Thomas Carlyle

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[Footnote: Cf. Byron's account of the same household at Pisa. Carlyle
deals very leniently with the malignant volume on Byron which amply
justified the epigram of Moore. But he afterwards spoke more slightly of
his little satellite, attributing the faint praise, in the _Examiner_, of
the second course of lectures to Hunt's jealousy of a friend now
"beginning to be somebody."]

The work "stern and grim" was the _French Revolution_, the production
of which is the dominant theme of the first chapter of Carlyle's London
life. Mr. Froude, in the course of an estimate of this work which leaves
little room for other criticism, dwells on the fact that it was written
for a purpose, _i.e._ to show that rulers, like those of the French
in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the pleasures and
oblivious of the duties of life, must end by being "burnt up." This,
doubtless, is one of the morals of the _French Revolution_--the other
being that anarchy ends in despotism--and unquestionably a writer who
never ceased to be a preacher must have had it in his mind. But Carlyle's
peculiarity is that he combined the functions of a prophet and of an
artist, and that while now the one, now the other, was foremost, he never
wholly forgot the one in the other. In this instance he found a theme
well fit for both, and threw his heart into it, though under much
discouragement. Despite the Essays, into each of which he had put work
enough for a volume, the Reviews were shy of him; while his _Sartor_ had,
on this side of the Atlantic, been received mainly with jeers. Carlyle,
never unconscious of his prerogative and apostolic primogeniture, felt
like an aspirant who had performed his vigils, and finding himself still
ignored, became a knight of the rueful countenance. Thoroughly equipped,
adept enough in ancient tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German
and a fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from
Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "tragically hard,"
exclaiming, "I could learn to do all things I have seen done, and am
forbidden to try any of them." The efforts to keep the wolf from his own
doors were harder than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed in
London with his L200 reserve, he could easily have made way in the
usual ruts; but he would have none of them, and refused to accept the
employment which is the most open, as it is the most lucrative, to
literary aspirants. To nine out of ten the "profession of literature"
means Journalism; while Journalism often means dishonesty, always
conformity. Carlyle was, in a sense deeper than that of the sects,
essentially a nonconformist; he not only disdained to write a word he
did not believe, he would not suppress a word he did believe--a rule
of action fatal to swift success. During these years there began an
acquaintance, soon ripening into intimacy, the memories of which are
enshrined in one of the most beautiful of biographies. Carlyle's relation
to John Sterling drew out the sort of affection which best suited
him--the love of a master for a pupil, of superior for inferior, of the
benefactor for the benefited; and consequently there is no line in the
record of it that jars. Sterling once tried to benefit his friend, and
perhaps fortunately failed. He introduced Carlyle to his father, then the
chief writer in the _Times_, and the Editor invited the struggling author
to contribute to its columns, but, according to Mr. Froude, "on the
implied conditions ... when a man enlists in the army, his soul as well
as his body belong to his commanding officer." Carlyle talked, all his
life, about what his greatest disciple calls "The Lamp of Obedience"; but
he himself would obey no one, and found it hard to be civil to those who
did not see with his eyes. Ho rejected--we trust in polite terms--the
offer of "the Thunderer." "In other respects also," says our main
authority, "he was impracticable, unmalleable, and as independent and
wilful as if he were the heir to a peerage. He had created no 'public' of
his own; the public which existed could not understand his writings
and would not buy them; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more
neglected than he had been in Scotland." Welcome to a limited range of
literary society, he astonished and amused by his vehement eloquence,
but when crossed he was not only "sarcastic" but rude, and speaking of
people, as he wrote of them, with various shades of contempt, naturally
gave frequent offence. Those whose toes are trodden on, not by accident,
justifiably retaliate. "Are you looking for your t-t-turban?" Charles
Lamb is reported to have said in some entertainer's lobby after listening
for an evening to Carlyle's invectives, and the phrase may have rankled
in his mind. Living in a glass case, while throwing stones about,
super-sensitive to criticism though professing to despise critics, he
made at least as many enemies as friends, and by his own confession
became an Ishmaelite. In view of the reception of _Sartor_, we do not
wonder to find him writing in 1833--

It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the
craft of literature, and yet I know no fault I have
committed.... I am tempted to go to America.... I shall quit
literature, it does not invite me. Providence warns me to
have done with it. I have failed in the Divine Infernal
Universe;

or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world
like Teufelsdroeckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet
all the time, with incomparable naivete, he was asserting:--

The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my
feeling of natural superiority to them.... The literary
world here is a thing which I have no other course left me
but to defy.... I can reverence no existing man. With health
and peace for one year, I could write a better book than
there has been in this country for generations.

