he hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Carlyle—(December 4th, 1795)—was lately commemorated. The house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, which he had occupied from 1834 till his death (February 4th, 1881), was handed over to trustees to be preserved as a public memorial. No house in the British islands has more remarkable associations. Thither Carlyle had come in his thirty-eighth year, still hardly recognized by the general public, though already regarded by a small circle as a man of extraordinary powers. There he went through the concluding years of the long struggle which ended by a hard-won and scarcely enjoyed victory. There he had been visited by almost all the most conspicuous men of letters of his time: by Jeffrey, Southey, and J. S. Mill; by Tennyson and Browning, the greatest poets, and by Thackeray and Dickens, the greatest novelists of his generation; by the dearest friends of his youth, Irving and Emerson and John Sterling, and by his last followers, Froude and Ruskin. There too had lived until 1866 the woman who had shared his struggles, whom he loved and admired without stint, and whom he was yet destined to remember with many bitter pangs of remorse. Their story, laid bare with singular fullness, has invested the scene of their joys and sorrows, their alienation and reconciliations, with extraordinary interest. Every one who has read the "Reminiscences" and the later mass of biographical matter must be glad to see the "sound-proof" room, and the garden haunted by the "demon-fowls" and the other dumb witnesses of a long tragi-comedy. No one was so keenly sensitive as Carlyle to the interest of the little gleams of light which reveal our ancestors not only stirred by the great passions, but absorbed like ourselves by the trivialities of the day. A similar interest will long attach to the scene of his own trials.
Carlyle's life was a struggle and a warfare. Each of his books was wrenched from him, like the tale of the 'Ancient Mariner,' by a spiritual agony. The early books excited the wrath of his contemporaries, when they were not ridiculed as the grotesque outpourings of an eccentric humorist. His teaching was intended to oppose what most people take to be the general tendency of thought, and yet many who share that tendency gladly acknowledge that they owe to Carlyle a more powerful intellectual stimulus than they can attribute even to their accepted teachers. I shall try briefly to indicate the general nature of his message to mankind, without attempting to consider the soundness or otherwise of particular views.
Carlyle describes what kind of person people went to see in Cheyne Row. "The very sound of my voice," he says, "has got something savage-prophetic: I am as a John the Baptist girt about with a leather girdle, whose food is locusts and wild honey." Respectable literary society at "aesthetic tea-parties" regarded him as the Scribes and Pharisees regarded the Hebrew prophet. He came among them to tear the mask from their hypocritical cant. Carlyle was not externally a Diogenes. Though the son of peasants, he had the appearance and manner of a thorough gentleman in spite of all his irritable outbreaks. But he was not the less penetrated to the core with the idiosyncrasies of his class. The father, a Davie Deans of real life, had impressed the son profoundly. Carlyle had begun life on the same terms as innumerable young Scots. Strict frugality had enabled him to get a college training and reach the threshold of the ministry. His mother could look forward to the exquisite pleasure of seeing "her own bairn wag his head in a pulpit!" But at this point Carlyle's individuality first asserted itself. He could not step into any of the ordinary grooves. His college teachers appeared to him to offer "sawdust" instead of manna from heaven. The sacred formulæ of their ancestral creed had lost their savor. Words once expressive of the strongest faith were either used to utter the bigotry of narrow pedants, or were adopted only to be explained away into insipid commonplace. Carlyle shared the intellectual movement of his time too much to profess any reverence for what he called the "Hebrew old-clothes." Philosophers and critics had torn them to rags. His quarrel however was with the accidental embodiment, not with the spirit of the old creeds. The old morality was ingrained in his very nature; nor was he shocked, like some of his fellows, by the sternness of the Calvinistic views of the universe and life. The whole problem was with him precisely to save this living spirit. The skeptics, he thought, were, in the German phrase, "emptying out the baby with the bath." They were at war with the spirit as well as with the letter; trying to construct a Godless universe; to substitute a dead mechanism for the living organism; and therefore to kill down at the root every noble aspiration which could stimulate the conscience, or strengthen a man to bear the spectacle of the wrongs and sufferings of mankind.
