Carlyle (1795-1881), with Burns, Knox, and Scott, is the chief representative in letters of "the good and the not so good" (in his own words applied to Sir Walter) of the Scottish character. Unlike the other three, Carlyle was "thrawn," a word not easily translated, but implying a certain twist, or perversion, towards the whole nature of things. The apostle of silence was the most voluble of mortals; the peasant stoic felt the pain of the pea beneath a heap of mattresses as keenly as the delicate princess of the fairy tale.
Carlyle was first of all a Scottish humorist; that peculiar humour of which Southrons deny the existence underlay the fateful gloom of the philosopher and historian who beheld his country "shooting Niagara," who saw that society was rotten and doomed, and who found no remedy except in the arrival of a Cromwell or a Frederick. He "praised the keen unscrupulous force" of such heroes: though he did not use the term "superman," he believed in the idea. It is quite certain that he had great tenderness and friendliness; his affection for Lockhart, so unlike him superficially (though Lockhart, too, was tender, melancholy, and "thrawn") is really touching. Carlyle had "our Scottish kindness," in Knox's phrase, that is attachment to kin and clan. Even in his dourest moods of personal invective his bark was worse than his bite, but there was a great deal of bark. The conclusion of the whole matter in the long dispute as to the relations of Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle is that, with a deep mutual affection, theirs was a life of cat and dog.
Born in 1795 at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, Carlyle was the son of a stone mason, though his genealogy traces him back behind the Conquest to the Carlyle Lords of Torthorwald. Educated at the Grammar School of Annan, and the University of Edinburgh, Carlyle was for some years a dominie, much at odds with himself and the universe. He found guidance in Goethe and other Germans; wrote in "Fraser's Magazine," and elsewhere, essays often historical; in London met Coleridge and Lamb, who was in one of his wildest moods; wrote a "Life of Schiller" in the style of a man of this world; married in 1826, and for six years was brooding, grumbling, studying, writing, and "making himself," in the bitter solitude of his wife's little lairdship, Craigenputtock. Here he produced, in his own characteristic manner, "Sartor Resartus," a disguised autobiography, a humorous and mournful version of his own struggles to find bottom in a universe apparently bottomless. That most things are shams, and that shams are doomed, was Carlyle's message. The fate of shams was illustrated in the fiery pages of his "French Revolution," written after he went to his life-long home in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where it could not be said that, as in Kilmeny's fairy-land, "the cock never crew". When, despite cocks and other disturbances, Carlyle, with heroic efforts of study, had finished the first volume, John Stuart Mill lent it to a lady, and it was never seen again. Her cook may have been a Betty Barnes. Carlyle returned to his task, and in 1837 the book astonished the world. It had all the colour of romance, and despite the discoveries of recent research, it seems substantially accurate in detail.
"Heroes and Hero-Worship," and the "Past (mediaeval) and Present," preluded to his very laborious "Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell" (1845). With many a groan over the confusion of his materials, and with many a shout of applause to the orator of the speeches, Carlyle set Oliver in the light of day, interpreting the studied ambiguities of such speeches of the hero as he makes to the puzzled Wildrake in "Woodstock". Sir Walter's Cromwell is probably as correct a portrait of the Protector as Carlyle's, and Carlyle's must be compared with the less enthusiastic study by Mr. S. R. Gardiner. Carlyle took conscientious pains with the military part of his history, visiting the battlefields, and becoming epic in the fiery spirit of his description of the defeat of his countrymen at Dunbar. A chart-picture of the battle evaded his research, and his account is not absolutely correct. After another prophetic cry of doom in "Latter Day Pamphlets" (1850) Carlyle plunged for many years into the labour of studying "Frederick the Great". The toil outwore his force, and it may be complained that he did not focus his subject. Yet none of his books is of greater interest, and he is the prophet of the modern greatness of Germany. We see how fortis Etruria crevit; through discipline, patriotism, self-sacrifice, "enduring hardness," and obedient to her greatest men. No other than Carlyle could have told the story with so much alluring animation; his military history, too, is most conscientiously studied. His native gift of observing and divining, and describing (in his own words on a singularly private scene, witnessed by him) "with perhaps some humorous exaggeration," found ample scope in his work on Frederick, as well as in his "French Revolution". No doubt he overdid the trick of reiterating traits in Dickens's manner;—for a truly candid censure of his style an essay by his obliged friend, Leigh Hunt, may be consulted (see remarks on Leigh Hunt).
Occasionally, as in his essays on "Cagliostro" and "The Diamond Necklace," Carlyle's freedom of style, and his attacks on his authorities, are somewhat infuriating; the reader wants to be told a plain tale without these excursions, exclamations, and imaginations. Carlyle regarded imagination as one of the wings of history, and perhaps encouraged the too freely imaginative narrations of his friend Froude.
To him, unhappily, he bequeathed the autobiographical papers of himself and his wife, which Froude handled, to the best of his power, as he understood that Carlyle had desired that they should be treated. There followed outcries from the more ferocious admirers of Carlyle, though Froude had done his best to obey his master! That he could not be absolutely accurate is certain; but disloyal he never was. There is no doubt that Carlyle, irritable, absorbed in his work, and taking his wife's exemplary care of him for granted, was "gey ill to live wi'," while "she had a tongue with a tang". These facts have produced a jungle of deplorable writings; but of Carlyle's genuine goodness and kindness no one who saw him could reasonably doubt.
The style of Carlyle was unique, unimaginable except by himself, the worst of models for others, and exquisitely fitted to embody his own idiosyncrasies—in short, it is, in prose, not wholly unlike that of Browning in many of his poems. To address the world in this voice, when he was almost unknown, demanded a courage and confidence in which Carlyle was not deficient. One is occasionally reminded of the methods, illegitimate but effective, of the author of "Tristram Shandy," and, again, of Rabelais.
James Anthony Froude.
In one way, as a historian, Froude (1818-1894) may be called the pupil, as he was the devoted friend, of Carlyle. That sage worshipped force in men, and Froude, failing a Cromwell or a Frederick, made a hero of Henry VIII., "that blot of blood and grease on the pages of English history," as Dickens called the king who found "the gospel light in Boleyn's eyes". It is not from Carlyle that a young historian can learn the unpopular grace of impartiality. To read Froude you would suppose that the Protestant party in the sixteenth century were innocent of the blood shed by political assassins; whereas the godly slayers of Beaton, Riccio, and the Duc de Guise, like Elizabeth when she bade Paulet murder Mary Stuart, were precisely on a level with the would-be murderers of Elizabeth; and Henry VIII. was burning martyrs of all shades in England, while the Beatons were doing the same thing to heretics in Scotland. Henry was perhaps even more treacherous than he was lustful and cruel, but it is in the original sources, not in Froude's History, that you discover the fact.