“The last infirmity of noble mind.”
Does Mr. Carlyle feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or even notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness of Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a pen which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things, should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men of genius who illustrate his era, is a fact so monstrous, that one is driven to monstrous devices to divulge its motive. In such a case it is impossible to premise to what clouds of self-delusion an imaginative man will not rise.
Writing of Thomas Carlyle, the last words must not be censorious comments on a weakness; we all owe too much to his strength; he is too large a benefactor. Despite over-fondness for Frederick and the like, and what may be termed a pathological drift towards political despotism, how many quickening chapters has he not added to the “gospel of freedom”? Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses, with delicate sympathies. From many a page what cordialities step forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon; what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what bursts of splendor through nebulous mutterings. Much has he helped the enfranchisement of the spirit. Well do I remember the thirst wherewith, more than thirty years ago, I seized the monthly “Frazer,” to drink of the spiritual waters of “Sartor Resartus.” Here was a new spring; with what stimulating, exhilarating, purifying draughts, did it bubble and sparkle! That picture, in the beginning, of the “doing and driving (Thun und Treiben)” of a city as beheld by Professor Teufelsdroeckh from his attic—would one have been surprised to read that on a page of Shakespeare?
A marvelous faculty of speech has Mr. Carlyle; a gift of saying what he has to say with a ring in the words that makes the thought tingle through your ears. His diction surrounds itself with a magnetic aura, which seems to float it, to part it from the paper, it stands out in such transparent chiar-oscuro. Common phrases he refreshes by making them the vehicle for new meanings, and in the ordering of words he has command of a magical logic. The marrowy vigor in his mind it is that lends such expressiveness, such nimbleness, such accent to his sentences, to his style.
Mr. Carlyle’s power comes mainly from his sensibilities. Through them he is poetical; through them there is so much light in his pages. More often from his than from any others, except those of the major poets, breaks the sudden, joyful beam that flames around a thought when it knows itself embraced by a feeling. Of humor and of wit, what an added fund does our language now possess through his pen. The body of criticism, inclosed in the five volumes of Miscellanies, were enough to give their author a lasting name. When one of these papers appeared in the Edinburgh, or other review, it shone, amid the contributions of the Jeffreys and Broughams, like a guinea in a handful of shillings.
The masterpiece of Mr. Carlyle, and the masterpiece of English prose literature, is his “French Revolution,” a rhythmic Epic without verse. To write those three volumes a man needs have in him a big, glowing heart, thus to flood with passionate life all the men and scenes of a momentous volcanic epoch; a lively, strong, intellectual vision he must have, to grasp in their full reality the multitudinous and diverse facts and incidents so swiftly begotten under the pulsation of millions of contentious brains; he needs a literary faculty finely artistic, creatively imaginative, to enrank the figures of such vast tumultuous scenes, to depict the actors in each, to present vividly in clear relief the rapid succession of eventful convulsions. Outside of the choice achievements of verse, is there a literary task of breadth and difficulty that has been done so well? A theme of unusual grandeur and significance is here greatly treated.
The foremost literary gift,—nay, the test whereby to try whether there be any genuine literary gift,—is the power in a writer to impart so much of himself, that his subject shall stand invested, or rather, imbued, with a life which renews it; it becomes warmed with a fire from the writer’s soul. Of this, the most perfect exhibition is in poetry, wherein, by the intensity and fullness of inflammation, of passion, is born a something new, which, through the strong creativeness of the poet, has henceforth a rounded being of its own. With this power Mr. Carlyle is highly endowed. Not only, as already said, does his page quiver with himself; through the warmth and healthiness of his sympathies, and his intellectual mastery, he makes each scene and person in his gorgeous representation of the French Revolution to shine with its own life, the more brilliantly and truly that this life has been lighted up by his. Where in history is there a picture greater than that of the execution of Louis XVI.? With a few strokes how many a vivid portrait does he paint, and each one vivid chiefly from its faithfulness to personality and to history. And then his full-length, more elaborated likenesses, of the king, of the queen, of the Duke of Orleans, of Lafayette, of Camille Desmoulins, of Danton, of Robespierre: it seems now that only on his throbbing page do these personages live and move and have their true being. The giant Mirabeau, ‘twas thought at first he had drawn too gigantic. But intimate documents, historical and biographical, that have come to light since, confirm the insight of Mr. Carlyle, and swell his hero out to the large proportions he has given him.
For a conclusion we will let Mr. Carlyle depict himself. Making allowance for some humorous play in describing a fellow-man so eccentric as his friend, Professor Teufelsdroeckh, this we think he does consciously and designedly in the fourth chapter of “Sartor Resartus,” wherein, under the head of “Characteristics,” he comments on the professor’s Work on Clothes, and its effect on himself. From this chapter we extract some of the most pertinent sentences. It opens thus:—
“It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothes entirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, like the very sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work of genius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amid its effulgence,—a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dullness’ double-vision, and even utter blindness.
“Without committing ourselves to those enthusiastic praises and prophesyings of the “Weissnichtwo’sche Anzeiger,” we admitted that the book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book; that it had even operated changes in our way of thought; nay, that it promised to prove, as it were, the opening of a new mine-shaft, wherein the whole world of Speculation might henceforth dig to unknown depths. More especially it may now be declared that Professor Teufelsdroeckh’s acquirements, patience of research, philosophic, and even poetic vigor, are here made indisputably manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity and tortuosity and manifold inaptitude….