JOHN STERLING ON CARLYLE
[From London and Westminster Review October, 1839]
All countries at all times require, and England perhaps at the present not less than others, men having a faith at once distinct and large, the expression of what is best in their times, and having also the courage to proclaim it, and take their stand upon it….
But in our day such visionaries are less and less possible. The spread of shallow but clear knowledge, like the cold snow-water issuing from the glaciers, daily chills and disenchants the hearts of millions once credulous. Daily, therefore, does it become more probable that millions will follow in the track of those who are called their betters. Thus will they find in the world nothing but an epicurean stye, to be managed, with less dirt and better food, by patent steam-machinery; but still a place for swine, though the swine may be washed, and their victuals more equally divided.
Is it not then strange that in such a world, in such a country, and among those light-hearted Edinburgh Reviewers, a man should rise and proclaim a creed; not a new and more ingenious form of words, but a truth to be embraced with the whole heart, and in which the heart shall find as he has found, strength for all combats, and consolation, though stern not festal, under all sorrows? Amid the masses of English printing sent forth every day, part designed for the most trivial entertainment, part black with the narrowest and most lifeless sectarian dogmatism, part, and perhaps the best, exhibiting only facts and theories in physical science, and part filled with the vulgarest economical projects and details, which would turn all life into a process of cookery, culinary, political, or sentimental—how few writings are there that contain like these a distinct doctrine as to the position and calling of man, capable of affording nourishment to the heart, and support to the will, and in harmony at the same time with the social state of the world, and with the most enlarged and brightened insight which human wisdom has yet attained to?
We have been so little prepared to look for such an appearance that it is difficult for us to realize the conception of a genuine coherent view of life thus presented to us in a book of our day, which shall be neither a slight compendium of a few moral truisms, flavoured with a few immoral refinements and paradoxes, such as constitute the floating ethics and religion of the time; nor a fierce and gloomy distortion of some eternal idea torn from its pure sphere of celestial light to be raved about by the ignorant whom it has half-enlightened, and half made frantic. But here, in our judgment—that is, in the judgment of one man who speaks considerately what he fixedly believes—we have the thought of a wide, and above all, of a deep soul, which has expressed in fitting words, the fruits of patient reflection, of piercing observation, of knowledge many-sided and conscientious, of devoutest awe and faithfullest love….
The clearness of the eye to see whatever is permanent and substantial, and the fervour and strength of heart to love it as the sole good of life, are, in our view, Mr. Carlyle's pre-eminent characteristics, as those of every man entitled to the fame of the most generous order of greatness. Not to paint the good which he sees and loves, or see it painted, and enjoy the sight; not to understand it, and exult in the knowledge of it; but to take his position upon it, and for it alone to breathe, to move, to fight, to mourn, and die—this is the destination which he has chosen for himself. His avowal of it and exhortation to do the like is the object of all his writings. And, reasonably considered, it is no small service to which he is thus bound. For the real, the germinal truth of nature, is not a dead series of physical phenomena into the like of which all phenomena are cunningly to be explained away. This pulseless, rigid iron frame-work, on which the soft soil of human life is placed, and above which its aërial flowers and foliage rise, does not pass with him for the essential and innermost principle of all. It is rather that which, being itself poorest, the poorest of faculties can apprehend. As physical mechanism, it is that which is most palpable, and undeniable by any, because it is that which lies nearest the nothingness whence it has been hardly rescued, and is therefore, most akin to minds in whose meanness of structure or culture, even human existence might seem scarce better than nothingness. He knows, few in our nation so well, that of a world of new machinery, the highest king and priest would be the neatest clockwork figure. And in such a world, a being feeling ever towards or somewhat beyond what he can weigh and measure, and looking up to find above himself that which is too high for him to understand, would be an anomaly as lawless and incredible as the wildest fabled monster, the Minotaur or the Chimera, the Titan—the Sphynx itself—nay a more delirious riddle than any that in dreams it proposes to us.
On the other hand, neither is for him the solid, abiding, inexhaustible, that merely which is received as such by the popular acquiescence. It must needs be a truth which the spirit, cleared and strengthened by manifold knowledge and experience, and above all by steadfast endeavour, can rest in and say: This I mean; not because it is told me, were my informants all the schools of Rabbins or a hierarchy of angels; but because I have looked into it, tried it, found it healthful and sufficient, and thus know that it will stand the stress of life. We may be right or wrong in our estimate of Mr. Carlyle, but we cannot be mistaken in supposing that on this kind of anvil have all truly great men been fashioned, and of metal thus honest and enduring.