All through his journal and his correspondence there is a perpetual
alternation of despair and confidence, always closing with the refrain,
"Working, trying is the only remover of doubt," and wise counsels often
echoed from Goethe, "Accomplish as well as you can the task on hand, and
the next step will become clear;" on the other hand--A man must not only
be able to work but to give over working.... If a man wait till he has
entirely brushed off his imperfections, he will spin for ever on his
axis, advancing no whither.... The _French Revolution_ stands pretty
fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to
splash down what I know in large masses of colours, that it may look like
a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance.

The progress of this work was retarded by the calamity familiar to every
reader, but it must be referred to as throwing one of the finest lights
on Carlyle's character. His closest intellectual link with J.S. Mill was
their common interest in French politics and literature; the latter,
himself meditating a history of the Revolution, not only surrendered in
favour of the man whose superior pictorial genius he recognised, but
supplied him freely with the books he had accumulated for the enterprise.
His interest in the work was unfortunately so great as to induce him to
borrow the MS. of the first volume, completed in the early spring of
1835, and his business habits so defective as to permit him to lend it
without authority; so that, as appears, it was left lying about by Mrs.
Taylor and mistaken by her servant for waste paper: certainly it was
destroyed; and Mill came to Cheyne Row to announce the fact in such a
desperate state of mind that Carlyle's first anxiety seems to have been
to console his friend. According to Mrs. Carlyle, as reported by Froude,
"the first words her husband uttered as the door closed were, 'Well,
Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him
how very serious this business is to us.'" This trait of magnanimity under
the first blow of a disaster which seemed to cancel the work of years
should be set against his nearly contemporaneous criticisms of Coleridge,
Lamb, Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Macaulay, etc.

[Footnote: Carlyle had only been writing the volume for five months; but
he was preparing for it during much of his life at Craigenputtock.]

Mill sent a cheque of L200 as "the slightest external compensation" for
the loss, and only, by urgent entreaty, procured the acceptance of half
the sum. Carlyle here, as in every real emergency, bracing his resolve
by courageous words, as "never tine heart or get provoked heart," set
himself to re-write the volume with an energy that recalls that of Scott
rebuilding his ruined estate; but the work was at first so "wretched"
that it had to be laid aside for a season, during which the author
wisely took a restorative bath of comparatively commonplace novels. The
re-writing of the first volume was completed in September 1835; the whole
book in January 1837. The mood in which it was written throws a light on
the excellences as on the defects of the history. The _Reminiscences_
again record the gloom and defiance of "Thomas the Doubter" walking
through the London streets "with a feeling similar to Satan's stepping
the burning marl," and scowling at the equipages about Hyde Park Corner,
sternly thinking, "Yes, and perhaps none of you could do what I am at. I
shall finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and
withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." In an adjacent page he reports
himself as having said to his wife--

What they will do with this book none knows, my lass; but
they have not had for two hundred years any book that came
more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample
it under foot and hoof as they see best.... "They cannot
trample that," she would cheerily answer.

This passage points at once to the secret of the writer's spell and to
the limits of his lasting power. His works were written seldom with
perfect fairness, never with the dry light required for a clear
presentation of the truth; they have all "an infusion from the will and
the affections"; but they were all written with a whole sincerity and
utter fervour; they rose from his hot heart, and rushed through the air
"like rockets druv' by their own burnin'." Consequently his readers
confess that he has never forgot the Horatian maxim--

Si vis me flere, dolendum est
Primum ipsi tibi.

