of clotted nonsense." Carlyle's style was held up as a fearful warning. He found bis first warmest admirers on the other side of the Atlantic. The enthusiasm which his work excited in a few minds was not always tempered with intelligence, and we have come across an American literary periodical of those times which warns its readers that the Author of "Sartor Resartus" in "not to be confounded with Mr. Carlisle, now deceased, who was a confident and avowed champion of infidelity." Before fame in its common form had come to him, men whose private opinions were to be future public opinion had conceived the highest notion of his powers and the future before him; and the little parlour in Cheyne-row had become the gathering place, the favourite haunt of many literary men. At different timas between 1837 and 1840, Mr. Carlyle delivered at Willie's Rooms and Portman Square courses of lectures on some of his favourite subjects -- "German Literature," The History of Literature," "The Revolutione of Modern Europe," and "Heroes and Hero-Worship." Each of there lectures was a considerable event in literature. Their effect was such as it is difficult now to conceive. The audience included most of the chief man of letters of the day. "The accomplished and distinguished, the beautiful, the wise, something of what is best in England, have listened patiently to my rude words" is his own account of his hearers. They were alternately shocked and entranced. There was uncertainty whether his burning words, delivered in an odd sing song and unquestionable Doric, were wild rhapsodies or the sublime mutterings of a true prophet, who had a message to deliver to modern society. But, at all events, it was a man of a wholly new order who spoke, and people of all shades and schools -- the Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites of London -- were amazed. Crabbe Robinson, who attended the whole of one course, says of a certain lecture, "It gave great satisfaction, for it had uncommon thoughts, and was delivered with unusual animation." "As for Carlyle's Lectures," writes Bunsen, "they are very striking, rugged thoughts, not ready made up for any political or religious system; thrown at people's heads, by which most of his audience are sadly startled." "Attended Carlyle's lecture," writes Macready, " 'The hero as a prophet,' on which he descanted with a fervour and eloquence that only complete conviction of truth could give. I was charmed, carried away by him. Met Browning there."
"The French Revolution," the first work to which Mr. Carlyle put his name, appeared in 1837. It would have been published sooner but for the famous disaster which befell the manuscript of the first volume. The author had lent it to Mr. John Stuart Mill; the latter handed it to Mrs. Taylor, his future wife. What became of it was never exactly known. Mrs. Taylor left the manuscript for some days on her writing table: when wanted it could nowhere be found; and the most probable explanation of ita disappearance was the suggestion that a servant had used the manuscript to light the fire. Carlyle at once set to work to reproduce from his notes the lost volume; he swiftly finished bis task, but he always thought that the first draft was the best. Though welcomed, as it deserved to be, by Mill and Stirling, the "French Revolution" was not at once successful. The bulk of readers did not hail it as the great prose poem of the century. They were not enraptured by the Iliad-like swiftness and vividness of the narrative, the sustained passion, as if the whole had been written at a sitting, the full flow of poetry, with touches of grandeur and tenderness: and those pages like the pictures from Salvator Ross's brush, in which a flash of lightning reveals, side by side, the horrors of Nature and her pastoral aweetness. Landor, indeed, hailed "The French Revolu- tion" as the best book published in his time, and recognized the coming of a new literary potentate; but his vision was exceptionally acute. The incongruities, monstrosities of style, and the author's disdain for what an admirer called the "feudalities of literature" struck all readers, and it was only some of them who thought much more of the intrinsic beauty of the jewel than of the strange setting.
About 1839 began a new phase of activity. Mr. Carlyle had imbibed a deep distrust and even abhorrence of all the somewhat mechanical expedients for the amelioration of society then in fashion. The favourite schemes of social reform were then even more crude than they generally are; Mr. Carlyle despised them all. The philanthropists whom he met with were not the most practical or the wisest of their kind; Mr. Carlyle thought them, for the most part, mealy-mouthed, engaged in ineffectual dallying and parleying with the stern invincible verities of life, and coaxing and coddling those upon whom Nature had pronounced her irreversible sentences of extermination. From the depths of society, from torchlight meetings hold by Chartists in Birmingham and other towns, from the agricultural counties where " Swing" was burning ricks or throwing down toll gates, from Ireland, where an overgrown population no longer found potatoes enough to satisfy its simple wants, came sullen mutterings of discontent, ominous signs of commotions to come, perplexity, tribulation, and distress among nations. There was no lack of nostrums or social doctors. Mr. Carlyle pronounced them one and all vain and unprofitable. In a series of works published from 1839 to 1850 -- in "Chartism," "Past and Present," and "Latter-day Pamphlets" he poured unmeasured scorn and contumely on the false teachers and blind guides of the time. It was the kernel of his philosophy that legislation, Reform or Ballot Bills, statutory measures of social improvement of any kind, would do of themselves next to no good. Reforms to be effectual must go deeper than an English Parliament, of whose perfect wisdom he had grave doubts, was likely to tolerate. "Christian philanthropy and other most amiable-looking, but most baseless, and, in the end, most baneful and all-bewildering jargon;" "philanthropisms" issuing "in a universal sluggard and scoundrel protection society"; the crowds of amiable simpletons sunk in deep froth oceans of benevolence;" Bentham, a "bore of the first magnitude, with his immense baggage of formulae, and his tedious iteration "of the greatest happiness of the greatest number;" the political economists mumbling barren truisms or equally unfruitful paradoxes about supply and demand; Malthusians preaching to deaf ears the most unacceptable of gospels; so-called statesmen collecting with impotent hands information about the Condition of England Question which they could not apply, and letting things slide to chaos and perdition; Ireland sluttishly starving from age to age on Act of Parliament freedom; the braying of Exeter Hall; the helpless babbling of Parliament; and liberty made a pretext, in the Weat Indies and elsewhere, for flying in in the face the great law that, if a man work not, neither shall he eat -- these were some of the butts of his scorn and contempt. It would be searcely worthwhile to try to measure the exact value of these jeremiads. Mr. Carlyle was much too eloquently wrathful. His criticisms were often grotesque caricatures, They abounded in contradictions, and it was always pretty clear that Mr. Carlyle found it much easier to rail at large than to suggest any working substitutes for the systems which he despised. De Quincey was unanswerable when he said to Carlyle, "You've shown or you've made another hole in the tin kettle of society; how do you propose to tinker it ?" Harsh and crude judgments are to be met with in almost every page, and much of the teaching, so far as it is intelligible and consistent, preposterous and impracticable. But, dismissing all expectation of finding precise suggestions, it in astonishing to note note how, under uncouth, rhapsodical phraseology, lie many ideas which are now the common property of most educated men. The novelties and paradoxes of 1840 are, to a large extent, nothing but the good sense of 1881. Who would not now echo Mr. Cariyle's protests against the supposed omnipotence of Parliament or of the possibility of saving nations by the use of the ballot box! Who now believes that man can be instantaneously reformed in battalions and platoons, or that human nature can be remade by any order of the Poor Law Commissioners? Who does not now own that the change in our colonies from servitude to idleness and squalor, temporary, it is true, was not as unmixed bleaning to those most concerned? If all wise men are now haunted by a sense of the impotence of legislation to effect deep changes for good, and of the necessity of working out reformations really worth anything in the souls of individuals, to whom do they owe this so much as to Mr. Carlyle! Who recognized the the duty of spreading education earlier aud more clearly than he! We say nothing of the keen eye for the detection of rogues and impostors, under all disguises, which Mr. Carlyle's political pamphlets reveal; or of those ingenious ingenious epithets of his which, attached to some blustering, swelling place of fraud, acted like a stone tied to the neck of a dog flung into deep water. It is enough to say that again and again he reminded, in his own was way the generation of stern truths which it was in danger of forgetting.
