THOMAS CARLYLE.
Born Dec. 4, 1795. Died Feb. 5, 1881.
A Latter-day Fragment, 1851.
(Carlyle on Bloomerism.)
“A mad world this, my friends, a World in its lunes, petty and other; in lunes other than petty now for sometime; in petty lunes, pettilettes or pantalettes, about these six weeks, ever since when this rampant androgynous Bloomerism first came over from Yankee land. A sort of shemale dress you call Bloomerism; a fashion of Sister Jonathan’s.
Trowsers tight at ankles, and for most part frilled; tunic descending with some degree of brevity, perhaps to knees, ascending to throat and open at chemisette front, or buttoned there; collar down-turned over neckerchief; and crowning all, broad brimmed hat; said garments generally feathered, trimmed, ribboned, variegated, according to the fancies and the vanities: these, chiefly, are the outward differences between Bloomer dress and customary feminine Old Clothes. Not much unlike nursery-uniforms, you think this description of costume, but rather considerably like it, I compute. Invisible are the merits of the Bloomer dress, such as it has. A praiseworthy point in Bloomerism the emancipation of the ribs; an exceeding good riddance, the deliverance from corset, trammelling genteel thorax with springs of steel and whalebone, screwing in waist to Death’s hour glass contraction, and squeezing lungs, liver, and midriff into unutterable cram. Commendable, too, the renouncement of sous-jupe bouffante, or ineffable wadding, invented, I suppose, by some Hottentot to improve female contour after the type of Venus, his fatherland’s, and not Cythera’s. Wholesome, moreover, and convenient, the abbreviation of trains, serving in customary female old clothes the purpose of besom, and no other: real improvements, doubtless, these abandonments of ruinous shams, ridiculous unveracities, and idolatries of indescribable mud-Pythons.… Disputes about surplices in pulpit, and also elsewhere, give place to controversies in theatres and lecture-halls concerning petty lunes and frilled trowsers; paraphernalia, however, not less important than canonicals, as I judge for one.… But here are we, my friends in this mad world, amid the hallooings and bawlings, and guffaws, and imbecile simperings, and titterings, blinded by the November smoke fog of coxcombries and vanities, stunted by the perpetual hallelujahs of flunkeys, beset by maniacs and simpletons in the great lunes and the petty lunes; here, I say, do we, with Bloomerism beneath us bubbling uppermost, stand, hopelessly upturning our eyes for the daylight of heaven, upon the brink of a vexed unfathomable gulf of apehood and asshood simmering for ever.”
Anonymous.
The Tichborne Trial.
By Thomas Carr Lisle.
The Tichborne Trial is ended! Yea, my brother and other things are ended of which that is but a type, Looming Portentous; verily, a sort of Fire-balloon of paper, or of papers rather, Standard, Telegraph, and what not.
Men say “The truth is out at last.” The Truth out! my poor brothers-nay, was the Truth ever in. Surely there was no Truth, rather other than that.
And yet doth it not mean something, think you, this Tichborne Trial, its Solicitor-Generals, Tichborne bonds, and legal Inanities? Says it not “Is there Truth in the land, O Israel?” “What is Truth?” said jesting Pilate, or rather where is it? Cry the question into the bottomless Inane of this our world, and what answer? Nothing but an inarticulate response of Tichborne bonds, Solicitor-Generals, and such.
Yea, they mean something, these Solicitor-Generals and Tichborne bonds:—a Partridge-shooting, Salmon-preserving, Dilettante Aristocracy have said so much, have said so with lifting of hands and Reverence—we fear somewhat of the Rotatory Calabash kind. They mean this much, which is perhaps somewhat other than Double-barrelled Dilettantisms would have them mean. They mean this much. This England of ours believes no longer in Truth, believes rather in a kind of Sham Truth, a stucco business, much to be lamented; at least, by all such as hold their soul for a purpose other than to save salt, to keep them from Rottenness, Stinking, and utter Unsavouryness. “They say unto us ‘make brick,’ and no straw is given unto thy servants.” So might cry our men of law, lacking Truth to work upon; but for straw they cry not, thinking to make brick without straw; and they make no brick, rather Falsity, Puffery, and Unnature.