About this time Carlyle writes, "My friends think I have found the art of
living upon nothing," and there must, despite Mill's contribution, have
been "bitter thrift" in Cheyne REow during the years 1835-1837. He
struggled through the unremunerative interval of waiting for the sale
of a great work by help of fees derived from his essay on the _Diamond
Necklace_ (which, after being refused by the _Foreign Quarterly,_
appeared in _Fraser,_ 1837), that on _Mirabeau_ in the _Westminster,_
and in the following year, for the same periodical, the article on _Sir
Walter Scott._ To the last work, undertaken against the grain, he refers
in one of the renewed wails of the year: "O that literature had never
been devised. I am scourged back to it by the whip of necessity." The
circumstance may account for some of the manifest defects of one of the
least satisfactory of Carlyle's longer' reviews. Frequent references in
previous letters show that he never appreciated Scott, to whom he refers
as a mere Restaurateur.

Meanwhile the appearance of the _French Revolution_ had brought the
name of its author, then in his forty-third year, for the first time
prominently before the public. It attracted the attention of Thackeray,
who wrote a generous review in the _Times,_ of Southey, Jeffrey,
Macaulay, Hallam, and Brougham, who recognised the advent of an equal, if
sometimes an adverse power in the world of letters. But, though the book
established his reputation, the sale was slow, and for some years the
only substantial profits, amounting to about L400, came from America,
through the indefatigable activity and good management of Emerson. It
is pleasant to note a passage in the interesting volumes of their
_Correspondence_ which shows that in this instance the benefited
understood his financial relation to the benefactor: "A reflection I
cannot but make is that, at bottom, this money was all yours; not a penny
of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful friend-ship.... I
could not examine it (the account) without a kind of crime." Others
who, at this period, made efforts to assist "the polar Bear" were less
fortunate. In several instances good intentions paved the palace of
Momus, and in one led a well-meaning man into a notoriously false
position. Mr. Basil Montagu being in want of a private secretary offered
the post to his former guest, as a temporary makeshift, at a salary of
L200, and so brought upon his memory a torrent of contempt. Undeterred by
this and similar warnings, the indefatigable philanthropist, Miss Harriet
Martineau, who at first conciliated the Carlyles by her affection for
"this side of the street," and was afterwards an object of their joint
ridicule, conceived the idea of organising a course of lectures to an
audience collected by canvass to hoar the strange being from the moors
talk for an hour on end about literature, morals, and history. He was
then an object of curiosity to those who knew anything about him at all,
and lecturing was at that time a lucrative and an honourable employment.
The "good Harriet," so called by Cheyne Row in its condescending mood,
aided by other kind friends of the Sterling and Mill circles--the former
including Frederick Denison Maurice--made so great a success of the
enterprise that it was thrice repeated. The _first_ course of six
lectures on "German Literature," May 1837, delivered in Willis's Rooms,
realised L135; the _second_ of twelve, on the "History of European
Literature," at 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, had a net result of
L300; the _third,_ in the same rooms, on "Revolutions," brought L200; the
_fourth,_ on "Heroes," the same. In closing this course Carlyle appeared
for the last time on a public platform until 1866, when he delivered
his Inaugural Address as Lord Rector to the students of Edinburgh. The
impression he produced on his unusually select audiences was that of a
man of genius, but roughly clad. The more superficial auditors had a
new sensation, those who came to stare remained to wonder; the more
reflective felt that they had learnt something of value. Carlyle had
no inconsiderable share of the oratorical power which he latterly so
derided; he was able to speak from a few notes; but there were comments
more or less severe on his manner and style. J. Grant, in his _Portraits
of Public Characters,_ says: "At times he distorts his features as if
suddenly seized by some paroxysm of pain ... he makes mouths; he has a
harsh accent and graceless gesticulation." Leigh Hunt, in the _Examiner,_
remarks on the lecturer's power of extemporising; but adds that he often
touches only the mountain-tops of the subject, and that the impression
left was as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalised by
German philosophy. Bunsen, present at one of the lectures, speaks of
the striking and rugged thoughts thrown at people's heads; and Margaret
Fuller, afterwards Countess Ossoli, referred to his arrogance redeemed
by "the grandeur of a Siegfried melting down masses of iron into sunset
red." Carlyle's own comments are for the most part slighting. He refers
to his lectures as a mixture of prophecy and play-acting, and says that
when about to open his course on "Heroes" he felt like a man going to be
hanged. To Emerson, April 17th 1839, he writes :--

My lectures come on this day two weeks. O heaven! I cannot
"speak"; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a
spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by
want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then--!
Shall it be Switzerland? shall it be Scotland? nay, shall it
be America and Concord?

