Halleck's New English Literature Part 59

"Calculation never made a hero."

"Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."

(2) Like Macaulay, Newman excelled in the use of the concrete. In his _Historical Sketches_, he imagines the agent of a London company sent to inspect Attica:--

"He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than at first survey might have been expected, sufficient certainly for sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long since worked out; figs fair; oil first rate; olives in profusion...

He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere freshened up the pale olive till the olive forgot its monotony, and its cheek glowed like the arbutus or the beech of the Umbrian hills."

A general statement about superseding "the operation of the laws of the universe in a mult.i.tude of ways" does not satisfy him. He specifies in those ways when he records his belief that saints have "raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured incurable diseases."

(3) He modestly called himself a rhetorician, but he possessed also the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as to make one clear impression. Such power made him one of the great Victorian masters of argumentative prose.

THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881

[Ill.u.s.tration: THOMAS CARLYLE. _From the painting by James McNeil Whistler, Glasgow Art Galleries_.]

Life.--Thomas Carlyle, who became one of the great tonic forces of the nineteenth century, was also most interested in spiritual growth.

He specially emphasized the gospel of work as the only agency that could develop the atmosphere necessary for such growth, and, though deeply religious, he cared little for any special faith or creed.

The son of a Scotch stone mason, Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. At the age of fourteen, the boy was ready for the University of Edinburgh, and he walked the eighty miles between it and his home. After he was graduated, he felt that he could not enter the ministry, as his parents wished. He therefore taught while he was considering what vocation to follow.

In 1821 he met Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful girl, descended on her father's side from John Knox and on her mother's from William Wallace. With the spirit of Wallace, she climbed in her girlhood up to places that a boy would have considered perilous. When she was forbidden to take up such a masculine study as Latin, she promptly learned to decline a Latin noun. Carlyle had much trouble in winning her; but she finally consented to be his wife, and they were married in 1826. In 1828 they went to live for six lonely years on her farm at Craigenputtock, sixteen miles north of Dumfries, where it was so quiet that Mrs. Carlyle said she could hear the sheep nibbling the gra.s.s a quarter of a mile away. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited them here and formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. It was here that Carlyle fought the intense spiritual battle of his early life, here that he wrote his first great work, _Sartor Resartus_, which his wife p.r.o.nounced "a work of genius, dear."

[Ill.u.s.tration: CRAIGENPUTTOCK.]

It would be difficult to overestimate the beneficent influence which Mrs. Carlyle exerted over her husband in those trying days of poverty and spiritual stress. When her private correspondence was inadvisedly published after his death, she unwittingly became her husband's Boswell. For many years after the appearance of her letters, his personality and treatment of her were more discussed than his writings. Her references to marital unhappiness were for awhile given undue prominence; but with the pa.s.sing of time there came a recognition of the fact that she was almost as brilliant a writer as her husband, that, like him, she was frequently ill, and that in expressing things in a striking way, she sometimes exercised his prerogative of exaggeration. "Carlyle has to take a journey always after writing a book," she declared, "and then gets so weary with knocking about that he has to write another book to recover from it."

She once said that living with him was as bad as keeping a lunatic asylum.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MRS. CARLYLE.]

Unfortunately, his early privations had caused him to have chronic indigestion. He thought that the worst punishment he could suggest for Satan would be to compel him to "try to digest for all eternity with my stomach." This disorder rendered Carlyle peculiarly irascible and explosive. His wife's quick temper sometimes took fire at his querulousness; but her many actions, which spoke much louder than her words, showed how deeply she loved him and how proud she was of his genius. After their removal to London, she would quietly buy the neighbors' crowing roosters, which kept him awake, and she prepared food that would best suit his disordered digestion. She complained of his seeming lack of appreciation. "You don't want to be praised for doing your duty," he said. "I did, though," she wrote.

Carlyle's lack of restraint was most evident in little things. A German who came from Weimar to see him was unfortunately admitted during a period of stress in writing. A minute later the German was seen rapidly descending the stairs and leaving the house. Carlyle immediately hurried to the room where his wife was receiving a visitor, and tragically asked what he had done to cause the Almighty to send a German all the way from Weimar to wrench off the handles of his cupboard doors. Carlyle did not then appear to realize that the frightened German had mistaken the locked cupboard doors for the exit from the room. On the other hand, when the great political economist, John Stuart Mill, was responsible for the loss of the borrowed ma.n.u.script of the first volume of _The French Revolution_, Carlyle said to his wife: "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavor to hide from him how very serious the business is to us." To rewrite this volume cost Carlyle a year's exhausting labor.