In 1845 be published "Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations." The work was well received. It passed rapidiy through several editions. In a petition addressed in 1839 to the House of Commons on the subject of of the Copyright Bill, Mr. Carlyle had said of his literary labours that they had "found hitherto, in money or money's worth, small recompense or none," and he was by no means sure of ever getting any. His "Oliver Cromwell," however, was at once widely read; and in his preface to the second edition be thought proper to admit that, contrary to his expectations, "the work had spread itself abroad with some degree of impetus." No one could fail to see how the great Protector, as he really was, bad at last been disinterred from bebeath Pelicus and Ossas of calumny and rubbish heaped upon him by generations of detractors. We are familiar enongh by this time with the process of historical whitewashing. None of the attempts of the kind have, however, however, stood the test of time so well as well as Mr. Carlyle's. From the gibbet on which Cromwell had hung for nearly two canturies he has been taken taken down for ever. In 1850 appeared the "Latter-day Pamphlets." Mr. Carlyle's next work, published in 1851, was the life of his friend, John Sterling, one of the most charming biographies in the language. Why Stering's Life should have been again written, after Archdeacon Hare had told the simple, uneventful story, was à priori anything but clear, but posterity would not willingly lose this record of beautiful friendship. Carlyla had first met Sterling accidentally at the India Office in company with John Stuart Mill. The talk on this occasion laid the foundations of a lasting intercourse. Sterling's mother took to Mrs. Carlyle in kindly, maternal way, and the two families formed many ties. "We had unconsciously made an acquisition which grew richer and wholesomer every new year, and ranks now, even seen in the pale moonlight of memory, and must ever rank, as among the precious possessions of life." The personal feeling which guided Mr. Carlyle's pen gave a lighter touch and more genial glow to the style; the book is full of sunny sketches of men and things; and a benign fate, aimilar to that which descended upon a young Edward King, the hero of "Lycidas," has given to John Sterling in these pages an immortality which his fugitive writings and his amiable virtues and beautiful endowments would not have procured him.
Between 1858 and 1865 appeared the ten volumes of Carlyle's laborious history of Frederick the Great. On this work Mr. Carlyle spent more time and trouble than on any of his other books. It is a marvel of industry. He has not been outdone by the German writers on the subject -- and Ranke, Preurs and Droysen are in the field -- in minute and painful investigation. Every accesible memoir and book bearing on the subject was read and collated, Mr. Carlyle want to Germany in 1858 for the sake of his book. He visited Zarodorff, Leuthen, Liegnitz, Sorr, Mollwitz, Prague, and many other places famous in the wars of Frederick and the vivid desuriptions to be found in the later volume -- for example, the description of the scenes of the battles of Chotusitz and Dettingen -- we owe to this journey. In none of his works is more genius discernible. Nowhere does his humour flow more copiously and brilliantly. Who that has read his Tobacco Parliament will ever forget it ? The figures of Wilhelmina, Old Paps, Excellency Robinson, Old Deasan, and a dozen other characters, move about vividly as they did in life. And yet the ten volumes are painful to read. Peculiarities of doric, embarrassing in others of Mr. Carlyle's books, have grown to be wearisome and vexatious; little tricks and contortions of manner are repeated without mercy; miserable petty details are pushed into the foreground; whole pages are written in a species of crabbed shorthand; the speech of ordinary mortals is abandoned; and sometimes we can detect in the writer a sense of weariness and a desire to tumble out in any fashion the multitude of somewhat dreary facts which he had collected. When he visited Varnhagen von Ense in 1858, he told his host, as we gather from Von Ense's "Tagebücher," that his "Friedrich" was "the poorest, most troublesome, and arduous piece of work he had ever undertaken." "No satisfaction in it at all, only labour and sorrow. What the devil had I to do with your Frederick 1" As to which Von Ense observes, "It must have cost bim unheard-of labour to understand Frederick," adding in his snappish, cantankerous way, "if he does understand him."
Since his "Frederick" was published Mr. Carlyle had undertaken no large work. But he had not been altogether silent. During the American War was published his half-contemptuous, we had almost said, truculent, account of the issues in his "Ilias in Nuce," enunciating his old predilection for the peculiar institution. In 1865 he was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. Next year he delivered an address to the students on "the choice of books." It was full of serene wisdom, the apt words of one who looked benignly down from the summit of a life well spent on the beginners in the struggle. Those who remember the old man's appearance, as he talked to the lads before him with amiable gravity of manner, his courageous, hopeful words, did not expect that in few hours exceeding sorrow would befall him. During his absence from London his wife died. Her death was quite unlooked for; while she was driving in the Park she suddenly expired. When the ccschman stopped he found his mistress lifeless. Carlyle might well say that "the light of his life had quite gone out; and the letters which he wrote to his friends are full of exceeding sorrow, and were at times the voice of ons for whom existence has nothing left. "A most sorry dog kenned it oftenest all seems to me, and wise words, if one even had them, to be only thrown away upon it. Basta, basta, I for the most part say of it, and look with longings towards the still country where at last we and our beloved ones shall be together again. Amen, amen." "It is the saddest feature of old age," he wrote, just a year after the death of his wife, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, "that the old man has to see himself daily growing more lonely; reduced to commune with inarticulate eternities, and the Loved Ones, now unresponsive, who have preceded him thither. Well, well, there is blessedneas in this too, if we take it well. There is grandeur in it, if also an extent of sombre sadness which is now to one; nor is hope quite wanting, nor the clear conviction that those whom we most screen from more pain and misery are now safe and strest. It lifts one to, real kinship withal, real for the first time in this scene of things. Courage, mу friend, let us endure patiently, let us act piously, to the end."
In 1867 the discussions about Parliamentary Reform revived in Mr. Carlyle his old thoughts about democracy, and he published in Macmillan's Magazine "Shooting Niagara, and After ?" Through our columns, he gave to the world in 1870, his trenchant views on the Franco-German War, denouncing "the cheap pity and newspaper lamantation over fallen and afflicted France," and expressing his opinion that it would be well for her and everybody if Bismarck took Alsace and so much of Lorraine as he wanted. Mr. Carlyle's last published writings were some contributions in 1875 to Fraser's Magazine, on John Knox's portrait. Hìs active literary life had thus extended over about half a century.
Mr. Carlyle has shunned many literary honours which were always within the reach. He did not accept the Grand Cross of the Bath, and on the death of Manzoni, in 1876, he was presented with the Prussian Order "for Merit" -- an honour given by the Knights of the Order and confirmed by the Sovereign, and limited to 30 German and as many foreign Knights.
It was knowing Mr. Carlyle imperfectly to know him only by his bocka. One must have talked with him, or, to be more accurate, allowed him to talk, in order to understand how his influence had burnt itself itself so deep into all men who knew him well. In his prime, strangers of all sorts came from the ends of the earth to the little house at Chelsea, just to hear this genial Timon inveigh and harangue against shams, wiggeries, and other customary themes. His talk was in many respects like his writings -- equally picturesque, vehement, lit up with wayward flashes of humour, abounding in song-like refrains, rarely falling into those ingeniously grotesque entanglementa of phraseology which disfigure his later pages, and set off by his homely Scotch accent, rugged, peasant like as the day when first he quitted Nithsdale. There were not many greater pleasures than to sit by his arm chair and hear him tell, as he loved to tell, when years came on, of old Annandale folk and ways, or descant on his favourite themes, turning round sharply every now and then upon the listener while he uttered some crashing dogma, such as "Lies -- lies are the very devil." There have been men of more astonishing powers a powers of talk -- men with more varied Information at their command; men who would quote chapter and verse in a way which was not distinctive of him. But Mr. Carlyle's talk had a charm of its own which no one could resist. He put so much genius, so much of bimself, so much aggressive fervour into a talk with friend or stranger who was to his mind. It was natural to him, as natural as it was to Dr. Johnson, to talk well, Let us quote on this head the testimony of Margaret Fuller, herself no mean talker, and, with all her admiration, little vexed, as we may see, at Mr. Carlyle's inability to let others shine. In spite of its transcendental twang, the description will serve to show how he looked in 1846 to a clever woman:-
In early life he was a swift writer. Later, however, his habits of composition changed. It is is said that the sight of the manuscript of a well-known author, with numerous interlineations and erasures, was a revelation to him of the pains which were necessary for the best workmanship. Certain it is that he corrected and re-corrected his later works; pieces of manuscript were interpolated or pasted in, and the finished production was sometimes very wonderful in appearance.
