A brain ever aglow with self-kindled fire—a cerebral battery bristling with magnetic life—such is Thomas Carlyle. Exceptional fervor of temperament, rare intellectual vivacity, manful earnestness—these are the primary qualifications of the man. He has an uncommon soul-power. Hence his attractiveness, hence his influence. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, throbs with his own being. Themselves all authors put, of course, more or less, into what they write: few, very few, can make their sentences quiver with themselves. This Mr. Carlyle does by the intenseness of a warm individuality, by the nimble vigor of his mental life, and, be it added, by the rapture of his spirituality. The self, in his case, is a large, deep self, and it sends an audible pulse through his pen into his page.
To all sane men is allotted a complete endowment of mental faculties, of capacities of intellect and feeling; the degree to which these are energized, are injected with nervous flame, makes the difference between a genius and a blockhead. There being high vital pressure at a full, rich, interior source, and thence, strong mental currents, through what channels the currents shall flow depends on individual aptitudes, these aptitudes shaping, in the one case, a Dante, in another, a Newton, in another, a Mirabeau. And Nature, with all her generosity, being jealous of her rights, allows no interchange of gifts. Even the many-sided Goethe could not, by whatever force of will and practice, have written a bar in a symphony of Beethoven. In his dominant aptitudes, Mr. Carlyle is not more one-sided than many other intellectual potentates; but, like some others, his activity and ambition have at times led him into paths where great deficiencies disclose themselves by the side of great superiorities. His mind is biographical, not historical; stronger in details than in generalization; more intuitive than scientific; critical, not constructive; literary, not philosophical. Mr. Carlyle is great at a picture, very great; he can fail in a survey or an induction. Wealth of thought, strokes of tenderness, clean insight into life, satire, irony, humor, make his least successful volumes to teem with passages noteworthy, beautiful, wise, as do his “Cromwell” and his “Frederick.” Such giants carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr. Carlyle, in writing their lives with duteous particularity, has embraced the full story of the epoch in which each was the leader. To him they are more than leaders. Herein he and Mr. Buckle stand at opposite poles; Mr. Buckle underrating the protagonists of history, them and their share of agency; Mr. Carlyle overrating them,—a prejudicial one-sidedness in both cases. Leader and led are the complements the one of the other.
History is a growth, and a slow growth. Evils in one age painfully sow the seed that is to come up good in another. The historian, and still more the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient, calm, judicial, hopeful. Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful, nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough. One healthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betaking him to the past as a refuge from the present; would not tauntingly throw into the face of contemporaries an Abbot Sampson of the twelfth century as a model. A judicial expounder would not cite one single example as a characteristic of that age in contrast with this. A patient, impartial elucidator, would not deride “ballot-boxes, reform bills, winnowing machines:” he would make the best of these and other tools within reach; or, if his part be to write and not to act, would animate, not dishearten, those who are earnestly doing, and who, by boldly striking at abuses, by steadily striving for more justice, by aiming to lift up the down-trodden, prepare, through such means as are at hand, a better ground for the next generation. If to such workers, instead of God-speed, a writer of force and influence gives jeers and gibes, and ever-repeated shrieks about “semblance and quackery, and cant and speciosity, and dilettantism,” and deems himself profound and original, as well as hopeful, when he exclaims: “Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning of human worth and truth, we shall never by all the machinery in Birmingham discover the true and worthy:” in that case, does he not expose him to the taunt of being himself very like a mouthing quack, and his words, which should be cordial, brotherly, do they not partake of the hollow quality of what Mr. Carlyle holds in such abhorrence, namely, of cant? The sick lion crouches growling in his lair; he cannot eat, and he will not let others eat.
Many grateful and admiring readers Mr. Carlyle wearies with his ever-recurrent fallacy that might is right. In Heaven’s name, what are all the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans,—worldly bishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallow sway-wielding dukes,—what are all these, and much else, but so many exemplications of might that is not right? When might shall cease to bully, to trample on right, we shall be nearing Utopia. Utopia may be at infinite distance, not attainable by finite men; but as surely as our hearts beat, we are gradually getting further from its opposite, the coarse rule of force and brutality, such rule as in the twelfth century was rife all around “Abbot Sampson.”