O, great Roger! these matters of thine call with a tolerably audible voice of Proclamation, and a universal “oyez,” and we English Microcosms may know that it was verily meant in earnest that same Phenomenon, and had its reasons for appearing there—Just and Unjust cause—Dikaios and Adikos Logos—trying to settle or get themselves settled, incessantly protesting against each being the other, and with it may be another kind of Logos from the great Universe with silent continual Beckonings trying to revenge itself, revancher itself, make itself good again.
For does not the Universe hold an inarticulate Sympathy with Justice, yearning that meum be mine tuum thine. That meum be mine! There is surely something Respectable in that.
And what is the outcome, ask Practical men, of all this? What is the import of the matter to us who are not Rogers? Verily, my friends, this—that England is in a state of Chronic Atropos, hath made her a covering of Asses-ears, Midas-leavings, Sermons, parchment and what not, hoping to sleep through it in such caloric apparel in this Glass house of hers, knowing that glass is no conductor—to Heaven’s lightning at least.
The Outcome of ninety-one days’ sittings, Red-tape Philosophies, Club-room jaw-clackings, and Infernal Babel of Telegraphs and Morning Stars is little other than—for Rogers Newgate and the Blackness of Darkness, for those who are not Rogers, discovery of Chronic Atropos in a Rampant state, wholly Insuppressible, Irrepressible, and Mad.
After all, is not Insanity just what is the matter with this English Bull just now? Is there Sanity at all among us butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers, red tape dummies, black crape ludicrousnesses, Puseyisms, Benthamee Radicalisms, Church and Statisms, Dilettantisms, Mammonisms, double-barelled Aristocracies, and inane Chimæras generally? Literature is, perhaps, the Sanest thing we have just at present, at least tolerabler, impressibler, beneficenter than mere Chaos, articulate or inarticulate. Writers, at least, have a Meaning, must have a Meaning; state some Fact or Facts, or what they take for Fact or Facts, intelligibly, so that men may say “Thus thinks a Man, whether he think wrong or right.”
And the Tichborne Trial was mad, utterly mad, with no Truth, hardly even Untruth in it, but Confusion and Roaring as of the Pit and Abyss of stupidity.
Did the Insanity thereof dawn upon many, think you? One might have hoped so, have hoped that such had been the Outcome which Practical Men require. One might have hoped that the sense of the World, Judicial, Social, and Otherwise, would have got itself resuscitated from Asphyxia, or proved for ever irresuscitable. But, instead thereof, we have Times Subscription-list actually now present, and Impending Ominous Perjury-trials, fresh Chaotic Incongruities, diabolic Floppings and Caterwaulings hitherto thought moribund, scattering incalculable Contagion.
Thus clearly doth this Roger matter preach its lesson to mankind, teaching and preaching clearly as these Words writ down here the Unveracity of Demiurgurships, of Solicitor-Generals, and such Parchment Kings.
But, my friends, such things will not last, at least not longer than Doomsday in the afternoon. It is very notable, Demiurgurship of Judges, that loud Inane Actuality with justice in its pocket, which rolls along there with trumpeters blaring round it, and all the world escorting it as mute or vocal Flunkey—go thy way. Escort it not thou, my brother. Say unto it rather, “Loud blaring Nonentity, no force of wigs, spectacles, and trumpets can make thee an Entity. Thou art a Nonentity and deceptive Simulacrum.” Storm-clothed Caverns Cheese and Earwigs! French and Phrygians, Zero. Ba! Moo! Hee Haw! Hee Haw.
From The Light Green, Cambridge, 1872.
The Editor of The World offered two prizes for compositions (in the style of Thomas Carlyle) describing Mr. Gladstone’s portrait by Millais, and on August 6, 1879, it published the two following parodies:—
First Prize.