Emerson had written about a Boston publication of the _Miscellanies_
(first there collected), and was continually urging his friend to
emigrate and speak to more appreciative audiences in the States; but
the London lectures, which had, with the remittances from over sea,
practically saved Carlyle from ruin or from exile, had made him decide
"to turn his back to the treacherous Syren"--the temptation to sink into
oratory. Mr. Froude's explanation and defence of this decision may be
clenched by a reference to the warning his master had received. He had
announced himself as a preacher and a prophet, and been taken at his
word; but similarly had Edward Irving, who for a season of sun or glamour
gathered around him the same crowd and glitter: the end came; twilight
and clouds of night. Fashion had flocked to the sermons of the elder
Annandale youth--as to the recitatives of the younger--to see a wild man
of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on"
to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with
"unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed
his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause,
madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with
the fixed resolve, "De me fabula non narrabitur," he shut the book on
this phase of his life.

The lectures on "Hero-Worship" (a phrase taken from Hume) were published
in 1841, and met with considerable success, the name of the writer having
then begun to run "like wildfire through London." At the close of the
previous year he had published his long pamphlet on _Chartism_, it having
proved unsuitable for its original destination as an article in the
_Quarterly_. Here first he clearly enunciates, "Might is right"--one
of the few strings on which, with all the variations of a political
Paganini, he played through life. This tract is on the border line
between the old modified Radicalism of _Sartor_ and the less modified
Conservatism of his later years. In 1840 Carlyle still speaks of himself
as a man foiled; but at the close of that year all fear of penury was
over, and in the following he was able to refuse a Chair of History at
Edinburgh, as later another at St. Andrews. Meanwhile his practical
power and genuine zeal for the diffusion of knowledge appeared in his
foundation of the London Library, which brought him into more or less
close contact with Tennyson, Milman, Forster, Helps, Spedding, Gladstone,
and other leaders of the thought and action of the time.

There is little in Carlyle's life at any time that can be called
eventful. From first to last it was that of a retired scholar, a thinker
demanding sympathy while craving after solitude, and the frequent
inconsistency of the two requirements was the source of much of his
unhappiness. Our authorities for all that we do not see in his
published works are found in his voluminous correspondence, copious
autobiographical jottings, and the three volumes of his wife's letters
and journal dating from the commencement of the struggle for recognition
in London, and extending to the year of her death. Criticism of these
remarkable documents, the theme of so much controversy, belongs rather
to a life of Mrs. Carlyle; but a few salient facts may here be noted. It
appears on the surface that husband and wife had in common several
marked peculiarities; on the intellectual side they had not only an
extraordinary amount but the same kind of ability, superhumanly keen
insight, and wonderful power of expression, both with tongue and pen; the
same intensity of feeling, thoroughness, and courage to look the ugliest
truths full in the face; in both, these high qualities were marred by a
tendency to attribute the worst motives to almost every one. Their joint
contempt for all whom they called "fools," _i.e._ the immense majority of
mankind, was a serious drawback to the pleasure of their company. It is
indeed obvious that, whether or not it be correct to say that "his nature
was the soft one, her's the hard," Mrs. Carlyle was the severer cynic of
the two. Much of her writing confirms the impression of those who have
heard her talk that no one, not even her husband, was safe from the
shafts of her ridicule. Her pride in his genius knew no bounds, and it is
improbable that she would have tolerated from any outsider a breath of
adverse criticism; but she herself claimed many liberties she would not
grant. She was clannish as Carlyle himself, yet even her relations
are occasionally made to appear ridiculous. There was nothing in her
affections, save her memory of her own father, corresponding to his
devotion to his whole family. With equal penetration and greater scorn,
she had no share of his underlying reverence. Such limited union as was
granted to her married life had only soured the mocking-bird spirit
of the child that derided her grandfather's accent on occasion of his
bringing her back from a drive by another route to "varry the shane."