In 1834 Carlyle went to London, where he lived for the rest of his life in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. The publication of _The French Revolution_ in 1837 made him famous. Other works of his soon appeared, to add to his fame. His essays, collected and published in 1839 under the t.i.tle, _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays_, contained his sympathetic _Essay on Burns_, which no subsequent writer has surpa.s.sed. _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations_ (1845) permanently raised England's estimation of that warrior statesman.

Carlyle's writings, his lectures on such subjects as _Heroes and Hero Worship_ (1841), and his oracular criticism on government and life made him as conspicuous a figure as Dr. Samuel Johnson had been in the previous century. Carlyle's last great work, _History of Friedrich II_., was fortunately finished in 1865, the year before his great misfortune.

In the latter part of 1865 the students of the University of Edinburgh elected Carlyle Lord Rector of that inst.i.tution because they considered him the man most worthy to receive such high honor. In the spring of 1866, he went to Edinburgh to deliver his inaugural address.

Before he returned, he received a telegram stating that his wife had died of heart failure while she was taking a drive in London. The blow was a crushing one. The epitaph that he placed on her monument shows his final realization of her worth and of his irreparable loss. He said truly that the light of his life had gone out.

During his remaining years, he produced little of value except his _Reminiscences_, a considerable part of which had been written long before. Honors, however, came to him until the last. The Prussian Order of Merit was conferred on him in 1874. The English government offered him the Grand Cross of Bath and a pension, both of which he declined. On his eightieth birthday, more than a hundred of the most distinguished men of the English-speaking race joined in giving him a gold medallion portrait. When he died in 1881, an offer of interment in Westminster Abbey was declined and he was laid beside his parents in the graveyard at Ecclefechan.

Sartor Resartus.--Like Coleridge, Carlyle was a student of German philosophy and literature. His earliest work was _The Life of Friedrich Schiller_ (1823-1825), which won for him the appreciation and friendship of the German poet, Goethe.

Carlyle's first great original work, the one in which he best delivers his message to humanity, is _Sartor Resartus_ (_The Tailor Patched_).

This first appeared serially in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833-1834. He feigned that he was merely editing a treatise on _The Philosophy of Clothes_, the work of a German professor, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh. This professor is really Carlyle himself; but the disguise gave him an excuse for writing in a strange style and for beginning many of his nouns with capitals, after the German fashion.

When _Sartor Resartus_ first appeared, Mrs. Carlyle remarked that it was "completely understood and appreciated only by women and mad people." This work did not for some years receive sufficient attention in England to justify publication in book form. The case was different in America, where the first edition with a preface by Emerson was published in 1836, two years before the appearance of the English edition. In the year of Carlyle's death, a cheap London edition of 30,000 copies was sold in a few weeks.

Carlyle calls _Sartor Resartus_ a "Philosophy of Clothes." He uses the term "Clothes" symbolically to signify the outward expression of the spiritual. He calls Nature "the Living Garment of G.o.d." He teaches us to regard these vestments only as semblances and to look beyond them to the inner spirit, which is the reality. The century's material progress, which was such a cause of pride to Macaulay, was to Carlyle only a semblance, not a sign of real spiritual growth. He says of the utilitarian philosophy, which he hated intensely:--

"It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness; till the whole World-kennel will be rabid."

The majority of readers cared nothing for the symbolism of _Sartor Resartus_; but they responded to its effective presentation of the gospel of work and faced the duties of life with increased energy.

Carlyle seemed to stand before them saying:--

"_Do the Duty which lies nearest thee_, which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer... The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of ..."

The French Revolution.--In 1837 when Carlyle finished the third volume of his historic masterpiece, _The French Revolution_, he handed the ma.n.u.script to his wife for her criticism, saying: "This I could tell the world: 'You have not had for a hundred years any book that comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man.'" His Scotch blood boiled over the injustice to the French peasants. His temperature begins to rise when he refers to the old law authorizing a French hunter, if a n.o.bleman, "to kill not more than two serfs."

Carlyle brings before us a vast stage where the actors in the French Revolution appear: in the background, "five full-grown millions of gaunt figures with their hungry faces"; in the foreground, one young mother of seven children, "looking sixty years of age, although she is not yet twenty-eight," and trying to respond to the call for seven different kinds of taxes; and, also in the foreground, "a perfumed Seigneur," taking part of the children's dinner. The scene changes; the great individual actors in the Revolution enter: the tocsin clangs; the stage is reddened with human blood and wreathed in flames.

We feel that we are actually witnessing that great historic tragedy.

Carlyle had something of Shakespeare's dramatic imagination, which pierced to the heart of men and movements. More detailed and scholarly histories of this time have been written; but no other historian has equaled Carlyle in presenting the French Revolution as a human tragedy that seems to be acted before our very eyes.