This is not the in time to try to measure Mr. Carlyle's services or the worth of his works. They have stood many years before the world; each one has long ago had his say about them; the general judgment of mankind on his shortcomings and faults has been pronounced. It will scarcely be questioned that the quantity of the ore of pure truth to be extracted from them in small. Precise definitions, reservations, and qualifications are not in his way; he is too eager and too much afire to be particular about these things; be will not tarry over the niceties of attorney logic. He does not travel by the common highways; he is on the wing; and there is neither obstacle nor boundary thought of in his flight. Justness of view as a critic is not to be expected of him. His prejudices have always been immense and wayward. You must not look for sober, well-ordered reasoning; for him the time of argument is always past; his business is to make good his victory, to force upon you his conviction. As Jobnson refuted Berkeley by "striking his foot with mighty force against a stone," so with equal agency Mr. Carlyle has disposed of many disagreeable theories by dubbing their anthors M'Crowdy or M'Quirk. His books are a sort of puritanical syllabus, not less condemnatory of the modern spirit than that which issued from the Vatican. His social and political theories are, in the main, but aspirations after impossible ideals -- vain attempts, heroic, but ineffecrual, to bring back the past and yet to retain the richest fruits of progress. His extravagances of style lie on the surface, and his disciples have found it easy to copy and outdo his tricks and foibles of manner and his recurring touches of grotesqueness. They have not always copied also the sound sense which made atonement and which controlled all that he did. Many historians have fancied that they were following in Mr. Carlyle's footsteps bacause they poohpoohed the operation of general causes and principles, paraded some trumpery scrap of information about the clothes or "property" of their heroes, ostentatiously cleared up a wretched date, or struck out a new mode of spelling an unimportant name. We have seen clumsy imitators who cumbered their pages with meaningless and garish details, or interpolated Iaboured rhapsodies, which were feeble reminiscences or hollow echoes of Sauerteig. The commonplacas of Mr. Carlyle bave been the stock-in-trade of a terribly wearisome group of writers, who assumed the nod of Jove, but could not hurl his thunderbolts. Unfortunately they aped other and graver faults, and supposed that they were animated by Mr. Carlyle's spirit when they applauded every exhibition of brute force and insulted the weaker but not less noble elements of human nature. Mr. Cariyle is responsible for much in modern Literature which it is not pleasant to look upon; and some of his own pages, with their exultant os victi over fallen causes, are not edifying. But what are these defects to the good which he has done? To whom has he not been a salutary teacher? Kingsley, Fronde, and Huskin have sat his feet, and a host of others, scarcely a leading mind of our time excepted, have felt his influence Wherever, in truth, men have turned their minds for the last quarter of a century to the deep relations of things his spirit has been present to rebuke frivolity, to awaken courage and hope. No other writer of this generation ever cast so potent a spell on the youth of England. They might outgrow him; they they might travel far from the region of his thoughts; they might learn to see in the teacher of their early days only the iconoclast whose work was done. They could never wholly get outside the circle of his spell, and to take up one of his books and read but a page or two was sure to recall a flood of old memories and influences even as will the sound of distant bells or a snatch of a once familiar song. To many he was always a teacher. He brought ardour and vehemence congenial to their young hearts, and into them he shot fiery arrows which could never be withdrawn.
What Hazlitt said of Coleridge was true of him -- he cast a great stone into the pool of contemporary thought, and the circles have grown wider and wider. He was early enough in the field to deal the last blows to expiring Byronism. It was his fortune to be for most educated Englishmen the discoverer of the literature of Germany. In what state did be find literary criticism here ? What did It not become under his hand? How many heaps of dry bones in history have been quickened and made to rise and walk ? How many skeletone have been clothed with flesh at his touch? And yet in all his varied activity, from first to last, he was something of the inspired peasant. The waves of London life came up to and about him; but they but they never overwhelmed him or had power to alter him one jot. With all his culture and nearly 50 years of residence in the south, he was to the end substantially unchanged; his ways were his forefathers' ways; his deepest convictions were akin to theirs; and it needed but a little stretch of the imagination to suppose him a fellow worker with Knox or the friend and companion of Burns,
Thomas Carlyle died at half-past 9 on Saturday morning at his house in Cheyne-row, Cheshire. He had been for some years in poor health, and more than once in 1879 and 1880. His recovery seemed doubtful. Of late, however, his friends saw little of him. He could not bear the strain of prolonged or exciting conversation, and growing weakness, approaching, as he himself said, almost constant pain, had compelled him to give up very much his old habit of taking long walks every day. But since manhood, he had been frequently subject to ailments, dyspepsia and kindred weaknesses had been his scourge since his childhood; he had rallied more than once from severe attacks of ill-health; and it was not supposed until quite recently that his condition was near. The announcement of his death will bring home to every educated English its significance. A chasm opens between the present and the past of our literatures, a whole world of associations disappears. No recent man of letters has held in England a place comparable to that which for at least a quarter of a century has been his without dispute, and authors of all kinds and schools will feel that they have lost their venerable doyen. A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted, has passed away amid universal regret. The close has come of a well-ordered, full, stately, and complete life.
About eight months before Robert Burns died, and within but a few miles of Dumfries, the scene of his death, was born the most ponetrating and sympathetic interpreter of his genius. Carlyle's birthplace was Ecclefechan, an insignificant Dumfriesshire village, in the parish of Huddam, known by name, at least, to readers of Burns, and memorable for an alehouse which was loved only too well by the poet. There Carlyle was born on the 4th of December, 1795. He was the eldest son of a family of eight children; his brothers were all men of character and ability; one of them, Dr. John Carlyle, was destined to make a name in literature as the translator of Dante. Mr. Carlyle's father, James Carlyle, was the son of Thomas Carlyle, tenant of Brown-Knowes, a small farm in Annandale, and of Margaret Aitken. At the time of his eldest son's birth. James Carlyle was a stone mason, and resided in Ecclefechan; but he afterwards became tenant of Scotsberg, a farm of two or three hundred acres, which is now occupied by Mr. Carlyle's youngest and only surviving brother. James Carlyle was a man of rectitude, worth, and intelligence, and in many ways remarkable. His son once said, "I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people," and his own lineage might well have suggested this saying. Carlyle never spoke of his father and mother except with veneration and affection. Of the former specially he liked to talk, and he once made the remark that he thought his father, all things considered, the best man whom he had ever known. There were points of strong likeness between them. The father was a man of energy and strong will; and he had in no small measure the picturesque and vivid powers of speech of the son, and liked to use out-of-the-way, old-fashioned, sharp, and pungent words. His pithy sayings, occasionally prickly and sharp, ran through the country side. His favourite books were the Bible and an old Puritan divine. He was, said his son on one occasion to a friend, "a far cleverer man than I am, or will ever be." An elder in the Kirk, and a man of established character for probity, he was one who, to use again his son's description of him, "like Enoch of old, walked with God." All extant testimony goes to show that Mr. Carlyle's father and mother were of the finest type of Scotch country folk -- simple, upright, and with family traditions of honest worth.
