English Literature for Boys and Girls

by H. E. Marshall

At the end of six years or so Carlyle decided that Craigenputtock was of no use to him. He wanted to get the ear of the world, to make the world listen to him. It would not listen to him when he spoke from a far-off wilderness. So he made the great plunge, and saying good-by to the quiet of barren rock and moorland he came to live in London. He took a house in Cheyne Row in Chelsea, and this for the rest of his life was his home. But at first London was hardly less lonely than Craigenputtock. It seemed impossible to make people want either Carlyle or his books. "He had created no 'public' of his own," says a friend who wrote his life,* "the public which existed could not understand his writings and would not buy them, nor could he be induced so much as to attempt to please it; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more neglected than he had been in Scotland."

*Froude.

Still in spite of neglect Carlyle worked on, now writing his great French Revolution. He labored for months at this book, and at length having finished the first volume of it he lent it to a friend to read. This friend left it lying about, and a servant thinking it waste paper destroyed it. In great distress he came to tell Carlyle what had happened. It was a terrible blow, for Carlyle had earned nothing for months, and money was growing scarce. But he bravely hid his consternation and comforted his friend. "We must try to hide from him how very serious this business is to us," were the first words he said to his wife when they were alone together. Long afterwards when asked how he felt when he heard the news, "Well, I just felt like a man swimming without water," he replied.*

*Life of Tennyson.

So once more he set to work rewriting all that had been lost. In 1837 the book was published, and from that time Carlyle took his place in the world as a man of genius. But money was still scarce, so as a means of making some, he gave several courses of lectures. But he hated it. "O heaven!" he cries, "I cannot speak. I can only gasp and write and stutter, a spectacle to gods and fashionables,—being forced to it by want of money." One course of these lectures—the last—was on Heroes and Her Worship. This may be one of the first of Carlyle's book that you will care to read, and you may now like to hear what he has to say of Samuel Johnson in The Hero as a Man of Letters.

"As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of our great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last; in a kindlier element what might he not have been,—Poet, Priest, Sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain of his 'element," or his 'time' or the like; it is thriftless work doing so. His time is bad; well then, he is there to make it better!—

"Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any of the favourablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could have been other than a painful one. The world might have had more profitable work out of him, or less; but his effort against the world's work could never have been a light one. Nature, in return for his nobleness, had said to him, 'Live in an element of diseased sorrow.' Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness were intimately and even inseparably connected with each other. . . .

"The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of 'fourpence halfpenny a day.' Yet a giant, invincible soul; a true man's. One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford; the rough, seamy-faced, raw-boned College Servitor stalking about, in winter season, with his shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door, and the raw-boned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thought,—pitches them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger, or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self- help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal.

"It is a type of the man's life, this pitching away of the shoes, an original man;—not a second hand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;—On the reality and substance which nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has give another than us!-

"And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small souls are otherwise. . . .