Sartor Resartus is peculiarly important because of its chronological position. We have seen in the Introduction that the failure of the revolutionary ideal gives to the new period its most prominent characteristic. ‘The gospel according to Jean Jacques’ was accepted no longer. Sartor may be called a grim sort of gospel according to Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle himself had written before this; Macaulay had begun his brilliant career; among the poets, Tennyson, Browning and Elizabeth Barrett had published their earlier works; but Sartor is the first great book which faces the difficulties, and, in a way, embodies the aspirations of the new period. Its grimness no one will dispute. It is also a gospel, because the Everlasting No is routed, and under all the enigmas there is the promise of success and, if not Happiness, Blessedness, in work. It deals with quite a surprising range of modern problems. All the principal social, political and religious questions of the century are treated in greater or less detail. Carlyle’s attitude towards economic and other science, his views on religion, the outline of his opinions as to the position and proper treatment of the poor, his conviction of the need of a better and stronger government, may all be seen in Sartor. He expanded greatly and illustrated in his later writings, but he did not add much. Sartor is his most original and probably his greatest work. It is peculiarly interesting to notice that in it the central point of his creed is the need of reconstruction. Religion must be reconstructed: the ‘Hebrew old-clothes’ have had their day and will serve for human garments no longer. But this is equally true of the tailoring of the French Revolution: society itself has to be reconstructed. And the reconstruction, in Carlyle’s view, is a complex task. The salvation of mankind must be sought by the positive, not by the negative method. The way will be long and difficult, not short and simple as the Revolutionists supposed. Neither will any amount of political machinery suffice. Not by majorities, however numerous, nor by ballot-boxes, however ingenious, can sound government be carried on, but only by something which goes to the root of character. Carlyle, writing in the midst of a great agitation for improvement in political machinery, merely looks on in contemptuous indifference, convinced that at least the true solution lies not there. He was too contemptuous, for the true solution lies not in any one thing but in the union of many, and of these political machinery is one.
Carlyle was not the only writer of this period who gave thought to such problems, nor the only one who appreciated their complexity, but it was he who first adequately expressed them; and it is Sartor Resartus, written in solitude on the Dumfriesshire moors, that summons the crowds of modern cities to face and solve them. If the voice is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, it is addressed to the multitudes of human society wherever they are gathered together.
The principle at the root of all Carlyle’s other works is the same. It has been already pointed out how his own character forms, as it were, a background even to his histories. As that character had been built up in the struggle with, and continued to be absorbed in the contemplation of, those problems, it follows that the histories are just the presentation of the same problems under the wider and more varied conditions of national existence. There was artistic gain to Carlyle in the new conditions. A longer dwelling in the regions of Sartor would have fed the morbid blood in him. History, without smothering his own personality, took him sufficiently out of it to check this tendency. The History of the French Revolution is much purer as an artistic conception than Sartor. It is more orderly in development, it has more artistic unity. Indeed, with the exception of one or two of Carlyle’s smaller works, like the Life of Sterling, it is in this respect the best he ever wrote. Among histories it is quite singular for its coherence. Few histories have the unity of works of imaginative art. Among early works we may find one or two, like the history of Herodotus, which simulate the character and rival the proportions of a national epic. Among later works we may find one or two, like Gibbon’s, which derive an impressive unity from the stately march of events to a great far-off catastrophe. But probably nowhere is there a history which in every chapter, and almost in every sentence, breathes the artistic purpose as Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution does. It has been frequently called the ‘epic’ of the Revolution. In point of fact, as Froude justly says, the conception is rather dramatic, and the best comparison is to Æschylus.
Carlyle had an infinite respect for facts, and as far as he could by industry and care, he assured himself that all he wrote as history was exactly true. It is of small moment that, like all the historians who have ever lived or ever will live, he has been proved to have made mistakes. But it is well to notice that, much as he revered facts, no one is farther removed than he from the school of Dryasdust. Few were so bold in making selection of their facts. The artistic principle always underlying his work saved him from the mistake into which so many recent historians seem prone to fall, the mistake of attempting to tell everything. To Carlyle, the fact must be illuminative, or he cast it aside. Moreover, while he denounced theorists, few bolder theorists than himself have ever written. Behind almost every sentence of his French Revolution there lies a theory, of character or motive, if not of cause and effect. The difference between him and the theorists he railed at was really that he presented poetically what, they presented logically. He was aware of the limited truth attainable by their method; he was not perhaps fully aware of the dangers of his own. We see this imaginative element in the great part which character plays in the development of the French Revolution as Carlyle conceived it. It is in men, not in political machinery, that we must seek the clue to it. Hence the prominence, perhaps exaggerated, given to Mirabeau. Carlyle’s facts are never left bare facts. He reverences them, not so much in themselves, as for the insight they give into the souls of men. This is the key-note of Carlyle’s histories. They are essentially imaginative; and the writer spends his strength less in a narrative of events than in delineation of characters, and in the tracing of moral forces.