Carlyle learnt to read and write in the parish school of Hoddam, where he remained until his ninth year. The parish minister, his father's friend, taught him the elements of Latin. From the parish school he passed to the Burgh School of Annan, six miles distant, where he saw Edward Irving, "his first friend," as he once called him, who was some years his senior. Lads still go very young to Scotch Universities; 60 years ago they went still younger, and were wont to quit them with their degree, if they cared to take any, which they rarely did, at an age when an English youth has not quitted a public school. Carlyle was barely 14 when he entered the University of Edinburgh. It was then in its glory. Some of its professors possessed a European reputation. The eloquent and acute Dr. Thomas Brown lectured on moral philosophy; Playfair held the chair of natural philosophy; the ingenious and quarrelsome Sir John Leslie taught mathematics; and Dunbar was professor of Greek. They were a group of men likely to impress much a susceptible lad of genius, and especially one who had a strong bias towards mathematical studies. But Carlyle was not so impressed. For Dr. Brown -- "Miss Brown," or "that little man who spouted poetry," as he derisively called him he had no liking, Against Playfair he had a grudge, because, after having worked bard at the class studies, on calling at Playfair's house for the certificate to which he was entitled, befound the document worded in a somewhat niggardly spirit. The only professor for whom he seems to have had much regard for was Sir John Leslie, who had some points of affinity to his pupil; and the feeling was returned. Carlyle made few friends at the University. He was lonely and contemplative in his habits. He took no part in the proceedings, and his name is not to be found on the list of members of the Speculative Society, which every clever student was then expected to join. In after years he laid it down that "the true University of these days is a collection of books," and on this principle he acted. Not content with ransacking the College Library, he read all that was duplicated in various circulating libraries — among others, one founded by Allan Ramsay — and acquired knowledge which extended far beyond the bounds of the University course. He left the University with no reprimand. "Had you anywhere in Crim Tartary," he observes with reference to the University which Tenfelsdröckh studied, but probably with a covert glance at his own Alma mater, "walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen library; and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years; certain persons, under the title of professors, being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable admission fees -- you had not, indeed, in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary." Still, Carlyle profited much by the four years spent at college. He read hard, even to the point of injuring his health; he acquired a sound and, for his years, unusual knowledge of mathematics, and might have boasted with Gibbon, but without the qualification which Gibbon appended, that he had attained a stock of erudition that would have puzzled a doctor. Having passed through the arts curriculum of the University, Carlyle ought rightly, in the natural course of things, to have proceeded to the study of theology, for be had been destined by his father to be a minister.
There is some tradition that matters had gone so for that is had been arranged in what church Carlyle should appear as a "probationer." But he did not carry on his father's intentions. "Now that one bad gained man's estate," to quote his own account of this crisis in his life, "I was not sure that I believed the doctrines of my father's church; and it was necessary I should now settle it. And so I entered my chamber and closed the door, and around me there came a trooping throng of phantasms dire from the abysmal depths of nethermost perdition, doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing were there; and I wrestled with them in agony of spirit." The end of all this storm was the settled conviction that he could not enter the Church. Carlyle at once turned his hand to work by which he could earn his bread, and for a year or two he taught mathematics in the burgh school of Annan, where he had but lately been a pupil. He remained there only two years; at their close he was appointed teacher of mathematics and classics in the burgh school of Kirkcaldy. At the other end of "the lang toun" was a private adventure school, called the Academy, where Edward Irving taught some of the well-known tongues and mathematics. The two young men of genius were already acquainted with each other; indeed, it was at Irving's instigation, and with view to be near him, that Carlyle went to Kirkcaldy. There, however, were riveted the bonds of a friendship destined to be tested by trials, some of them of a very personal character. These bonds were sometimes stretched, but never broken, not even when Carlyle saw with sorrowfulness his gifted friend pass into the regions of darkness and chaos whence he never returned. Teaching Fifeshire boys was not Carlyle's vocation. After staying about two years in Kirkcaldy, he quit it, leaving behind him the reputation of a too stern discplinarian, to begin in Edinburgh the task of his life as a writer of books.
At that date the capital of Scotland was still another Weimar. Men of letters had not yet deserted it for London. "Mags" was in its glory. Lockhart, John Wilson, Magion, were in their brilliant prime; Jeffrey was at the head of the Edinburgh, and the stalwart form of Scott, not yet beset by the load of misfortune and toll, might be seen occasionally in the streets. Carlyle tried his prentice-hand in Brewster's "Edinburgh Encyclopaedia," to which he contributed many articles on geographical and biographical subjects; among others, articles on Sir John Moore, Dr. Moore, Nelson, the older and younger Pitt, Montaigne, and Montesquieu. These first essays on authorship have never been republished, and they do not, perhaps, deserve to be so. They give but faint, uncertain promise of the author's genius and of those gifts which made his later works as individual as a picture by Albert Dürer or Rembrandt. But they indicate patient industry and research and minute attention to details; and they show that the author was consulting those stores of varied knowledge upon which his imagination was to work in after years. Here and there is a stroke of force and felicity. Occasionally the confidence of his later style is suspected, as, for example, when he refutes Montesquieu's theory of the influence of climate on race and history. We recognise the author of "The French Revolution" in the vivid description of the philosopher as a cheery and benign sage, talking with the peasant under the oak at La Brède. At the instances of Sir David Brewster be translated Legendre's "Geometry and Trigonometry," prefixing to the treatise a short and modest introduction on proportion. Brewster's name was put to the translation. Carlyle received £30 for his work, a sum not unimportant in those days. He was always proud of his essay on Proportion, and with good reason. De Morgan pronounced it "a thoughtful and ingenious essay, as good a substitute for the fifth book of Euclid as could be given in speech," and it is certainly clear, concise, and direct. Carlyle about this time mastered German; his brother was studying in Germany, and the letters from Dr. Carlyle heightened his interest in its language and its literature, which was then in full blossom. The first fruits of this knowledge was an article contributed to the New Edinburgh on "Faust," a subject to which he was so often to return.
For some time after leaving Kirkcaldy, and until a year or two before his marriage, he served as tutor to the brilliant, amiable Charles Buller, teaching him, if not then, at least afterwards, some other things besides mathematics, as those who remember Buller's views on pauperism, emigration, and colonization will admit. About this period of Carlyle's life, the once famous John Scott was editing the London Magazine and gathered around him a group of enthusiastic writers; Lazlitt, Lamb, Croly, Cary, and Allan Cunningham were a few of them. Carlyle joined them. Here appeared, in 1823, the first part of the "Life of Schiller." No name was attached to it. Those who knew that it was Carlyle's work predicted great things from a writer who, in youth, exhibited noble simplicity and maturity of style, and who had conceptions of criticism very rare in those times. In the following year he published, again anonymously, a translation of "Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre," with misgivings, not strange or unjustified, as to how his countrymen would receive a book so repugnant in many ways to the dominent taste. Goethe was then no prophet out of his own country. He was known to no Englishman but De Quincey, Coleridge, and a few students of German literature. The novel was sneered at, and the savage, elaborate invectives which De Quincey hurled at Goethe did not spare the translator. Carlyle's style was sharply criticised. Magina, in after years, complained that Gosthe had been translated from the Fatherlandish dialect of High Dutch to the Allgemeine Mid Lothianish of Auld Reekie, and that Carlyle was seeking to acclimatize the roundabout, hubble-bubble, rumfustianish (hübble-bubblen, rüm-fästeanischen), roly-poly, gromerly of style, dear to the heart of a son of the Fatherland. Undeterred by listeners and remonstrances, Carlyle published in 1827 several volumes entitled "German Romance," containing translations from the chief writers of the Romantic school, such as Musaeus, La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Hofmann, and Richter, with short biographical notices. This work was, as he himself admitted, "mere journey-work," not of his own suggesting or desiring -- mere preparation for the work of his genius. Before