Turn we, therefore, from this jaunting, jostling, pestering Piccadilly into the Academy—whether really Royal this year I know not, or whether it be no more than the grandest Graphic we have had this many months, the most illustrious Illustrated of the year. Pause not to catch glamorous glancing glimpses of the besodden (with rain only, think you?) Season’s Beauties—drawn verily, each of them, by most Special Correspondents—but step sternly on, and stop face to face with this William—the People’s William, as the mob hath not dubiously dubbed him. Is it the Portrait merely or the Man himself that ye have come out for to see? Be you friend or foe to him, is there not in this counterfeit presentment of him—this wild, much-suffering, much-inflicting (not on trees only) man—something which almost attaches you? Is it not the attitude and face of a man who hath said to Cant, ‘Begone!’ to Dilettantism, ‘Here canst thou not be!’ and to Truth, ‘Be thou in place of all—ay, of ‘place’ itself to me!’—a man who hath manfully defied the ‘Time-Prince’ or Devil to his face, by all weapons, in all places, at all times? See you not, in the earnestly, sternly eagle-eyed look of him the ground of the enthusiasm,—The Schwärmerei,—for him? Contrast him not odiously, but in sober, sensible silence, with the dazzling Dizzy, the bright Beaconsfield. Which of them, both great, is really greatest? Which the grandest Thing and thoughtfullest we have done lately? Which will we send to the next Exhibition, Paris or otherwise? Which of them will we show for our Honour, with Peace or without it, amongst foreign nations, and for our Peace with Honour surely amongst ourselves? Which? Consider now, if they asked us, “Choose ye not this time, like ill-starred princess ’twixt axe and crown,’ but twixt the man who sways the axe, and him who rejects (rightly doubtless) the crown; ’twixt the lopper of laurels, and the creator of crowns, Imperial and other, that fade.” Consider now, if they asked us, “Will you give up your William or your Benjamin,—not little truly, and just now your Ruler—O ye lost Tribes of Israel? Never have had any William, or never have had any Benjamin?” Consider now both of them, all of you, as Men of State, of Letters, ay, of Post-cards also if you will! Really it were a grave question. Official persons would doubtless answer in official language; but we, for our part, should not we also be forced to answer, ‘Benjamin or no Benjamin, we cannot do without William’? He is verily ours,—not with us here and there only, in Oriental mystery amongst us; but ours always,—Fortnightly, our own Contemporary (or a large part of it), our best Nineteenth Century Man.
Conservative.
Second Prize.
Here, O belated wayfarer, in thy weary march in search of the Beautiful, after painful journeying through a Realm of æsthetic Unrealities, pause! Thou art verily at last in presence of a Man. No mere clothes-bundle of humanity this, presented before thee, smirking, pomatumed, garnered from the Dustbin of the Ages—marvelling by what blundering Miracle of the Destinies he finds himself there. Wandering in this bewildering waste of ruined canvas, that by wise guidance might have evolved itself into practical Breeches for the Breechless in this howling naked world—this many-tinted appalling array of painted, but, alas, soulless Flesh—of bewigged Pomposity, of empty Dead-Sea faces with no Souls behind them, children of the Inane begotten in Vanity and brought forth in Vexation of Spirit, acres of æsthetic Upholstery, Sugar-loaf Confectionary, perpetuated Blockheadism, respectable Giggery, and other like phenomena,—all jumbled together, gibbeted in veneer and gold;—here, at last, I say, amid this motley throng, come we on a glimpse of the Ideal, a Giant among pigmies, a Man surrounded by Tailor-puppets, a human Soul gazing out from an earnest human face intent upon things other than mere cultivation of the Digestive faculty. Yea, look upon him! An earnest, passionate, restless, lean, but withal noble face. An eager eye, but pathetic in its eagerness, looking out compassionately on this sad oppressed world. Stern compressed lips, an undaunted brow, with a Stormy Force hidden under the calm exterior. Straight he looks into the Shams and Chicanery of our insincere Charlatan age,—the keen lightnings of his eye, and fierce thunderbolts of his tongue, cleaving, piercing, exploding the Windbags and inflated Bladders that in our noodle, jabbering, screech-owl Parliament try to pass themselves as Verities and Realities. O my brothers, look on this, a fragment of the Real flung by some miracle amid the Unreal, of the Invisible made Visible, embodying for us, and for those who come after us, a picture, a semblance, an apparition, a Verisimilitude of Greatness that will survive the cacklings and hissings and venom-squirting propensities of a purblind Age!
TEUFELSDRÖCKH JUNIOR.
