Indeed it would be quite idle to stipulate that anything here said to the detriment of Macaulay’s criticism is said relatively, if there were not a sort of doubtless honest folk who seem to think that denying a man the riches of Crœsus means that he is penniless and in debt. Macaulay was a critic on his day—a good one for a long time, and perhaps always a great one in potentia. But his criticism was slowly edged out by its rivals or choked by its own parasitic plants. It occupies about a twentieth part (to adopt his own favourite arithmetical method) of the Essay on Bacon, about one-tenth of that on Temple. In the famous piece on “Restoration Drama” it is the moral and social, not the literary or even the dramatic, side of the matter that interests Macaulay: and in dealing with Addison himself, a man who, though not quite literary or nothing, was certainly literary first of all, the purely literary handling is entirely subordinated to other parts of the treatment. This may be a good thing or it may be a bad thing: the tendenz-critics, and the criticism-of-life critics, and the others, are quite welcome to take the first view if they please. But that it is a thing; that Macaulay himself acknowledged it, and that—despite his unsurpassed devotion to literature and his great performance therein—it must affect our estimate of him, according to the schedules and specifications of this book, is not, I think, deniable by any honest inquirer.
Similar dwindling in Carlyle.
A phenomenon by no means wholly dissimilar in kind, but conditioned as to extent and degree by the differing temperaments and circumstances of the two men, may be seen in the criticism of Macaulay’s great contemporary, opposite, and corrective, Carlyle;[[931]] and those who care for such investigations might find it interesting to compare both with the admitted instances of dwindling literary interest—not critical but simply enjoying—in cases like that of Darwin. But leaving this extension as out of our province, and returning to our two great men of letters themselves, we shall find differences enough between them, here as elsewhere, but a remarkable agreement in the gradual ascendancy obtained by anthropology over (in the old and good sense, not the modern perversion) philology. Carlyle had always the more catholic, as Macaulay had the exacter, sense of literary form; but it may be suspected that at no time was the form chiefly eloquent to either: and in Carlyle’s attitude for many years after the somewhat tardy commencement of his actual critical career, something ominous may be observed. It may seem strange and impious to some of those who acknowledge no greater debt for mental stimulation to any one than to Carlyle, and who rank him among the greatest in all literature, to find one who joins them in this homage, and perhaps outgoes most of them therein, questioning his position as a critic. Let us therefore examine the matter somewhat carefully.
Carlyle’s criticism, like his other qualities, interpenetrates nearly all his work, from Sartor to the “Kings of Norway”: it appears in the Life of Schiller,[[932]] in Heroes and Hero-Worship, in Past and Present, in the Life of Sterling, while it fuliginates itself to share in the general fuliginousness of the Latter-day Pamphlets, and is strewn even over the greater biographies and histories of the Cromwell and the Frederick. We shall, however, lose nothing, and gain much, by confining ourselves mainly to the literary constituents of the great collection of Essays in this place. The discussion can be warranted to be well leavened with remembrance of the other work.
Who indeed is more rememberable than Carlyle? Of late years, partly from having read them so much, partly from having so much else to read, I have left parts of these Essays unopened for a long time. Yet, in looking them through for the purpose of this present writing, I have found myself constantly, even in the least familiar and famous parts, able to shut the book and complete clause, sentence, or even to some extent paragraph, like a text, or a collect, or a tag of Horace or Virgil. But in this re-reading it has struck me, even more forcibly than of old, how much Carlyle’s strictly critical inclinations, if not his strictly critical faculties[faculties], waned as he grew older. In the earlier Essays—those written before and during the momentous period of the Craigenputtock sojourn—there is a great deal of purely or almost purely literary criticism of an excellent kind—sober and vigorous, fresh and well disciplined. There may be, especially in regard to Richter and Goethe, a slightly exaggerated backing of the German side. But it is hardly more than slightly exaggerated, and the treatment generally is of the most thorough kind compatible with an avowed tendency towards “philosophical” rather than “formal” criticism. Professor Vaughan was certainly justified in including part of the Goethe in his selected specimens of English criticism[[933]] for its general principles and examples of method. Nor is Carlyle less to be praised for his discharge of the more definitely practical part of the critic’s business. He is thought of generally as “splenetic and rash”: but it would be impossible to find anywhere a more good-humoured, and (in parts at least) a more judicial censure than that of William Taylor’s preposterous German Poetry,[[934]] or a firmer, completer, and at the same time less excessive condemnation than that of the equally preposterous method of Croker’s original Boswell. We may see already that the critic evidently prefers matter to form, and that he is by no means quite catholic even in his fancy for matter. The earlier Essays. But he has a right to be this; and altogether there are few things in English criticism better worth reading, marking, and learning, by the novice, than the literary parts of these earlier volumes of Essays.[[935]] It may be that the channels in which his ink first flowed (especially that rather carefully, not to say primly, banked and paved one of the Edinburgh) imposed some restriction on him; it may be that he found the yet unpublished, or just published, Sartor a sufficient “lasher” to draw off the superfluous flood and foam of his fancy. But the facts are the facts.
The later.
And so, too, it is the fact that, later, he draws away from the attitude of purely literary consideration, if he does not, as he sometimes still later does, take up one actually hostile to this. The interesting “Characteristics” (as early as 1831) is one of the places most to be recommended to people who want to know what Carlyle really was, and not what divers more or less wise or unwise commentators have said of him. The writer has flings at literary art—especially conscious literary art—towards the beginning: afterwards (which is still more significant) he hardly takes any notice of it at all. In the much better known “Boswell,” “Burns,” and “Scott”[[936]] Essays, his neglect of the purely literary side is again the more remarkable, because it is not ostentatious. In the “Diderot,” dealing with a subject who was as much a man of letters first of all (though of very various and applied letters) as perhaps any man in history, he cannot and does not neglect that subject’s literary performance; but the paper is evidence of the very strongest how little of his real interest is bestowed upon it. It is of the man Diderot—and of the man Diderot’s relation to, and illumination of, that condition of the French mind and state of which some good folk have thought that Carlyle knew nothing—that he is thinking, for this that he is caring. Later still, he will select for his favourite subjects people like Mirabeau, who had much better have written no books at all, or Dr Francia, whose connection with literature is chiefly limited to the fact of his having written one immortal sentence. And this sentence, not having myself seen or wished to see the works of Rengger, I have always suspected that Carlyle or “Sauerteig” edited for him.[[937]]