Like unto this moral fallacy is an æsthetic fallacy which, through bright pages of criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment. “I confess,” says Mr. Carlyle, “I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men.” Could Newton have written the “Fairy Queen?” Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation? Could Columbus have given birth to “Don Quixote?” One of Mr. Carlyle’s military heroes tried hard to be a poet. Over Frederick’s verses, how his friend Voltaire must have grinned. “I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward.” Thus Mr. Carlyle writes in “Heroes and Hero-Worship.” If Mirabeau, why not Savonarola, or Marcus Aurelius. In that case a “Twelfth Night,” or an “Othello,” might have come from Luther. Nature does not work so loosely. Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she is profuse in the use of her riches. She delights in variety, thence her ineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency. Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of her beauty. Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications are endless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonest men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. “Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages,” says Mr. Carlyle. We hope they did, or could have done, in the prosaic field, much better than that. We Americans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages may be done.
On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages, pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, and executed with the scholar’s care and the critic’s culture. His early papers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, made something like an epoch in English criticism. Seizing the value and significance of genuine poetry, he exclaims in “Past and Present,”—“Genius, Poet! do we know what these words mean? An inspired soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature’s own great fire-heart, to see the truth, and speak it and do it.” On the same page he thus taunts his countrymen: “We English find a poet, as brave a man as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere under the sun; and do we kindle bonfires, thank the gods? Not at all. We, taking due counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of Dumfries, and pique ourselves on our ‘patronage of genius.’” “George the Third is Defender of something we call ‘the Faith’ in those years. George the Third is head charioteer of the destinies of England, to guide them through the gulf of French Revolutions, American Independences; and Robert Burns is gauger of ale in Dumfries.” Poor George the Third! One needs not be a craniologist to know that the eyes which looked out from beneath that retreating pyramidal forehead could see but part even of the commonest men and things before them. How could they see a Robert Burns? To be sure, had Dundas, or whoever got Burns the place of gauger, given him one of the many sinecures of two or three hundred pounds a year that were wasted on idle scions of titled families, an aureole of glory would now shine through the darkness that environs the memory of George III. So much for George Guelf. Now for Thomas Carlyle.
If, for not recognizing Burns, poor George is to be blamed, what terms of stricture will be too harsh for rich Thomas, that by him were not recognized poets greater than Burns, at a time when for England’s good, full, sympathetic recognition of them was just what was literarily most wanted? Here was a man, for the fine function of poetic criticism how rarely gifted is visible in those thorough papers on Burns and Goethe, written so early as 1828, wherein, besides a masterly setting forth of their great subjects, are notable passages on other poets. On Byron is passed the following sentence, which will, we think, be ever confirmed by sound criticism. “Generally speaking, we should say that Byron’s poetry is not true. He refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real men; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do not these characters, does not the character of their author, which more or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for the occasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but something intended to look much grander than nature? Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so much scowling and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so powerful pieces.”