Carlyle's constant wailings take from him any claim to such powers of
endurance as might justify his later attacks on Byron. But neither
had his wife any real reticence. Whenever there were domestic
troubles--flitting, repairing, building, etc., on every occasion of
clamour or worry, he, with scarce pardonable oblivion of physical
delicacy greater than his own, went off, generally to visit distinguished
friends, and left behind him the burden and the heat of the day. She
performed her unpleasant work and all associated duties with a practical
genius that he complimented as "triumphant." She performed them,
ungrudgingly perhaps, but never without complaint; her invariable
practice was to endure and tell. "Quelle vie," she writes in 1837 to John
Sterling, whom she seems to have really liked, "let no woman who values
peace of soul ever marry an author"; and again to the same in 1839,
"Carlyle had to sit on a jury two days, to the ruin of his whole being,
physical, moral, and intellectual," but "one gets to feel a sort of
indifference to his growling." Conspicuous exceptions, as in the case of
the Shelleys, the Dobells, and the Brownings, have been seen, within
or almost within our memories, but as a rule it is a risk for two
supersensitive and nervous people to live together: when they are
sensitive in opposite ways the alliance is fatal; fortunately the
Carlyles were, in this respect, in the main sympathetic. With most of the
household troubles which occupy so exaggerated a space in the letters and
journals of both--papering, plastering, painting, deceitful or disorderly
domestics--general readers have so little concern that they have reason
to resent the number of pages wasted in printing them; but there was one
common grievance of wider and more urgent interest, to which we must here
again finally refer, premising that it affected not one period but the
whole of their lives, _i.e._ their constant, only half-effectual struggle
with the modern Hydra-headed Monster, the reckless and needless Noises
produced or permitted, sometimes increased rather than suppressed, by
modern civilisation. Mrs. Carlyle suffered almost as much as her husband
from these murderers of sleep and assassins of repose; on her mainly fell
the task of contending with the cochin-chinas, whose senseless shrieks
went "through her like a sword," of abating a "Der Freischuetz of cats,"
or a pandemonium of barrel organs, of suppressing macaws for which
Carryle "could neither think nor live"; now mitigating the scales on a
piano, now conjuring away, by threat or bribe, from their neighbours
a shoal of "demon fowls"; lastly of superintending the troops of
bricklayers, joiners, iron-hammerers employed with partial success to
convert the top story of 5 Cheyne Row into a sound-proof room. Her
hard-won victories in this field must have agreeably added to the sense
of personality to which she resolutely clung. Her assertion, "Instead
of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle
round every individuality," is the essence of much of her mate's
philosophy; but, in the following to Sterling, she somewhat bitterly
protests against her own absorption: "In spite of the honestest efforts
to annihilate my I---ity or merge it in what the world doubtless
considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting, and,
alas, self-seeking me."

The ever-restive consciousness of being submerged is one of the dominant
notes of her journal, the other is the sense of being even within the
circle unrecognised. "C. is a domestic wandering Jew.... When he is at
work I hardly ever see his face from breakfast to dinner."... "Poor
little wretch that I am, ... I feel as if I were already half-buried ...
in some intermediate state between the living and the dead.... Oh, so
lonely." These are among the _suspiria de profundis_ of a life which her
husband compared to "a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother,
whom he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming:--"Solitude,
indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad like Bedlam; absence
of delirium is possible only for me in solitude"; a sentiment almost
literally acted on. In his offering of penitential cypress, referring to
his wife's delight in the ultimate success of his work, he says, "She
flickered round me like a perpetual radiance." But during their joint
lives their numerous visits and journeys were made at separate times or
apart. They crossed continually on the roads up and down, but when
absent wrote to one another often the most affectionate letters. Their
attraction increased, contrary to Newton's law, in the _direct_ ratio of
the square of the distance, and when it was stretched beyond the stars
the long-latent love of the survivor became a worship.

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