Past and Present

by Thomas Carlyle

We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the talent displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special criticism in the wrong. And we may easily fail in expressing the general objection which we feel. It appears to us as a certain disproportion in the picture, caused by the obtrusion of the whims of the painter. In this work, as in his former labours, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick giant. His humours are expressed with so much force of constitution that his fancies are more attractive and more credible than the sanity of duller men. But the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies whilst it stimulated.

It is felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the picture. It is not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in lurid storm lights. Every object attitudinises, to the very mountains and stars almost, under the refraction of this wonderful humorist; and instead of the common earth and sky, we have a Martin's Creation or Judgment Day. A crisis has always arrived which requires a deus ex machina. One can hardly credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us—as of a failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to begin again and try to do a little business. It was perhaps inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and imagination on English politics, that a certain local emphasis and love of effect, such as is the vice of preaching, should appear, producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by the excess of value attributed to circumstances. But the splendour of wit cannot out—dazzle the calm daylight, which always shows every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each age has its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young people; its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself; and if you should ask the contemporary, he would tell you, with pride or with regret (according as he was practical or poetic), that he had none. But after a short time, down go its follies and weakness and the memory of them; its virtues alone remain, and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in the horizon with mist and colour. The revelation of Reason is this of the un-changeableness of the fate of humanity under all its subjective aspects; that to the cowering it always cowers, to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients are only venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial; as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot reach to their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?

And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing dangers of the English State, may easily excuse some over- colouring of the picture; and we at this distance are not so far removed from any of the specific evils, and are deeply participant in too many, not to share the gloom and thank the love and the courage of the counselor. This book is full of humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this as in all Mr. Carlyle's works than the attitude of the writer. He has the dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to him, and never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of the great line of scholars, and sustains their office in the highest credit and honour. If the good heaven have any good word to impart to this unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for its occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close. Let who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye oft from that gracious Infinite which embosoms us.

As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his expedient for expressing those unproven opinions which he entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of straw from the cell,—and the respectable Sauerteig, or Teufelsdrockh, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveler, says what is put into his mouth, and disappears. That morbid temperament has given his rhetoric a somewhat bloated character; a luxury to many imaginative and learned persons, like a showery south-wind with its sunbursts and rapid chasing of lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to multitudes of reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession were possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it must not be forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,—in all this glad and needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level tone the very word, and then with new glee return to his game. He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but gives sincerity where it is due.

One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains. Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though deficient in depth. Carlyle in his strange, half mad way, has entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigour and wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney play of these times—the indubitable champion of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of details, into style. We have been civilising very fast, building London and Paris, and now planting New England and India, New Holland and Oregon—and it has not appeared in literature; there has been no analogous expansion and recomposition in books. Carlyle's style is the first emergence of all this wealth and labour with which the world has gone with child so long. London and Europe, tunneled, graded corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and East and West Indies for dependencies, and America, with the Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in literature. This is the first invasion and conquest. How like an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a symbol which was never a symbol before. This is the first experiment, and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned to so great an achievement. It will be done again and again, sharper, simpler; but fortunate is he who did it first, though never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose character pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had anything in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle. He "shakes with his mountain mirth." It is like the laughter of the Genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo the dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, and returns of his sense and music. Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Life of Schiller (Lond. Mag., 1823-4), 1825, 1845. (Supplement
published in the People's Edition, 1873) Wilhelm Meister's
Apprenticeship, 1824. Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry
(from the French of Legendre), 1824. German Romance, 1827.
Sartor Resartus (Fraser's Mag., 1833-4), 1835 (Boston) 1838.
French Revolution, 1837,1839. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,
1839, 1840, 1847, 1857. (In these were reprinted Articles from
Edinburgh Review, Foreign Review, Foreign Quarterly Review,
Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, New Monthly Magazine,
London and Westminster Review, Keepsake, Proceedings of the
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Times.) Chartism, 1840.
Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841. Past and
Present, 1843. Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches; with
Elucidations, 1845. Thirty-five Unpublished Letters of Oliver
Cromwell, 1847 (Fraser). Original Discourses on the Negro
Question (Fraser, 1849), 1853. Latter-day Pamphlets, 1850. Life
of John Sterling, 1851. History of Friedrich II. of Prussia,
1858-65. Inaugural Address at Edinburgh, 1866. Shooting
Niagara; and After? 1867 (from Macmillan). The Early Kings of
Norway; also an Essay on the Portraits of John Knox, 1875.

There were also contributions to Brewster's Edinburgh
Encyclopaedia, vols. xiv. xv., and xvi.; to New Edinburgh
Review, 1821, 1822; Fraser's Magazine, 1830, 1831; The Times,
19 June, 1844 (Mazzini); 28 November, 1876; 5 May, 1877;
Examiner, 1848; Spectator 1848.

First Collected Edition of Works, 1857-58 (16 vols.)

Reminiscences (ed. J.A. Froude), 1881; (ed. C.E. Norton, 1887,
and preprinted in Everyman's Library; 1932, with an added
article on Professor John Wilson—"Christopher North")
Reminiscences of my Irish journey in 1849, 1882. Last Words of
Thomas Carlyle, 1882 (ed. by J.C.A.) Last Words of Thomas
Carlyle, 1892. Rescued Essays (ed. P. Newberry) 1892.
Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reign of
James I. and Charles I. (ed. A. Carlyle), 1898.