In the same paper, that on Burns, Mr. Carlyle thus opened the ears of that generation,—partially opened, for the general æsthetic ear is not fully opened yet,—to a hollowness which was musical to the many: “Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much for Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for certain generalizations which philosophy termed men.” And in the paper on Goethe, he calls Gray’s poetry, “a laborious mosaic, through the hard, stiff lineaments of which, little life or true grace could be expected to look.” Thus choicely endowed was Mr. Carlyle to be, what is the critic’s noblest office, an interpreter between new poets and the public. Such an interpreter England grievously needed, to help and teach her educated and scholarly classes to prize the treasures just lavished upon them by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Shelley, and Keats. The interpreter was there, but he spoke not. Better than any man in England Mr. Carlyle could, if he would, have taught the generation that was growing up with him, whose ear he had already gained, what truth and fresh beauty and deep humanity there was in the strains of this composite chorus of superlative singers. Of such teaching, that generation stood in especial need, to disabuse its ear of the hollowness which had been mistaken for harmony; to refresh, with clear streams from “the divine fountain,” hearts that were fevered by the stimulus of Byronic “strong waters;” to wave before half-awakened eyes the torch which lights the way to that higher plane where breathe great poets, whose incomparable function it is, to impart to their fellow-men some of the enlargement and the purification of consciousness in which themselves exult through the influx of fresh ideas and the upspringing of prolific sentiment. The gifted interpreter was dumb. Nay, he made diversions into Scotland and Germany, to bring Burns and Scott more distinctly before Englishmen, and to make Schiller and Goethe and Richter better known to them. And it pleased him to write about “Corn-law rhymes.” That he did these tasks so well, proves how well he could have done, by the side of them, the then more urgent task. In 1828, Mr. Carlyle wrote for one of the quarterly reviews an exposition of “Goethe’s Helena,” which is a kind of episode in the second part of “Faust,” and was first published as a fragment. This takes up more than sixty pages in the first volume of the “Miscellanies,” about the half being translations from “Helena,” which by no means stands in the front rank of Goethe’s poetic creations, which is indeed rather a high artistic composition than a creation. At that time there lay, almost uncalled for, on the publisher’s shelf, where it had lain for five years, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, flushed with a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than any in English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out of Shakespeare,—a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender, deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards of feeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, are gathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue with excess of light,—or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanza rising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bed of Nature’s most precious perfumes, each shedding a new and a richer fragrance; I mean the “Adonais” of Shelley. For this glittering masterpiece,—a congenial commentary on which would have illuminated the literary atmosphere of England,—Mr. Carlyle had no word; no word for Shelley, no word for Coleridge, no word for Wordsworth. For Keats he had a word in the paper on Burns, and here it is: “Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in a weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility and a certain vague, random timefulness of nature, is no separate faculty.” A parenthesis, short and contemptuous, is all he gives to one of whom it has been truly said, that of no poet who has lived, not of Shakespeare, is the poetry written before the twenty-fifth year so good as his; and of whom it may as truly be said, that his best poems need no apology in the youthfulness of their author; but that for originality, power, variety, feeling, thoughtfulness, melody, they take rank in the first class of the poetry of the world. Is not Thomas Carlyle justly chargeable with having committed a high literary misdemeanor? Nay, considering his gift of poetic insight, and with it his persistent ignoring of the great English poets of his age, considering the warm solicitation on the one side, and the duty on the other, his offense may be termed a literary crime. He knew better.
Mr. Carlyle somewhere contrasts his age with that of Elizabeth, after this fashion; “For Raleighs and Shakespeares we have Beau Brummell and Sheridan Knowles.” Only on the surmise that Mr. Carlyle owed poor Knowles some desperate grudge, can such an outburst be accounted for. Otherwise it is sheer fatuity, or an impotent explosion of literary spite. For the breadth and brilliancy of the poetic day shed upon it, no period in the history of any nation, not that of Pericles or of Elizabeth, is more resplendent than that which had not yet faded for England when Mr. Carlyle began his career; nor in the field of public action can the most prolific era of Greece or of England hold up, for the admiration of the world and the pride of fellow-countrymen, two agents more deservedly crowned with honor and gratitude than Nelson and Wellington. Here are two leaders, who, besides exhibiting rare personal prowess and quick-eyed military genius on fields of vast breadth, and in performances of unwonted magnitude and momentousness, were, moreover, by their great, brave deeds, most palpably saving England, saving Europe, from the grasp of an inexorable despot. Surely these were heroes of a stature to have strained to its utmost the reverence and the love of a genuine hero-worshipper. On the ten thousand luminous pages of Mr. Carlyle they find no place. Not only are their doings not celebrated, that they lived is scarce acknowledged.
Even when its objects are the loftiest and the most honored, jealousy is not a noble form of