On March 5th, 1882, The Weekly Dispatch published the result of a Prize competition for parodies on Carlyle’s style. Four imitations were printed, but the prize was awarded to the following:
On the Parliamentary “Closure.”
Business in these latter days the national palaver has mostly ceased to do; talk in every variety, perorations, objurations clamorously vehement have inundated the poor palaver, well-nigh swamping what of sense and work remained to it. Strange have been the sights of late, honourable members struggling all day, all night, stormful, impetuously rampant, found still by saffron Phœbus motioning, dividing, weary, and reckless of everything, wishful only to make an end. Sacred truly are the rights of minorities, sacred too are other rights, for one the right to work and to progress; but this right of the not honourable member, shameless, unreasonable, treasonable to drone, and adjourn, and divide, senselessly and hopelessly seems not sacred; not to me, nor to the Eternal Reason. For from of old was it not given to the strong to rule, and rule well, at peril of their souls; and is not strength with the many and not the few, shriek and expostulate though they may, passionate, hysterical, futile—now to be overborne by the “evident sense of the majority” arresting the inane jabberings with true Puritan earnestness and vigour, rejoiced in by the Empyreans, enemies of froth and the Pit. The sense of the majority cannot too often be “evident.”
J. W. Hale.
People of the Present.
Omitted from Carlyle’s “Reminiscences.”
BROWN, THE POET.
Went last night in wet, bad weather to Dash’s to meet Brown. A lean, long, clothes-prop of a man, with a bilious complexion-spectral, hideous, discordant, almost infernal. Much common-coloured hair streaming over narrow shoulders. Asked leave to present me with his new volume of poems, the result being that I got to talking in the Annandale accent, and communicated large masses of my views on weak verse to all within hearing. Tuneful Brown shaken as with a passing earthquake. A very questionable impression of myself left in that quarter, I imagine.
ROBINSON, THE PAINTER.
In the evening an Oscarian rout. Dauber Robinson was the only novelty, for I have never noticed him before—a man with huge bush of beard, spectacled, staring, owlish. For the rest, a podgy man with loose mouth (spout mouth), cock nose, and shallowest brow. A sandy, barren character, dissonant speaking, dogmatic, trivial, with a singular exasperation on a question of perspective. Let him go on spoiling good canvas with his pictures—save the mark!—in the name of Beelzebub, the God of Ekron, who seems to be his god: but don’t let him flatter himself that he will ever get an order from me—ach Gott!
Funny Folks, November 1884.
——:o:——
The Ghost of Carlyle at the Inventories.
His observations on the equestrian statue of
the Prince of Wales in the Entrance Hall.
Beyond doubt a horse—breed questionable—a horse nevertheless. A horse, charging like an unbottled whirlwind, kicking up behind and before; dash, plash! Symptoms unmistakable. Too much other charging for the equine-imity of this full-bodied charger from the stables of Gulliver Swift’s Brobdingnag. Wo, intrepedest! carriest thou not a prince astride; he that is of Wales, yet no Welshman, no Taffy-stick; man of Three Feathers simply! He is the great chum-chum of the sociabilities, knowest thou not? not to be sneezed at like everyday clay. This clay that thou upbearest on that square back of thine is of the Pottery-Royal, good steed; hall-marked from Plantagenet to Guelph with despisable and undespisable Saxon-Norman-Dutch-German interweavings; yet a sound clay, and transparent withal, not mere bric-a-brac. All other sons of Adam bow to him; throw him, therefore, at thy peril. See, the Inanities are coming, with them the Lack-lustres, the Sham-aristocrats, the Brass-brains, the Tittle-tattlers, and the Bubble-mongers. What! still kicking! Do not these High Mightinesses affright thee? What sayest thou to the feminine new clothes-screens that come lilting in, puffy, protuberant, patchy? piquancy personified; all that. Burlesques of anatomy notwithstanding. Nunquam non paratus.
