On the Choice of Books Part 3

"SIR,--

"In your observations in yesterday's _Times_ on the late disgraceful affair of Mr. Mazzini's letters and the Secretary of State, you mention that Mr. Mazzini is entirely unknown to you, entirely indifferent to you; and add, very justly, that if he were the most contemptible of mankind, it would not affect your argument on the subject.[A]

[Footnote A: "Mr. Mazzini's character and habits and society are nothing to the point, unless connected with some certain or probable evidence of evil intentions or treasonable plots. We know nothing, and care nothing about him. He may be the most worthless and the most vicious creature in the world; but this is no reason of itself why his letters should be detained and opened."--leading article, June 17, 1844.]

"It may tend to throw farther light on this matter if I now certify you, which I in some sort feel called upon to do, that Mr. Mazzini is not unknown to various competent persons in this country; and that he is very far indeed from being contemptible--none farther, or very few of living men. I have had the honour to know Mr. Mazzini for a series of years; and, whatever I may think of his practical insight and skill in worldly affairs, I can with great freedom testify to all men that he, if I have ever seen one such, is a man of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity, humanity, and n.o.bleness of mind; one of those rare men, numerable unfortunately but as units in this world, who are worthy to be called martyr-souls; who, in silence, piously in their daily life, understand and practise what is meant by that.

"Of Italian democracies and young Italy's sorrows, of extraneous Austrian Emperors in Milan, or poor old chimerical Popes in Bologna, I know nothing, and desire to know nothing; but this other thing I do know, and can here declare publicly to be a fact, which fact all of us that have occasion to comment on Mr. Mazzini and his affairs may do well to take along with us, as a thing leading towards new clearness, and not towards new additional darkness, regarding him and them.

"Whether the extraneous Austrian Emperor and miserable old chimera of a Pope shall maintain themselves in Italy, or be obliged to decamp from Italy, is not a question in the least vital to Englishmen. But it is a question vital to us that sealed letters in an English post-office be, as we all fancied they were, respected as things sacred; that opening of men's letters, a practice near of kin to picking men's pockets, and to other still viler and far fataler forms of scoundrelism be not resorted to in England, except in cases of the very last extremity. When some new gunpowder plot may be in the wind, some double-dyed high treason, or imminent national wreck not avoidable otherwise, then let us open letters--not till then.

"To all Austrian Kaisers and such like, in their time of trouble, let us answer, as our fathers from of old have answered:--Not by such means is help here for you. Such means, allied to picking of pockets and viler forms of scoundrelism, are not permitted in this country for your behoof. The right hon. Secretary does himself detest such, and even is afraid to employ them. He dare not: it would be dangerous for him! All British men that might chance to come in view of such a transaction, would incline to spurn it, and trample on it, and indignantly ask him what he meant by it?

"I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

"THOMAS CARLYLE.[A]

"Chelsea, June 18."

[Footnote A: From _The Times_, Wednesday, June 19, 1844.]

The autumn of this year was saddened for Carlyle by the loss of the dear friend whose biography he afterwards wrote. On the 18th of September, 1844--after a short career of melancholy promise, only half fulfilled--John Sterling died, in his thirty-ninth year.

The next work that appeared from Carlyle's pen--a special service to history, and to the memory of one of England's greatest men--was "Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations and a Connecting Narrative," two volumes, published in 1845. If there were any doubt remaining after the publication of the "French Revolution"

what position our author might occupy amongst the historians of the age, it was fully removed on the appearance of "Cromwell's Letters."

The work obtained a great and an immediate popularity; and though bulky and expensive, a very large impression was quickly sold.

These speeches and letters of Cromwell, the spelling and punctuation corrected, and a few words added here and there for clearness' sake, and to accommodate them to the language and style in use now, were first made intelligible and effective by Mr. Carlyle. "The authentic utterances of the man Oliver himself," he says, "I have gathered them from far and near; fished them up from the foul Lethean quagmires where they lay buried. I have washed, or endeavoured to wash them clean from foreign stupidities--such a job of buckwashing as I do not long to repeat--and the world shall now see them in their own shape."