THOMAS CARLYLE.
The crisis of this struggle happened in 1821. After giving up the ministry, Carlyle had tried "schoolmastering" and found himself to be least fitted of mankind for a function which demands patience with stupidity. He had just glanced at the legal profession only to be disgusted with its chicaneries. Hack authorship was his only chance. The dyspeptic disorder which tormented him through life was tormenting him. "A rat was gnawing at the pit of his stomach." Then he was embittered by the general distress of his own class. Men out of work were threatening riots and the yeomanry being called out to suppress them. Carlyle was asked by a friend why he too did not come out with a musket. "Hm! yes," he replied, "but I haven't quite settled on which side." It was while thus distracted, that after three weeks of sleeplessness he experienced what he called his "conversion." The universe had seemed to him "void of life, of purpose, of volition, even of hostility; it was one huge and immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death!" And then he suddenly resolved to resist. Why go on trembling like a coward?—"As I so thought, there rushed a stream of fire over my whole soul, and I shook base fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit; almost a god: ever from that time the temper of my misery was changed; not fear or whining sorrow was in it, but indignation and grim, fell-eyed defiance." These are the phrases of his imaginary hero in 'Sartor Resartus.' In the 'Reminiscences' he repeats the statement in his own person. He had won "an immense victory"; he had escaped from the "foul mud gods" and soared into the "eternal blue of ether" where he had "for the spiritual part ever since lived." He could look down upon his fellow creatures still "weltering in that fatal element," "pitying the religious part of them and indignant against the frivolous"; enjoying an inward and supreme happiness which still remained to him, though often "eclipsed" in later years.
To understand this crisis is to understand his whole attitude. The change was not of the purely logical kind. Carlyle was not converted by any philosophical system. Coleridge, not long before, had found in Kant and Schelling an answer to similar perplexities. Carlyle, though he respected the German metaphysicians, could never find their dogmas satisfactory to his shrewd Scottish sense. His great helper, he tells us, in the strait, was not Kant but Goethe. The contrast between that serene prophet of culture and the rugged Scottish Puritan is so marked that one may be tempted to explain the influence partly by personal accident. Carlyle grew up at a time when the British public was just awaking to the existence of Germany; and not only promoted the awakening but was recognized by the great Goethe himself. He may well have been inclined in later years to exaggerate a debt due to so welcome a recognition. And yet it is intelligible that in Goethe, Carlyle saw what he most required. A man of the highest genius and a full representative of the most advanced thought could yet recognize what was elevating in the past as clearly as what was the true line of progress for us to pursue; and while casting aside the dead trappings as decidedly as Carlyle, could reach serene heights above the petty controversies where men wrangled over extinct issues. Goethe had solved the problem which vexed Carlyle's soul, and set an inspiring example of the true spirit and its great reward.
Carlyle, however, was not qualified by temperament or mental characteristics to follow Goethe's steps. If not primarily a reasoner, and too impatient perhaps for slow logical processes, he was also not a poet. Some of the greatest English teachers of his period embodied their conceptions of the world in poetry. Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron, in particular, were more effective representatives of the chief spiritual influences of the day than the few speculative writers. Carlyle thought for a time that he could utter himself in verse, or at least in prose fiction. He tried, only to feel his incompetence. As Froude observes, he had little ear for metrical composition. There were other and perhaps greater obstacles. A poet must be capable of detachment from the actual world in which he lives, however profound his interest in its great problems. He must be able to dwell with "seraph contemplation" and stand aside from the actual contest. To Carlyle such an attitude was partly impossible, partly contemptible. He had imbibed the Puritan aversion to æsthetic enjoyments. He had been brought up in circles where it was thought wrong for a child to read the 'Arabian Nights,' and where Milton could only obtain a doubtful admission as a versifier of the Scriptural narrative. Carlyle retained the prejudice. He always looked askance at poetry which had no immediate bearing upon conduct, and regarded "æsthetic" as equivalent to frivolous. "May the devil fly away with the fine arts" is a sentiment which he quotes with cordial sympathy. This view was congenial to his inborn characteristics.