Oh, Bucephalus, I am ashamed of thee; all the fineries are here, and thou shouldst be of the inaudibles. Else, better wert thou with thy commemorative counterpart, in distant, hot-as-Hades Bombay. Dost thou not, like the Heine-immortalised palm, have internal yearnings towards the other self out there in the land of the palanquin—that other self-made gift of to the Bombayliffs by Sir Albert Sassoon, C.S.I.? Ridden by an H.R.H., K.G., G.C.S.I., and presented by a C.S.I. Kt., thou shouldst, with thy O B C T, abide by the letter of thy compact. Look around thee; the show is now going on; the asinines are upon us; “Walk up! walk up!” See how they stream through the turn-stiles; pay here, pay there, pay everywhere; halt cabs, halt carriages; crush; press. Whoogh! Hotter work this than shelling peas in the back kitchen with Gretchen. Why, the very mural panels blush for thee in all their Doulton red-hotness. Yes, they have panelled all the inventions on these walls, from Agricola to Bessemer, from Caxton to Walter, from Jost Amman to Arkwright. These panels empanel thee, kicker. Ach Gott! an’ thou dost not stop thy cursed racket, thou shalt seek the Evermore with a walking-stick betwixt thy ribs! A full score peelers (well I remember Robert o’ that ilk) stand sentry, Right over Wrong, or vice versa, in this Hall of no entrance sans the cash, and yet thou art not mollified.
See, the crowds come in by the Subway also—Subwayters they, with a vengeance, and mix and muddle. Mark, too, the seats for the Demi-semi Flirts and their victims. Followers allowed there, Bucephalus, I surmise. See, how the crowd streams down the broad steps that lead to the great South Gallery in the West. A sunny south it is, methinks, this day of autumn. Wo, wo; gently, gently; thou wilt be Hors de combat of a verity one of these days; and this entrancing Hall of Entrance will be disinvented for its entrance upon the chaos of Do-Nothingness, which will surely come with the Inevitable that lies round the corner of Time’s next street, waiting for the ding of doom. Ah, here comes another tribe of the Monetaries, with parboiled visages, and permeations of fashion—starch all over them, head to foot. Boy, bring me a mushroom!
Gaiety, October 17, 1885.
From the “World-Harmonic-Æolian-Attachment.”
A burlesque notice of “The Biglow Papers.”
Speech is silver: silence is golden. No utterance more Orphic than this. While, therefore, as highest author, we reverence him whose works continue heroically unwritten, we have also our hopeful word for those who with pen (from wing of goose loud-cackling, or seraph God-commissioned) record the thing that is revealed.… Under mask of quaintest irony, we detect here the deep, storm-tost (nigh shipwracked) soul, thunder-scarred, semi-articulate but ever climbing hopefully toward the peaceful summits of an Infinite Sorrow.… Yes, thou poor, forlorn Hosea, with Hebrew fire-flaming soul in thee, for thee also this life of ours has not been without its aspects of heavenliest pity and laughingest mirth. Conceivable enough! Through coarse Thersites cloak, we have revelation of the heart, wild glowing, world-clasping, that is in him. Bravely he grapples with the life-problem as it presents itself to him, uncombed, shaggy, careless of the “nicer proprieties,” inexpert of “elegant diction,” yet with voice audible enough to whoso hath ears up there on the gravelly side-hills, or down on the splashy, Indiarubber-like salt-marshes of native Jaalam. To this soul also the Necessity of Creating somewhat has unveiled its awful front. If not Œipuses and Electras and Alcestises, then in God’s name Birdofredum Sawins. These also shall get born into the world, and filch (if so need) a Zingali subsistence therein, these lank, omnivorous Yankees of his. He shall paint the Seen, since the Unseen will not sit to him. Yet in him also are Nibelungen-lays and Iliads, and Ulysses-wanderings, and Divine Comedies—if only once he could come at them! Therein lies much, nay all; for what truly is this which we name All, but that which we do not possess?... Glimpses also are given us of an old father Ezekiel, not without paternal pride, as is the wont of such. A brown, parchment-hided old man of the geoponic or bucolic species, gray-eyed, we fancy, queued perhaps, with much weather-cunning and plentiful September-gale memories, bidding fair in good time to become the Oldest Inhabitant. After such hasty apparition, he vanishes and is seen no more.