putting out his full strength he seems to have felt the necessity of retiring to some secluded place where he might mature and arrange his seething and tumultuous thoughts. The occasion for doing so presented itself. In 1827 he married Miss Jane Welsh, the only daughter of Dr. Welsh, of Haddington, a descendant of John Knox. She had inherited a farm lying remote and high up among the hills of Dumfriesshire; and there Carlyle found the Patmos which his perturbed spirit needed. To the farmhouse of Craigenputtock -- a plain, gaunt two-story dwelling, with its face blankly looking towards the hill, up which the little gooseberry garden runs, partly sheltered from the fierce wind by a few badly-grown ash trees, almost cut off from the world by a morass, and reached only by a rough cart-road -- to this peaceful and simple abode, some 15 miles from town or market, came Carlyle and his bride in 1828. Here for six years he lived with this one friend and companion—a companion worthy of him; a woman of much character and practical wisdom, given to silence when he talked, but a talker scarcely inferior to himself, as those who know her well could testify; a woman, as he himself termed her, of "bright invincibility of spirit." Here for these years he wrote and read much -- "a whole cartload of French, German, American and English journals and periodicals piled upon his little library table" -- meditating or holding much high converse with his wife as they wandered on foot or horseback over the black and silent moors and unending hills -- an expanse of bleak, sour uplands, watered by nameless rills and shadowed by mist and rolling vapours, yet not wholly wanting in rugged and tender beanties congenial to his spirit. In a well-known letter to Goethe, Carlyle describes his life at Craigenputtock. He says:
Our residence is not in the town itself, but 15 miles to the northwest of it, among the Gaunt Hills and black moraines which stretch westward through Galloway to the Irish Sea. In this wilderness of heath and bog, one estate stands forth as a green oasis, a tract of flat enclosed and planted ground, where long-hedged, where corn ripens and trees afford a shade, although surrounded by sea mews and rough-wooled sheep. Here, with no small effort, we have built and furnished a neat, substantial dwelling. Here, in the absence of professional or other office, we live to cultivate literature according to our strength, and in our own special way. We wish a joyful growth to the roses and leaves of our garden; we hope for prosperity and peace, full thoughts to further our purpose. The roses, indeed, are still in part to be planted, but they blossom soon in anticipation. Two ponies, which carry us everywhere, and the mountain air are the best medicine for weak nerves. This daily exercise, to which I am also devoted, is the only recreation, for this neck of ours is the loneliest in Britain -- six miles removed before any one likely to visit me.Carlyle toiled hard in this temple of industrious peace. In these obscure youthful years, he wrote, read, and planned much, and made incursions into many domains of knowledge. Writing in December of 1828 to De Quincy of his ooupations, he says: -
Such a quantity of German periodical and mystic speculation embossomed in plain Scotch post-moss being nowhere that I know of to be met with ... We have no society, but who has in the strict sense of that word. I have never had any worth speaking about since I came into the world ... My wife and I are busy learning Spanish: far advanced in "Don Quixote" already. I purpose writing mystical reviews for somewhat longer than a twelve-month period, have Greek to read and the whole universe to study (for i understand less and less of it).In a bare, scantily furnished room of the farmhouse, now shown with pride to visitors, he pursued this plan and wrote essay after essay, and did much of his work. Here were composed his essays on Burns, Goethe and Johnson, Richter, Heyne, Novalls, Voltair and Diderot. "Sartor Resartus" was composed here; the manuscript to be laid aside until some other time. It was here, too, while, as Mr. Lewes remarked, Carlyle was rambling over the wild moors, "with thoughts at times as wild and dreary as those moors", that he conceived the
notion of sending to his master at Weimar a birthday present as a token of gratitude and silence on the part of himself and a few other English admirers of Goethe. The momento was a seal, designed by Mrs. Carlyle; it was followed by a letter written by Carlyle himself. The epistle runs:-
We said to ourselves, as it is always the highest duty and pleasure to show reverence where reverence is due, and our chief, and perhaps our only benefactor, is he who by act and word instructs us in wisdom; so we, the undersigned, looking towards the poet Goethe as the spiritually taught towards their spiritual teacher are desirous to express that sentiment openly and in common; for which end we have determined to solicit his acceptance of a special English gift, proceeding from us all equally, on his approaching birthday; so that while the venerable man still dwells among us, some memorial of the gratitude we owe him, and we think the whole world owes him, may not be wanting. And thus our little tribute, perhaps the purest that men can offer to man, now stands in visible form, and begs to be received. May it be welcome and speak permanently of a most close relation, though wide seas flow between the parties.In this happy mountain home Carlyle was not wholly cut off from the world. Fame came to him, though thus secluded, and thither from time to time journeyed strangers desires of seeing and holding converse with man whose written words in the Edinburgh and New and Foreign Quarterly had made them feel that a new teacher had come into the world. Sometimes an Edinburgh man of letters would travel by coach to Dumfries and walk or ride 16 long Scottish miles to Craigenputtock, making, perhaps, unexpected demands on the resources of the hospitable household, and compelling Mrs. Carlyle to mount a pony and set out in search of provisions. Thither came, among many other strangers, Emerson, who had read and admired in New England what Carlyle had written, and who went away full of enthusiasm at his heart's bright, vivid story, full of lively anecdote and streaming humour, which fed everything it looked upon. Carlyle contributed to the Edinburgh Review, which was still under the management of Jeffrey. The relationship was not perfectly smooth or entirely satisfactory to either editor or writer. It was difficult to adjust the boundaries of the respective perspective provinces, Carlyle being apt to take offence at the ruthless hacking and hewing of his work in which Jeffrey indulged, and, the latter being cut to the quick by the eccentricities of style displayed by his contributor, and surprised that Carlyle was not grateful for efforts to impart trim grace and polish to his articles. Jeffrey once told Charles Sumner, who had made some remark about the deterioration in Carlyle's writing since the publication of the essay on Burns, that there had been, in fact, no change, and as much as suggested that the earlier writings owed their grace to his careful revision. In the recently published correspondence of Professor Manvey Napier we can see the feeling of Jeffrey and Carlyle toward each other. It was by no means unmixed friendliness. "I fear Carlyle will not do," writes Aristarchus of Craigcrook to his sorely-bullied and much-suffering successor in 1832, "that is, if you do not take the liberties and pains with you that I did, by striking out freely, and writing in occasionally. The misfortune that he is very obstinate and, I am afraid, very conceited." "It is a great pity, for he is a man of genius and industry, and with the capacity of being an elegant and impressive writer." Carlyle was, alas! never fated to become the "elegant writer" whom Jeffrey saw in his critical mind's eye. Jeffrey lived to see his awkward contributor take rank as a classic, but that consumption of elegant authorship which he desired he was never to behold. With Professor Napier, on the other hand, Carlyle's dealings were much to his satisfaction, and he preferred to write for the Edinburgh.
"Sartor Resartus", that unique collection of meditations and confessions, passionate invective, solemn reflection, and romantic episodes from his own life, was composed at Craigenputtock in 1831. It had a difficulty in seeing the light. It is not a little astonishing that this book, every page of which is stamped with genius of the highest order, failed at first to find admirers or appreciators. The publishers would have nothing to do with it. We declared that the author lacked "tact," which was probably true. Another pronounced the humour too Teutonic and heavy -- a piece of criticism not without point. Even John Stuart Mill, who, afterward, delighted in the book, admitted that when he saw it in manuscript he thought little of it. The general impression seemed to be that much genius and German had made the author mad. He himself was at times a little disheartened by repeated rebuffs." "I have given up the notion," he says of "Sartor," in 1832, "of hawking my little manuscript book about any further: for a long time it bas lain quiet in a drawer waiting for a better day. The bookselling trade seems on the verge of dissolution; the force of puffing can go no further, yet bankruptcy clamours at every door: sad fate! I have to serve the Devil, and get no wages even from him! The poor Bookselling Guild, I often predict to myself, will ere long be found unfit to be the strange part now plays in our European world; and will give place to new and higher arrangements, of which the coming shadows are already becoming visible." Not for seven years after its composition did "Sartor" appear as a volume. "It had at last," says its successor, "to clip itself in pieces, and be contingent to struggle out, bit by bit, in some courageous magazine that offered."