Carlyle’s Cromwell is, more than either of the other histories, an illustration of his own doctrine of heroes, and less than either of the others is it a history of a nation as well as of a man. Cromwell to a great extent speaks for himself, and Carlyle expounds and comments on his uncouth and sometimes obsolete manner of expression. The commentary is free and even ample, yet there is less of Carlyle himself in this than in any other of his works. The great features of it are its delineation of the man Cromwell and the proof it presents of Carlyle’s skill in the use of documents. Carlyle has not converted everybody to his own view of Cromwell, but he has at least coloured the opinion of everybody who has since studied the period.
If Cromwell is narrower in its scope than the French Revolution, Frederick the Great is even wider. The Revolution expanded into a European movement, but within the limits Carlyle set to himself it was essentially French. Frederick was the centre of a movement which Carlyle found could only be treated as a European one. He was led by the relations, alliances and wars of his hero, to deal at greater or less length with all the principal countries of Europe, and his book, instead of being merely the history of a man, became the history of one of the most momentous series of events of the eighteenth century. In this respect therefore the history of Frederick is his most ambitious historical work; and either to it or to the French Revolution must be adjudged the palm of excellence in its class. Various arguments might be adduced on both sides, and it would be rash to pronounce definitely. For the earlier work it might be pleaded that it is clearly the more perfect in artistic conception. It is also true that, interesting as is the Seven Years’ War, and interesting as, in Carlyle’s hands, the growth of the Prussian Monarchy becomes, there is nothing in the subject-matter of Frederick quite as enthralling as the volcanic scenes of the French Revolution. It may also be pleaded that passages of eloquent writing are more frequent, and individual passages probably greater in the latter. The art in it moreover is purer, less intermixed with the grotesque, and with what can only be set down to Carlyle’s individual eccentricities. On the other hand, Frederick is even more forcible than the French Revolution. Carlyle gathered power as years went on, and he never expended it more lavishly than on this latest and most ambitious of his works. Nowhere, except perhaps in Sartor, are all his peculiarities more conspicuous; nowhere is his gospel preached with more uncompromising energy; nowhere is his strange style more unrestrained and less amenable to the ordinary laws of English composition. For these reasons, combined with the wide range of the work, which tasked his power of construction as it had never been tasked before, Frederick the Great will probably always win the suffrages of a large proportion of Carlylean devotees. For the same reasons, those who, acknowledging Carlyle’s original genius and admiring his power, are only half reconciled to his sometimes wanton eccentricities, will doubtless continue to prefer the more regular French Revolution.
Regarding the purely historical essays as minor examples of the kind of works just discussed, Carlyle’s remaining writings may be divided into two classes. These, in the order of their importance in his own eyes, and probably to the world, are, (1) works dealing with or bearing directly upon contemporary social and political problems; and (2) literary essays, including under the latter head the translations and the two biographies of Schiller and Sterling.