The work was at once republished in America, and two editions were called for here within the year.

While engaged on this work, Carlyle went down to Rugby by express invitation, on Friday, 13th May, 1842, and on the following day explored the field of Naseby, in company with Dr. Arnold. The meeting of two such remarkable men--only six weeks before the death of the latter--has in it something solemn and touching, and unusually interesting. Carlyle left the school-house, expressing the hope that it might "long continue to be what was to him one of the rarest sights in the world--a temple of industrious peace."

Arnold, who, with the deep sympathy arising from kindred n.o.bility of soul, had long cherished a high reverence for Carlyle, was very proud of having received such a guest under his roof, and during those few last weeks of life was wont to be in high spirits, talking with his several guests, and describing with much interest, his recent visit to Naseby with Carlyle, "its position on some of the highest table-land in England--the streams falling on the one side into the Atlantic, on the other into the German Ocean--far away, too, from any town--Market Harborough, the nearest, into which the cavaliers were chased late in the long summer evening on the fourteenth of June."

Perhaps the most graphic description of Carlyle's manner and conversation ever published, is contained in the following pa.s.sage from a letter addressed to Emerson by an accomplished American, Margaret Fuller, who visited England in the autumn of 1846, and whose strange, beautiful history and tragical death on her homeward voyage, are known to most readers.

The letter is dated Paris, November 16, 1846.

"Of the people I saw in London, you will wish me to speak first of the Carlyles. Mr. C. came to see me at once, and appointed an evening to be pa.s.sed at their house. That first time, I was delighted with him.

He was in a very sweet humour,--full of wit and pathos, without being overbearing or oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow of his discourse, and the hearty, n.o.ble earnestness of his personal being brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before I wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his great full sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a narrative ballad.

He let me talk, now and then, enough to free my lungs and change my position, so that I did not get tired. That evening, he talked of the present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of the men of the day, fanatics and others, and some sweet, homely stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry.

"Of you he spoke with hearty kindness; and he told, with beautiful feeling, a story of some poor farmer, or artisan in the country, who on Sunday lays aside the cark and care of that dirty English world, and sits reading the Essays, and looking upon the sea.

"I left him that night, intending to go out very often to their house. I a.s.sure you there never was anything so witty as Carlyle's description of ---- ----. It was enough to kill one with laughing.

I, on my side, contributed a story to his fund of anecdote on this subject, and it was fully appreciated. Carlyle is worth a thousand of you for that;--he is not ashamed to laugh when he is amused, but goes on in a cordial, human fashion.

"The second time Mr. C. had a dinner-party, at which was a witty, French, flippant sort of man, author of a History of Philosophy,[A]

and now writing a Life of Goethe, a task for which he must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him. But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt Carlyle a little, of which one was glad, for that night he was in his more acrid mood, and though much more brilliant than on the former evening, grew wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost everything he said.

[Footnote A: George Henry Lewes.]

"For a couple of hours he was talking about poetry, and the whole harangue was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind.

Tennyson wrote in verse because the schoolmasters had taught him that it was great to do so, and had thus, unfortunately, been turned from the true path for a man. Burns had, in like manner, been turned from his vocation. Shakespeare had not had the good sense to see that it would have been better to write straight on in prose;--and such nonsense, which, though amusing enough at first, he ran to death after a while.

"The most amusing part is always when he comes back to some refrain, as in the French Revolution of the _sea-green_. In this instance, it was Petrarch and _Laura_, the last word p.r.o.nounced with his ineffable sarcasm of drawl. Although he said this over fifty times, I could not help laughing when _Laura_ would come. Carlyle running his chin out when he spoke it, and his eyes glancing till they looked like the eyes and beak of a bird of prey.

Poor Laura! Luckily for her that her poet had already got her safely canonized beyond the reach of this Teufelsdrockh vulture.