Strengthening, helpful, and rich in fruit, were these yours in his Nithsdale hermitage. They were the seedbed of his fateful deeds. There he unravelled the tangled skein of his thoughts. There he laid up stores of knowledge, of health, of high resolutions for the work lying before him. There, in a solitude peopled only by books and thoughts and the companionship of his wife, and conversations with some congenial stranger, he inherited the sure foundations of a life which was destined to be so complete. But the time came for him to leave Craigenputtock. A historian, a critic, a biographer must have libraries within easy reach. He must know men if he is to instruct them; and on a hillside or bleak moor he cannot find to his hand all the materials which were necessary when he essays to write the history of the French Revolution. Some ties which bound Carlyle to Dumfriesshire had been severed. His father had passed away full of years, and it became fit, and even necessary, that Carlyle should leave his mountain seclusion and take himself to London. He settled in Cheyne-row, in a small three-storied house, which he never afterwards quitted. The part of Chelsea which he chose had associations interesting to him as a man of letters. Dr. Smollett's old house, Don Saltero's coffee-house, and Nell Gwynne's boudoir were close at hand. He had Leigh Hunt as a neighbor. He was, as he himself say in a letter written shortly after he went to his new home, encompassed by a cloud of witnesses -- good, bad, and indifferent. Chelsea has changed much since 1834. Let any one recall the enthusiastic term in which Leigh Hunt speaks of escape from the noise and dust of the New Road to the repose and quietude of a corner of Chelsea, where the air of the country came to refresh him, and where only pastoral cries of primroses and cow parsnip were to be heard in the streets. Carlyle lived to know Chelsea in very altered circumstances. The fields which he could see from the window of the attic, which was his study and place of work, were swarmed up by all-devouring brick and mortar, and hideous noises which came with increase of population vexed and distracted him, and were among the most serious discomforts of his life.
Carlyle was a man of mature years when he removed to London. He had then done comparatively little. His intellectual growth had been far from surprisingly fast. He was born a few months before Keats, and by 1821 Keats had sung his last song, and was at rest in his grave at Rome; Shelley, born only three years before Carlyle, had made himself an immortal name and passed away in 1823. Had Carlyle died so sadly, what would he have left but the memory among a few friends of brilliant but uncertain promise! His genius was a fire which, slowly lit, slowly died. The first years after his coming to London were the most fruitful of his literary life. Essays, histories, lectures, biographies poured from his brain with surprising rapidity. No buck-back could have surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked, late and early, in his small attic A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties. At 10 o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he took up his pen and laboured hard until 3 o'clock; nothing, not even the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends. One of his favourite relaxations was riding in an omnibus. In the evening he read and prepared for the work of the morrow. Success did not visit him at once. His form of worship, not being readily classified under any of the established categories, repelled ordinary readers of the time; he was not the mere popularizor of ideas already accepted; he had a gospel of his own to preach and disciples to convert and tease before it could be spread abroad. His best books were by no means instantaneously successful. Even the "French Revolution," with all its brilliancy and captivating élan, had to wait for a publisher. His "broad Brobdingnagian grin of true humour" was not relished. One North British Reviewer seemed inclined to take southern opinion before committing himself to being amused. Another writer pronounced "Sartor Resortas" a "heap of clotted nonsense." Carlyle's style was held up as a fearful warning. He found bis first warmest admirers on the other side of the Atlantic. The enthusiasm which his work excited in a few minds was not always tempered with intelligence, and we have come across an American literary periodical of those times which warns its readers that the Author of "Sartor Resartus" in "not to be confounded with Mr. Carlisle, now deceased, who was a confident and avowed champion of infidelity." Before fame in its common form had come to him, men whose private opinions were to be future public opinion had conceived the highest notion of his powers and the future before him; and the little parlour in Cheyne-row had become the gathering place, the favourite haunt of many literary men. At different timas between 1837 and 1840, Mr. Carlyle delivered at Willie's Rooms and Portman Square courses of lectures on some of his favourite subjects -- "German Literature," The History of Literature," "The Revolutione of Modern Europe," and "Heroes and Hero-Worship." Each of there lectures was a considerable event in literature. Their effect was such as it is difficult now to conceive. The audience included most of the chief man of letters of the day. "The accomplished and distinguished, the beautiful, the wise, something of what is best in England, have listened patiently to my rude words" is his own account of his hearers. They were alternately shocked and entranced. There was uncertainty whether his burning words, delivered in an odd sing song and unquestionable Doric, were wild rhapsodies or the sublime mutterings of a true prophet, who had a message to deliver to modern society. But, at all events, it was a man of a wholly new order who spoke, and people of all shades and schools -- the Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites of London -- were amazed. Crabbe Robinson, who attended the whole of one course, says of a certain lecture, "It gave great satisfaction, for it had uncommon thoughts, and was delivered with unusual animation." "As for Carlyle's Lectures," writes Bunsen, "they are very striking, rugged thoughts, not ready made up for any political or religious system; thrown at people's heads, by which most of his audience are sadly startled." "Attended Carlyle's lecture," writes Macready, " 'The hero as a prophet,' on which he descanted with a fervour and eloquence that only complete conviction of truth could give. I was charmed, carried away by him. Met Browning there."
"The French Revolution," the first work to which Mr. Carlyle put his name, appeared in 1837. It would have been published sooner but for the famous disaster which befell the manuscript of the first volume. The author had lent it to Mr. John Stuart Mill; the latter handed it to Mrs. Taylor, his future wife. What became of it was never exactly known. Mrs. Taylor left the manuscript for some days on her writing table: when wanted it could nowhere be found; and the most probable explanation of ita disappearance was the suggestion that a servant had used the manuscript to light the fire. Carlyle at once set to work to reproduce from his notes the lost volume; he swiftly finished bis task, but he always thought that the first draft was the best. Though welcomed, as it deserved to be, by Mill and Stirling, the "French Revolution" was not at once successful. The bulk of readers did not hail it as the great prose poem of the century. They were not enraptured by the Iliad-like swiftness and vividness of the narrative, the sustained passion, as if the whole had been written at a sitting, the full flow of poetry, with touches of grandeur and tenderness: and those pages like the pictures from Salvator Ross's brush, in which a flash of lightning reveals, side by side, the horrors of Nature and her pastoral aweetness. Landor, indeed, hailed "The French Revolu- tion" as the best book published in his time, and recognized the coming of a new literary potentate; but his vision was exceptionally acute. The incongruities, monstrosities of style, and the author's disdain for what an admirer called the "feudalities of literature" struck all readers, and it was only some of them who thought much more of the intrinsic beauty of the jewel than of the strange setting.
About 1839 began a new phase of activity. Mr. Carlyle had imbibed a deep distrust and even abhorrence of all the somewhat mechanical expedients for the amelioration of society then in fashion. The favourite schemes of social reform were then even more crude than they generally are; Mr. Carlyle despised them all. The philanthropists whom he met with were not the most practical or the wisest of their kind; Mr. Carlyle thought them, for the most part, mealy-mouthed, engaged in ineffectual dallying and parleying with the stern invincible verities of life, and coaxing and coddling those upon whom Nature had pronounced her irreversible sentences of extermination. From the depths of society, from torchlight meetings hold by Chartists in Birmingham and other towns, from the agricultural counties where " Swing" was burning ricks or throwing down toll gates, from Ireland, where an overgrown population no longer found potatoes enough to satisfy its simple wants, came sullen mutterings of discontent, ominous signs of commotions to come, perplexity, tribulation, and distress among nations. There was no lack of nostrums or social doctors. Mr. Carlyle pronounced them one and all vain and unprofitable. In a series of works published from 1839 to 1850 -- in "Chartism," "Past and Present," and "Latter-day Pamphlets" he poured unmeasured scorn and contumely on the false teachers and blind guides of the time. It was the kernel of his philosophy that legislation, Reform or Ballot Bills, statutory measures of social improvement of any kind, would do of themselves next to no good. Reforms to be effectual must go deeper than an English Parliament, of whose perfect wisdom he had grave doubts, was likely to tolerate. "Christian philanthropy and other most amiable-looking, but most baseless, and, in the end, most baneful and all-bewildering jargon;" "philanthropisms" issuing "in a universal sluggard and scoundrel protection society"; the crowds of amiable simpletons sunk in deep froth oceans of benevolence;" Bentham, a "bore of the first magnitude, with his immense baggage of formulae, and his tedious iteration "of the greatest happiness of the greatest number;" the political economists mumbling barren truisms or equally unfruitful paradoxes about supply and demand; Malthusians preaching to deaf ears the most unacceptable of gospels; so-called statesmen collecting with impotent hands information about the Condition of England Question which they could not apply, and letting things slide to chaos and perdition; Ireland sluttishly starving from age to age on Act of Parliament freedom; the braying of Exeter Hall; the helpless babbling of Parliament; and liberty made a pretext, in the Weat Indies and elsewhere, for flying in in the face the great law that, if a man work not, neither shall he eat -- these were some of the butts of his scorn and contempt. It would be searcely worthwhile to try to measure the exact value of these jeremiads. Mr. Carlyle was much too eloquently wrathful. His criticisms were often grotesque caricatures, They abounded in contradictions, and it was always pretty clear that Mr. Carlyle found it much easier to rail at large than to suggest any working substitutes for the systems which he despised. De Quincey was unanswerable when he said to Carlyle, "You've shown or you've made another hole in the tin kettle of society; how do you propose to tinker it ?" Harsh and crude judgments are to be met with in almost every page, and much of the teaching, so far as it is intelligible and consistent, preposterous and impracticable. But, dismissing all expectation of finding precise suggestions, it in astonishing to note note how, under uncouth, rhapsodical phraseology, lie many ideas which are now the common property of most educated men. The novelties and paradoxes of 1840 are, to a large extent, nothing but the good sense of 1881. Who would not now echo Mr. Cariyle's protests against the supposed omnipotence of Parliament or of the possibility of saving nations by the use of the ballot box! Who now believes that man can be instantaneously reformed in battalions and platoons, or that human nature can be remade by any order of the Poor Law Commissioners? Who does not now own that the change in our colonies from servitude to idleness and squalor, temporary, it is true, was not as unmixed bleaning to those most concerned? If all wise men are now haunted by a sense of the impotence of legislation to effect deep changes for good, and of the necessity of working out reformations really worth anything in the souls of individuals, to whom do they owe this so much as to Mr. Carlyle! Who recognized the the duty of spreading education earlier aud more clearly than he! We say nothing of the keen eye for the detection of rogues and impostors, under all disguises, which Mr. Carlyle's political pamphlets reveal; or of those ingenious ingenious epithets of his which, attached to some blustering, swelling place of fraud, acted like a stone tied to the neck of a dog flung into deep water. It is enough to say that again and again he reminded, in his own was way the generation of stern truths which it was in danger of forgetting.