He did not attempt to write a complete history of the time. He used the dramatist's legitimate privilege of selection. From a ma.s.s of material that would have bewildered a writer of less ability, he chose to present on the center of the stage the most significant actors and picturesque incidents.

Carlyle's "Real Kings."--Carlyle believed that "universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here." In accordance with this belief, he studied, not the slow growth of the people, but the lives of the world's great geniuses.

In his course of lectures ent.i.tled _Heroes and Hero Worship_ (1841), he considers _The Hero as Prophet, The Hero as Poet, The Hero as Priest_, and _The Hero as King_, and shows how history has been molded by men like Mohammed, Shakespeare, Luther, and Napoleon. It is such men as these whom Carlyle calls "kings," beside whom "emperors,"

"popes," and "potentates" are as nothing. He believed that there was always living some man worthy to be the "real king" over men, and such a kingship was Carlyle's ideal of government.

Oliver Cromwell was one of these "real kings." In the work ent.i.tled _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations_, Carlyle was the first to present the character of the Protector in its full strength and greatness and to demonstrate once for all that he was a hero whose memory all Englishmen should honor.

The _Life of John Sterling_ (1851) is a fair, true, and touching biography of Carlyle's most intimate friend, the man who had introduced him to Jane Welsh. After reading this book, George Eliot said she wished that more men of genius would write biographies.

Carlyle's next attempt at biography grew into the ma.s.sive _History of Friedrich II_. (1858-1865), which includes a survey of European history in that dreary century which preceded the French Revolution.

"Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect demiG.o.ds." He is "to the last a questionable hero." However, "in his way he is a Reality," one feels "that he always means what he speaks; grounds his actions, too, on what he recognizes for the truth; and, in short, has nothing of the Hypocrite or Phantasm." Despite his tyranny and his b.l.o.o.d.y career, he, therefore, is another of Carlyle's "real kings." While this work is a history of modern Europe, Friedrich is always the central figure. He gives to these six volumes a human note, a glowing interest of personal adventure, and a oneness that are remarkable in so vast a work.

General Characteristics.--Carlyle's writings must be cla.s.sed among the great social and democratic influences of the nineteenth century, in spite of the fact that he did not believe in pure democracy. It was his favorite theory that a great man, like Oliver Cromwell, could govern better than the unintelligent mult.i.tude. However much he rebelled against democracy in government, his sympathies were with the toiling ma.s.ses. His work ent.i.tled _Past and Present_ (1843) suggests the organization of labor and introduces such modern expressions as "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work." In _Sartor Resartus_, he specially honors "the toilworn Craftsman, that with earthmade implement laboriously conquers the Earth and makes her Man's."

Carlyle had a large fund of incisive wit and humor, which often appear in picturesque setting, as when he said to a physician: "A man might as well pour his sorrows into the long hairy ear of a jacka.s.s." As the satiric censor of his time, Carlyle found frequent occasion for caustic wit. He lashed the age for its love of the "swine's trough,"

of "Pig-science, Pig-enthusiasm and devotion." Although his intentions were good, his satire was not always just or discriminating, and he was in consequence bitterly criticized. The following Dutch parable is in some respects specially applicable to Carlyle:--

"There was a man once,--a satirist. In the natural course of time his friends slew him and he died. And the people came and stood about his corpse. 'He treated the whole round world as his football,' they said indignantly, 'and he kicked it.' The dead man opened one eye. 'But always toward the goal,' he said."

This goal toward which Carlyle struggled to drive humanity was the goal of moral achievement. Young people on both sides of the Atlantic responded vigorously to his appeals. The scientist John Tyndall said to his students:--

"The reading of the works of two men has placed me here to-day.

These men are the English Carlyle and the American Emerson.

I must ever remember with grat.i.tude that through three long, cold German winters, Carlyle placed me in my tub, even when ice was on its surface, at five o'clock every morning ... determined, whether victor or vanquished, not to shrink from difficulty... They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral force... They called out. 'Act!' I hearkened to the summons."

Huxley aptly defined Carlyle as a "great tonic,--a source of intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus."

Carlyle is not only a "great Awakener" but also a great literary artist. His style is vivid, forceful, and often poetic. He loves to present his ideas with such picturesqueness that the corresponding images develop clearly in the reader's mind. Impressive epithets and phrases abound. His metaphors are frequent and forceful. Mirabeau's face is pictured as "rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled." In describing Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of "the tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." He formed many new compound words after the German fashion, such as "mischief-joy"; and when he pleased, he coined new words, like "dandiacal" and "croakery."

His frequent exclamations and inversions make his style seem choppy, like a wave-tossed sea; but his sentences are so full of vigor that they almost call aloud from the printed page. His style was not an imitation of the German, but a characteristic form of expression, natural to him and to his father.