"The worst of hearing Carlyle is, that you cannot interrupt him. I understand the habit and power of haranguing have increased very much upon him, so that you are a perfect prisoner when he has once got hold of you. To interrupt him is a physical impossibility. If you get a chance to remonstrate for a moment, he raises his voice and bears you down. True, he does you no injustice, and, with his admirable penetration, sees the disclaimer in your mind, so that you are not morally delinquent; but it is not pleasant to be unable to utter it.

The latter part of the evening, however, he paid us for this, by a series of sketches, in his finest style of railing and raillery, of modern French literature, not one of them, perhaps, perfectly just, but all drawn with the finest, boldest strokes, and, from his point of view, masterly. All were depreciating, except that of Beranger. Of him he spoke with perfect justice, because with hearty sympathy.

"I had, afterward, some talk with Mrs. C., whom hitherto I had only _seen_, for who can speak while her husband is there? I like her very much;--she is full of grace, sweetness, and talent. Her eyes are sad and charming.

"After this, they went to stay at Lord Ashburton's, and I only saw them once more, when they came to pa.s.s an evening with us. Unluckily, Mazzini was with us, whose society, when he was there alone, I enjoyed more than any. He is a beauteous and pure music: also, he is a dear friend of Mrs. C., but his being there gave the conversation a turn to 'progress' and ideal subjects, and C. was fluent in invectives on all our 'rose-water imbecilities.' We all felt distant from him, and Mazzini, after some vain efforts to remonstrate, became very sad. Mrs.

C. said to me,--

"'These are but opinions to Carlyle, but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life and death.'

"All Carlyle's talk, that evening, was a defence of mere force,--success the test of right;--if people would not behave well, put collars round their necks;--find a hero, and let them be his slaves, &c. It was very t.i.tanic, and anti-celestial. I wish the last evening had been more melodious. However, I bid Carlyle farewell with feelings of the warmest friendship and admiration. We cannot feel otherwise to a great and n.o.ble nature, whether it harmonise with our own or not. I never appreciated the work he has done for his age till I saw England. I could not. You must stand in the shadow of that mountain of shams, to know how hard it is to cast light across it.

"Honour to Carlyle! _Hoch_! Although, in the wine with which we drink this health, I, for one, must mingle the despised 'rose-water.'

"And now, having to your eye shown the defects of my own mind, in the sketch of another, I will pa.s.s on more lowly,--more willing to be imperfect, since Fate permits such n.o.ble creatures, after all, to be only this or that. It is much if one is not only a crow or magpie;--Carlyle is only a lion. Some time we may, all in full, be intelligent and humanely fair."

"_December_, 1846.--Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendour scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse;--only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men,--happily not one invariable or inevitable,--that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe, and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.

"Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, 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. On the contrary, 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. Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness,--no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror;--it is his nature, and the untameable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons.

You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere; and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you, if you senselessly go too near.

"He seems, to me, quite isolated,--lonely as the desert,--yet never was a man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds them, but only in the past. 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, or with which, as with a knitting needle, he catches up the st.i.tches, if he has chanced, now and then, to let fall a row.

"For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigour; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as Fata Morganas, ugly masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. His talk, like his books, is full of pictures; his critical strokes masterly. Allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject. I cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it;--his works are true, to blame and praise him,--the Siegfried of England,--great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil, than legislate for good."[A]

[Footnote A: "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli." (Boston, 1852.) Vol.

iii., pp. 96-104.]

In 1848 Mr. Carlyle contributed a series of articles to the _Examiner_ and _Spectator_, princ.i.p.ally on Irish affairs, which, as he has never yet seen fit to reprint them in his Miscellanies, are apparently quite unknown to the general public. With the exception of the last, they may be considered as a sort of alarum note, sounded to herald the approach of the Latter-Day Pamphlets, which appeared shortly afterwards.

The following is a list of these newspaper articles:--

In _The Examiner_, 1848.

March 4. "Louis Philippe."

April 29. "Repeal of the Union."