Under the first class rank such works as Chartism, Past and Present and Latter-day Pamphlets. Under it too might be fairly brought some of the essays, such, for example, as the essay on the Corn Law Rhymes, which, though it deals primarily with a literary subject, was written because that subject opened immediately into a social one. But indeed all Carlyle’s works are closely cognate to this section; for if he was not directly treating of such themes, his thoughts were never far away from them. Still, there is a difference between dealing directly with a subject and illustrating it by a borrowed light. In Carlyle’s case the latter was the preferable method, and his wisest teaching on matters of immediate practical moment is not contained in the class of works here considered. The reason is that in discussing such questions he usually became violent and one-sided. Carlyle, as much as any man who ever lived, had ‘the defects of his qualities.’ We see in his own life how force and directness, his greatest qualities both literary and personal, become on occasion vices instead of virtues. He recognised the fact himself, and once humorously warned his own people, whom he had alarmed by his outcries, that they ought to know him too well to believe that he was being killed merely because he cried murder. But this habit of crying murder, trifling perhaps in itself, had no little influence for evil on his own life and on the life of her who was most closely associated with him. Just the same fault may be observed in all his works to some degree, but especially in the section of them now under discussion. Carlyle habitually saw through a magnifying glass. As he made an outcry if his own finger ached, so he did in the case of the evils of his own time. The ‘something in the state of Denmark’ he could contemplate with comparative equanimity, and the lesson he drew from that state was apt to be more just because more temperate than that which he drew directly from the present time itself. Compare, for instance, the ‘past’ with the ‘present’ in Past and Present. The former is calm, pure, beautiful, and, we feel convinced, true. The latter is lurid, turbid, exaggerated, repellent, only in part true. We cannot accept as true at all the contrast between the one age and the other; only a most enthusiastic disciple can fail to note that a select specimen of the past is pitted against the average, or worse than the average, of the present. But not thus is truth reached, and not thus is conviction carried to the candid mind. Doubtless Carlyle wished to reform, and the way to reform, it may be urged, is rather to point out what needs amendment than to insist upon the advantages of ‘our incomparable civilisation.’ This is true, but justice is the prime requisite as a preliminary to reform. The way to win men’s acquiescence is not to paint Hyperion on the one hand and a satyr on the other. The better way is to point out how a society faulty, troubled, but, it may be, not hopelessly corrupt, may be made in this point and in that a little less faulty, less troubled, less corrupt.
There is no such contrast in Carlyle’s other works to drive the sense of his error home; but the same error is present in them. It is far from being the case that their matter is essentially bad, or that Carlyle is essentially wrong. There is much that is wholly sound and good in Chartism; but it is unrelieved and unbalanced. The same is true of the Latter-day Pamphlets. Even the much-abused Nigger Question is fundamentally right. What it means is that unless we organise free labour we had better give up boasting that we have set it free. The liberation of the West Indian slaves had brought to the verge of bankruptcy what had previously been the richest of British colonial possessions, robbed them of a prosperity which they have never fully recovered, ruined the whites, and deprived the blacks themselves of a government and discipline which Carlyle believed to be morally necessary to them, and therefore their right. There are several points of contact between this and the theory of Aristotle; there is also a general resemblance between it and the bold doctrine of Carlyle’s countryman, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who, impressed by the evil of unorganised free labour degenerating into vagabondage, advocated the re-introduction of slavery. It does not follow from the evils pointed out by Carlyle that slavery ought to have been maintained; but it does seem a fair inference that the process of liberation actually adopted was ill considered, and was no subject for unqualified jubilation. If Carlyle had advanced such ideas in a moderate and conciliatory way he might have made converts. Instead of that, he was aggressive. He sowed the wind of provocation, and he reaped the whirlwind of opposition, rejection, sometimes of vituperation. It is vain to wish that he had done otherwise; he could only do as his character allowed him to do; but we shall do well to recognise that violence proved to be not strength but weakness, and that with more self-control he would probably have produced greater practical effect.
The class of writings dealing with literature and literary men is that to which Carlyle himself would have attached least importance. He was a man of letters by necessity rather than by choice. He would do nothing which did not promise him an opening into the sphere of the ideal, and literature was the only profession within his reach which seemed to do that. He would have preferred a life of action, provided the action had not for its end mere money-getting; and he declared there were few occupations for which he was not better fitted by nature than for that in which he spent his life. There may have been some exaggeration in this. If Carlyle had not by nature the faculty for writing, he made a marvellous faculty for himself. In favour of his own view, however, we may call to mind his well-known contempt for poetry, or rather verse, as it existed, and as he conceived it could alone exist, in his own day. Probably no born man of letters ever cherished such contempt, or ever submitted to be a writer of prose without some regret that he could not be a poet. Carlyle’s half-dislike and more than half-disbelief in his own profession shows itself in the fact that he escapes as soon as possible from the region of pure literature; and, while he remains himself a man of letters, he writes by preference about action and as little as may be about books and authors. His literary essays therefore belong principally to the first period of his authorship. Moreover, he betrays his tendency by his choice of subjects. He writes with most satisfaction on authors whom he can regard as teachers; on others he writes only of necessity and with little sympathy.