Further it must be said that, true as is his devotion to the truth, so flaming and cordial is his hatred of the false, in whatever shapes and names delusions may show themselves. Affectations, quackeries, tricks, frauds, swindlings, commercial or literary, baseless speculations, loud ear-catching rhetoric, melodramatic sentiment, moral drawlings and hyperboles, religious cant, clever political shifts, and conscious or half-conscious fallacies, all in his view, come under the same hangman's rubric,—proceed from the same offal heart. However plausible, popular, and successful, however dignified by golden and purple names, they are lies against ourselves, against whatever in us is not altogether reprobate and infernal. His great argument, theme of his song, spirit of his language, lies in this, that there is a work for man worth doing, which is to be done with the whole of his heart, not the half or any other fraction. Therefore, if any reserve be made, any corner kept for something unconnected with this true work and sincere purpose, the whole is thereby vitiated and accurst. So far as his arm reaches he is undoing whatever in nature is holy: ruining whatever is the real creation of the great worker of all. This truth of purpose is to the soul what life is to the body of man; that which unites and organises the mass, keeping all the parts in due proportion and concord, and restraining them from sudden corruption into worthless dust….
Anyone who should take up the writings themselves with no other preconception than that which we have attempted to give him, would doubtless be startled at the strangeness of the style which prevails more or less throughout them. They are not careless, headstrong, passionate, confused; but they bear a constant look of oddity which seems at first mere wilful wantonness, and which we only afterwards find to be the discriminating stamp of original and strong feeling. This— this feeling, rooted in profound susceptibility and matured into a central vivifying power—is, we should say, the author's most extraordinary distinction. For it is not the ostentatious, impetuous sentiment, which calls, a sufficient audience being by, on heaven and earth for sympathy, and would wish for that of Tartarus too, as an additional acknowledgment of its sublime sincerity. Here, on the contrary, the feeling is not that which the man is proud of, and would fain exhibit. He shrinks from the profession, nay from the sense of it; even painfully labours to trifle, and be at ease, that he may hide from others, and may for himself forget, the thorny fagot load of his own emotions. Yet make them known he must; for they are not those of some private personal grief or passion, from which he may escape into literature or science, and leave his pains and longings behind him; but his sensibilities are burning with a slow, immense fire, kindled by the very theme on which he writes, and compelling him to write. The greatness and weakness, the infinite hopes and unquenchable reality of human life; the aching pressure of the body and its wants on the myriads of millions in whom celestial force sleeps and dreams of hell; the sight of follies, frauds, cruelties, and lascivious luxury in the midst of a race then endowed and thus suffering; and the unconquerable will and thought with which the few work out the highest calling of all men; these it is, and not self-indulging distresses and theatrical aspirations of his own, which boil and storm within. Therefore does he speak with the solid strength and energy, which gives so serious and rugged an aspect to his sentences; while, perpetually checking himself, from a wise man's shame at excessive emotion, and from the knowledge that others will but half sympathise with him, he adds to his most weighty utterances a turn of irony which relieves the excessive strain…. Add to this, that Mr. Carlyle's resolution to convey his meaning at all hazards, makes him seize the most effectual and sudden words in spite of usage and fashionable taste; and that, therefore, when he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of some strange—we must call it—Carlylism; English, Scotch, German, Greek, Latin, French, Technical, Slang, American, or Lunar, or altogether superlunar, transcendental, and drawn from the eternal nowhere—he uses it with a courage which might blast an academy of lexicographers into a Hades, void even of vocables….
Here must end our remarks on the admirable writings of a great man. Could it be hoped, that by what has been said, any readers, and especially any thinkers, will be led to give them the attention they require, but also deserve, in this there would be ample repayment, even were there not at all events a higher reward, for the labour, which is not a slight one, of forming and assorting distinct opinions on a matter so singular and so complex. For few bonds that unite human beings are purer or happier than a common understanding and reverence of what is truly wise and beautiful. This also is religion. Standing at the threshold of these works, we may imitate the saying of the old philosopher to the friends who visited him on their return from the temples—Let us enter, for here too are gods.