In 1845 be published "Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations." The work was well received. It passed rapidiy through several editions. In a petition addressed in 1839 to the House of Commons on the subject of of the Copyright Bill, Mr. Carlyle had said of his literary labours that they had "found hitherto, in money or money's worth, small recompense or none," and he was by no means sure of ever getting any. His "Oliver Cromwell," however, was at once widely read; and in his preface to the second edition be thought proper to admit that, contrary to his expectations, "the work had spread itself abroad with some degree of impetus." No one could fail to see how the great Protector, as he really was, bad at last been disinterred from bebeath Pelicus and Ossas of calumny and rubbish heaped upon him by generations of detractors. We are familiar enongh by this time with the process of historical whitewashing. None of the attempts of the kind have, however, however, stood the test of time so well as well as Mr. Carlyle's. From the gibbet on which Cromwell had hung for nearly two canturies he has been taken taken down for ever. In 1850 appeared the "Latter-day Pamphlets." Mr. Carlyle's next work, published in 1851, was the life of his friend, John Sterling, one of the most charming biographies in the language. Why Stering's Life should have been again written, after Archdeacon Hare had told the simple, uneventful story, was à priori anything but clear, but posterity would not willingly lose this record of beautiful friendship. Carlyla had first met Sterling accidentally at the India Office in company with John Stuart Mill. The talk on this occasion laid the foundations of a lasting intercourse. Sterling's mother took to Mrs. Carlyle in kindly, maternal way, and the two families formed many ties. "We had unconsciously made an acquisition which grew richer and wholesomer every new year, and ranks now, even seen in the pale moonlight of memory, and must ever rank, as among the precious possessions of life." The personal feeling which guided Mr. Carlyle's pen gave a lighter touch and more genial glow to the style; the book is full of sunny sketches of men and things; and a benign fate, aimilar to that which descended upon a young Edward King, the hero of "Lycidas," has given to John Sterling in these pages an immortality which his fugitive writings and his amiable virtues and beautiful endowments would not have procured him.
Between 1858 and 1865 appeared the ten volumes of Carlyle's laborious history of Frederick the Great. On this work Mr. Carlyle spent more time and trouble than on any of his other books. It is a marvel of industry. He has not been outdone by the German writers on the subject -- and Ranke, Preurs and Droysen are in the field -- in minute and painful investigation. Every accesible memoir and book bearing on the subject was read and collated, Mr. Carlyle want to Germany in 1858 for the sake of his book. He visited Zarodorff, Leuthen, Liegnitz, Sorr, Mollwitz, Prague, and many other places famous in the wars of Frederick and the vivid desuriptions to be found in the later volume -- for example, the description of the scenes of the battles of Chotusitz and Dettingen -- we owe to this journey. In none of his works is more genius discernible. Nowhere does his humour flow more copiously and brilliantly. Who that has read his Tobacco Parliament will ever forget it ? The figures of Wilhelmina, Old Paps, Excellency Robinson, Old Deasan, and a dozen other characters, move about vividly as they did in life. And yet the ten volumes are painful to read. Peculiarities of doric, embarrassing in others of Mr. Carlyle's books, have grown to be wearisome and vexatious; little tricks and contortions of manner are repeated without mercy; miserable petty details are pushed into the foreground; whole pages are written in a species of crabbed shorthand; the speech of ordinary mortals is abandoned; and sometimes we can detect in the writer a sense of weariness and a desire to tumble out in any fashion the multitude of somewhat dreary facts which he had collected. When he visited Varnhagen von Ense in 1858, he told his host, as we gather from Von Ense's "Tagebücher," that his "Friedrich" was "the poorest, most troublesome, and arduous piece of work he had ever undertaken." "No satisfaction in it at all, only labour and sorrow. What the devil had I to do with your Frederick 1" As to which Von Ense observes, "It must have cost bim unheard-of labour to understand Frederick," adding in his snappish, cantankerous way, "if he does understand him."
Since his "Frederick" was published Mr. Carlyle had undertaken no large work. But he had not been altogether silent. During the American War was published his half-contemptuous, we had almost said, truculent, account of the issues in his "Ilias in Nuce," enunciating his old predilection for the peculiar institution. In 1865 he was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. Next year he delivered an address to the students on "the choice of books." It was full of serene wisdom, the apt words of one who looked benignly down from the summit of a life well spent on the beginners in the struggle. Those who remember the old man's appearance, as he talked to the lads before him with amiable gravity of manner, his courageous, hopeful words, did not expect that in few hours exceeding sorrow would befall him. During his absence from London his wife died. Her death was quite unlooked for; while she was driving in the Park she suddenly expired. When the ccschman stopped he found his mistress lifeless. Carlyle might well say that "the light of his life had quite gone out; and the letters which he wrote to his friends are full of exceeding sorrow, and were at times the voice of ons for whom existence has nothing left. "A most sorry dog kenned it oftenest all seems to me, and wise words, if one even had them, to be only thrown away upon it. Basta, basta, I for the most part say of it, and look with longings towards the still country where at last we and our beloved ones shall be together again. Amen, amen." "It is the saddest feature of old age," he wrote, just a year after the death of his wife, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, "that the old man has to see himself daily growing more lonely; reduced to commune with inarticulate eternities, and the Loved Ones, now unresponsive, who have preceded him thither. Well, well, there is blessedneas in this too, if we take it well. There is grandeur in it, if also an extent of sombre sadness which is now to one; nor is hope quite wanting, nor the clear conviction that those whom we most screen from more pain and misery are now safe and strest. It lifts one to, real kinship withal, real for the first time in this scene of things. Courage, mу friend, let us endure patiently, let us act piously, to the end."
In 1867 the discussions about Parliamentary Reform revived in Mr. Carlyle his old thoughts about democracy, and he published in Macmillan's Magazine "Shooting Niagara, and After ?" Through our columns, he gave to the world in 1870, his trenchant views on the Franco-German War, denouncing "the cheap pity and newspaper lamantation over fallen and afflicted France," and expressing his opinion that it would be well for her and everybody if Bismarck took Alsace and so much of Lorraine as he wanted. Mr. Carlyle's last published writings were some contributions in 1875 to Fraser's Magazine, on John Knox's portrait. Hìs active literary life had thus extended over about half a century.