… Of “Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam,” we have small care to speak here. Spare touch in him of his Melesigenes namesake, save, haply, the—blindness! A tolerably caliginose, nephelegeretous elderly gentleman, with infinite faculty of sermonizing, muscularized by long practice, and excellent digestive apparatus, and, for the rest, well-meaning enough, and with small private illuminations (somewhat tallowy, it is to be feared) of his own. To him, there, “Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam,” our Hosea presents himself as a quite inexplicable Sphinx-riddle. A rich poverty of Latin and Greek,—so far is clear enough, even to eyes peering myopic through horn-lensed editorial spectacles,—but naught farther? O purblind, well-meaning, altogether fuscous Melesigenes-Wilbur, there are things in him incommunicable by stroke of birch! Did it ever enter that old bewildered head of thine that there was the Possibility of the Infinite in him? To thee, quite wingless (and even featherless) biped, has not so much even as a dream of wings ever come? “Talented young parishioner”? Among the Arts whereof thou art Magister, does that of seeing happen to be one? Unhappy Artium Magister! Somehow a Nemean lion, fulvous, torrid-eyed, dry-nursed in broad-howling sand-wildernesses of a sufficiently rare spirit—Libya (it may be supposed) has got whelped among the sheep. Already he stands wild-glaring, with feet clutching the ground as with oak-roots, gathering for a Remus-spring over the walls of thy little fold. In Heaven’s name, go not near him with that fly-bite crook of thine! In good time, thou painful preacher, thou wilt go to the appointed place of departed Artillery-Election Sermons, Right-Hands of Fellowship, and Results of Councils, gathered to thy spiritual fathers with much Latin of the Epitaphial sort; thou, too, shalt have thy reward; but on him the Eumenides have looked, not Xantippes of the pit, snake-tressed, finger-threatening, but radiantly calm as on antique gems; for him paws impatient the winged courser of the gods, champing unwelcome bit; him the starry deeps, the empyrean glooms, and far-flashing splendors await.
——:o:——
In Banter (Edited by G. A. Sala) for November 11, 1867, there is a parody on Carlyle entitled Shows and Shams, dealing with the Lord Mayor’s Show for that year. But the topic is exhausted, and the parody is exhausting.
In the Christmas Number of the World for 1879 there is an imitation of Carlyle, descriptive of a picture called Music in the Drawing Room, this parody is of no interest apart from the illustration.
“Carlyle Redivivus, being an occasional discourse on Sauerteig” by Smellfungus, Edited by P. P. Alexander, M. A., was a pamphlet published in Glasgow by Mr. James Maclehose. It was first published during Mr. Carlyle’s lifetime, and ran through several editions. It not only parodied Carlyle’s style, but criticised his theories.
Here then, by way of conclusion, is a piece of real genuine Carlyleism, printed in The Times as long ago as 1877, and not now so generally remembered as it deserves to be.
Mr. Carlyle on the Crisis.
(To the Editor.)
Sir,—A rumour everywhere prevails that our miraculous Premier, in spite of his Queen’s Proclamation of Neutrality, intends, under cover of “care for British interests,” to send the English Fleet to the Baltic, or do some other feat which shall compel Russia to declare war against England. Latterly the rumour has shifted from the Baltic and become still more sinister, on the eastern side of the scene, where a feat is contemplated that will force not Russia only, but all Europe, to declare war against us. This latter I have come to know as an indisputable fact; in our present affairs and outlooks surely a grave one.
As to “British interests,” there is none visible or conceivable to me, except taking strict charge of our route to India by Suez and Egypt; and, for the rest, resolutely steering altogether clear of any copartnery with the Turk in regard to this or any other “British interest” whatever. It should be felt by England as a real ignominy to be connected with such a Turk at all. Nay, if we still had, as, in fact, all ought to have, a wish to save him from perdition and annihilation in God’s world, the one future for him that has any hope in it is even now that of being conquered by the Russians and gradually schooled and drilled into peaceable attempt at learning to be himself governed. The newspaper outcry against Russia is no more respectable to me than the howling of Bedlam, proceeding, as it does, from the deepest ignorant egotism, and paltry national jealousy.
These things I write not on hearsay, but on accurate knowledge, and to all friends of their country will recommend immediate attention to them while there is yet time lest in a few weeks the maddest and most criminal thing that a British Government could do should be done, and all Europe kindle into flames of war. I am, &c.,
T. Carlyle.
5, Cheyne-row, Chelsea, May 4.