One striking peculiarity was his extraordinary "receptivity" of all outward impressions. The strange irritability which he set down to the "hag Dyspepsia" made him resemble a patient in whom disease has produced a morbidly excessive sensibility. Little annoyances were magnified into tragic dimensions. The noises in a next-door house affected him as an earthquake might affect others. His memory was as retentive as his impressions were strong. Froude testifies that his account of a little trip to Paris, written forty years later without reference to memoranda, is verified down to the minutest details by contemporary letters. Scenes instantaneously photographed on his memory never faded. No one had a keener eye for country. When he visited Germany he brought back pictures of the scenes of Frederick's battles, which enabled him to reproduce them with such startling veracity that after reading you seem to remember the reality, not the book. In history he seeks to place before us a series of visions as distinct as actual eyesight: to show us Cromwell watching the descent of the Scottish army at Dunbar, or the human whirlpool raging round the walls of the Bastille. We—the commonplace spectators—should not, it is true, even at present see what was visible to Carlyle, any more than we see a landscape as Turner saw it. We may wish that we could. At any rate, we have the conviction of absolute truthfulness to the impression made on a powerful idiosyncrasy. We perceive, as by the help of a Rembrandt, vast chaotic breadths of gloomy confusion, with central figures thrown out by a light of extraordinary brilliancy. Carlyle, indeed, always has it in mind that what we call reality is but a film on the surface of mysterious depths. We are such stuff, to repeat his favorite quotation, as dreams are made of. Past history is a series of dreams; the magic of memory may restore them for an instant to our present consciousness. But the most vivid picture of whatever is not irrecoverably lost always brings, too, the pathetic sense that we are after all but ephemeral appearances in the midst of the eternities and infinities. Overwhelmed by this sense of the unsubstantiality even of the most real objects, Carlyle clutches, as it were with the energy of despair, every fading image; and tries to invest it with something of its old brightness. Carlyle was so desirous to gain this distinctness of vision that he could not be happy in personal descriptions till, if possible, he had examined the portrait of his hero and satisfied himself that he could reproduce the actual bodily appearance. The face, he holds, shows the soul. And then his shrewd Scottish sagacity never deserts him. If the hero sometimes becomes, like most heroes, a little too free from human infirmities, the actors in his dramas never become mere walking gentlemen. In Dryasdust he gives us lay figures, bedizened at times with shallow paradoxes; but Carlyle always deals in genuine human nature. His judgment may not be impartial, but at least it is not nugatory. He sees the man from within and makes him a credible individual, not a mere bit of machinery worked by colorless formulæ. With this eye for character goes the keen sense of grim humor which keeps him in touch with reality. Little incidents bring out the absurd side of even the heroic. The most exciting scenes of his 'French Revolution' are heightened by the vision of the shivering usher who "accords the grand entries" when the ferocious mob is rushing into the palace—not "finding it convenient," as Carlyle observes, "to refuse them"; and of the gentleman who continues for an hour to "demand the arrestment of knaves and dastards"—a most comprehensive of all known petitions. Carlyle's "mannerism" is one result of this strain to be graphic. It has been attributed to readings of Jean Paul, and by Carlyle himself, partly to Irving and partly to the early talk in his father's home. It appears at any rate as soon as Carlyle gets confidence enough in himself to trust to his own modes of impression; and if it may fairly be called a mannerism, was not an affectation. It was struck out in the attempt to give most effective utterance to his genuine thought, and may be compared, as Burke said of Johnson's conversation, to the "contortions of the Sibyl."