Mr. Carlyle has shunned many literary honours which were always within the reach. He did not accept the Grand Cross of the Bath, and on the death of Manzoni, in 1876, he was presented with the Prussian Order "for Merit" -- an honour given by the Knights of the Order and confirmed by the Sovereign, and limited to 30 German and as many foreign Knights.
It was knowing Mr. Carlyle imperfectly to know him only by his bocka. One must have talked with him, or, to be more accurate, allowed him to talk, in order to understand how his influence had burnt itself itself so deep into all men who knew him well. In his prime, strangers of all sorts came from the ends of the earth to the little house at Chelsea, just to hear this genial Timon inveigh and harangue against shams, wiggeries, and other customary themes. His talk was in many respects like his writings -- equally picturesque, vehement, lit up with wayward flashes of humour, abounding in song-like refrains, rarely falling into those ingeniously grotesque entanglementa of phraseology which disfigure his later pages, and set off by his homely Scotch accent, rugged, peasant like as the day when first he quitted Nithsdale. There were not many greater pleasures than to sit by his arm chair and hear him tell, as he loved to tell, when years came on, of old Annandale folk and ways, or descant on his favourite themes, turning round sharply every now and then upon the listener while he uttered some crashing dogma, such as "Lies -- lies are the very devil." There have been men of more astonishing powers a powers of talk -- men with more varied Information at their command; men who would quote chapter and verse in a way which was not distinctive of him. But Mr. Carlyle's talk had a charm of its own which no one could resist. He put so much genius, so much of bimself, so much aggressive fervour into a talk with friend or stranger who was to his mind. It was natural to him, as natural as it was to Dr. Johnson, to talk well, Let us quote on this head the testimony of Margaret Fuller, herself no mean talker, and, with all her admiration, little vexed, as we may see, at Mr. Carlyle's inability to let others shine. In spite of its transcendental twang, the description will serve to show how he looked in 1846 to a clever woman:-
His talk still had an amazement and splendour scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse, only harangue. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, stainless in their sharpness as so many bayonats, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others; no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought. But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase, .... He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical Poem, with regular cadences and generally catching up near the beginning some singular epithet which serves as a refrain when his song is full. He puts out his shin till it looks like the beak of bird of prey, and his eyes flash bright instinctive meanings like Jove's bird.Scarcely less interesting than his talk were his letters. They are models of of what letters ought to be. Even those which were written in his old age were little infected with the vices of manner which spoiled his published writings, We have lying before us letters written in as pure and liquid a style as as that of the ssay on Burns or on Goethe. They will no douht be gathered together; and it, as is understood, he has had more than one possible Boswell, who knows that his memory may not have the fate of Johnson's -- his pithy sayings being remembered and quoted when Carlylese is forgotten as much as Johnsonese. He was a copious letter-writer, and answered readily and with great forbearance the frequent miscellaneous appeals made to him. His clever young countrymen, coming to London with unborn projects in their heads, were apt to believe that they had a prescriptive right to lay before him their difficulties and plans, and to claim full and precise counsel. He rarely failed to respond with affectionate solicitude; and many a young author has owed to him wise advice which saved him from making shipwreck, Mr. Carlyle's purse was open, but his charity was was of rarer kind than that which is content with occasionally subscribing a few pounds. He would enter into details and give counsel at once precise, minute, and judicious.
In early life he was a swift writer. Later, however, his habits of composition changed. It is is said that the sight of the manuscript of a well-known author, with numerous interlineations and erasures, was a revelation to him of the pains which were necessary for the best workmanship. Certain it is that he corrected and re-corrected his later works; pieces of manuscript were interpolated or pasted in, and the finished production was sometimes very wonderful in appearance.
This is not the in time to try to measure Mr. Carlyle's services or the worth of his works. They have stood many years before the world; each one has long ago had his say about them; the general judgment of mankind on his shortcomings and faults has been pronounced. It will scarcely be questioned that the quantity of the ore of pure truth to be extracted from them in small. Precise definitions, reservations, and qualifications are not in his way; he is too eager and too much afire to be particular about these things; be will not tarry over the niceties of attorney logic. He does not travel by the common highways; he is on the wing; and there is neither obstacle nor boundary thought of in his flight. Justness of view as a critic is not to be expected of him. His prejudices have always been immense and wayward. You must not look for sober, well-ordered reasoning; for him the time of argument is always past; his business is to make good his victory, to force upon you his conviction. As Jobnson refuted Berkeley by "striking his foot with mighty force against a stone," so with equal agency Mr. Carlyle has disposed of many disagreeable theories by dubbing their anthors M'Crowdy or M'Quirk. His books are a sort of puritanical syllabus, not less condemnatory of the modern spirit than that which issued from the Vatican. His social and political theories are, in the main, but aspirations after impossible ideals -- vain attempts, heroic, but ineffecrual, to bring back the past and yet to retain the richest fruits of progress. His extravagances of style lie on the surface, and his disciples have found it easy to copy and outdo his tricks and foibles of manner and his recurring touches of grotesqueness. They have not always copied also the sound sense which made atonement and which controlled all that he did. Many historians have fancied that they were following in Mr. Carlyle's footsteps bacause they poohpoohed the operation of general causes and principles, paraded some trumpery scrap of information about the clothes or "property" of their heroes, ostentatiously cleared up a wretched date, or struck out a new mode of spelling an unimportant name. We have seen clumsy imitators who cumbered their pages with meaningless and garish details, or interpolated Iaboured rhapsodies, which were feeble reminiscences or hollow echoes of Sauerteig. The commonplacas of Mr. Carlyle bave been the stock-in-trade of a terribly wearisome group of writers, who assumed the nod of Jove, but could not hurl his thunderbolts. Unfortunately they aped other and graver faults, and supposed that they were animated by Mr. Carlyle's spirit when they applauded every exhibition of brute force and insulted the weaker but not less noble elements of human nature. Mr. Cariyle is responsible for much in modern Literature which it is not pleasant to look upon; and some of his own pages, with their exultant os victi over fallen causes, are not edifying. But what are these defects to the good which he has done? To whom has he not been a salutary teacher? Kingsley, Fronde, and Huskin have sat his feet, and a host of others, scarcely a leading mind of our time excepted, have felt his influence Wherever, in truth, men have turned their minds for the last quarter of a century to the deep relations of things his spirit has been present to rebuke frivolity, to awaken courage and hope. No other writer of this generation ever cast so potent a spell on the youth of England. They might outgrow him; they they might travel far from the region of his thoughts; they might learn to see in the teacher of their early days only the iconoclast whose work was done. They could never wholly get outside the circle of his spell, and to take up one of his books and read but a page or two was sure to recall a flood of old memories and influences even as will the sound of distant bells or a snatch of a once familiar song. To many he was always a teacher. He brought ardour and vehemence congenial to their young hearts, and into them he shot fiery arrows which could never be withdrawn.
What Hazlitt said of Coleridge was true of him -- he cast a great stone into the pool of contemporary thought, and the circles have grown wider and wider. He was early enough in the field to deal the last blows to expiring Byronism. It was his fortune to be for most educated Englishmen the discoverer of the literature of Germany. In what state did be find literary criticism here ? What did It not become under his hand? How many heaps of dry bones in history have been quickened and made to rise and walk ? How many skeletone have been clothed with flesh at his touch? And yet in all his varied activity, from first to last, he was something of the inspired peasant. The waves of London life came up to and about him; but they but they never overwhelmed him or had power to alter him one jot. With all his culture and nearly 50 years of residence in the south, he was to the end substantially unchanged; his ways were his forefathers' ways; his deepest convictions were akin to theirs; and it needed but a little stretch of the imagination to suppose him a fellow worker with Knox or the friend and companion of Burns,
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