Thomas Carlyle

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Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo,

all varieties of doctrinaire idealisms. Mazzini failed at Rome, Kossuth
at Pesth; the riots of Berlin resulted in the restoration of the old
dull bureaucratic regime; Smith O'Brien's bluster exploded in a cabbage
garden; the Railway Bubble burst in the fall of the bloated king Hudson,
and the Chartism of the time evaporated in smoke. The old sham gods, with
Buonaparte of the stuffed eagle in front, came back; because, concluded
Carlyle, there was no man in the front of the new movement strong enough
to guide it; because its figure-heads were futile sentimentalists,
insurgents who could not win. The reaction produced by their failure had
somewhat the same effect on his mind that the older French Revolution had
on that of Burke: he was driven back to a greater degree than Mr. Froude
allows on practical conservatism and on the negations of which
the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ are the expression. To this series of
_pronunciamentos_ of political scepticism he meant to add another, of
which he often talks under the name of "Exodus from Houndsditch," boldly
stating and setting forth the grounds of his now complete divergence from
all forms of what either in England or Europe generally could be called
the Orthodox faith in Religion. He was, we are told, withheld from this
by the feeling that the teaching even of the priests he saw and derided
in Belgium or in Galway was better than the atheistic materialism which
he associated with the dominion of mere physical science. He may have
felt he had nothing definite enough to be understood by the people to
substitute for what he proposed to destroy; and he may have had a thought
of the reception of such a work at Scotsbrig. Much of the _Life of
Sterling_, however, is somewhat less directly occupied with the same
question, and though gentler in tone it excited almost as much clamour as
the _Pamphlets_, especially in the north. The book, says Carlyle himself,
was "utterly revolting to the religious people in particular (to my
surprise rather than otherwise). 'Doesn't believe in us either!' Not he
for certain; can't, if you will know." During the same year his almost
morbid dislike of materialism found vent in denunciations of the "Crystal
Palace" Exhibition of Industry; though for its main promoter, Prince
Albert, he subsequently entertained and expressed a sincere respect.

In the summer of 1851 the Carlyles went together to Malvern, where they
met Tennyson (whose good nature had been proof against some slighting
remarks on his verses), Sydney Dobell, then in the fame of his
"Roman," and other celebrities. They tried the "Water Cure," under the
superintendence of Dr. Gully, who received and treated them as guests;
but they derived little good from the process. "I found," says Carlyle,
"water taken as medicine to be the most destructive drug I had ever
tried." Proceeding northward, he spent three weeks with his mother, then
in her eighty-fourth year and at last growing feeble; a quiet time only
disturbed by indignation at "one ass whom I heard the bray of in some
Glasgow newspaper," comparing "our grand hater of shams" to Father
Gavazzi. His stay was shortened by a summons to spend a few days with the
Ashburtons at Paris on their return from Switzerland. Though bound by
a promise to respond to the call, Carlyle did not much relish it.
Travelling abroad was always a burden to him, and it was aggravated in
this case by his very limited command of the language for conversational
purposes. Fortunately, on reaching London he found that the poet Browning,
whose acquaintance he had made ten years before, was, with his wife, about
to start for the same destination, and he prevailed upon them, though
somewhat reluctant, to take charge of him.

[Footnote: Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life of Robert Browning_.]

The companionship was therefore not accidental, and it was of great
service. "Carlyle," according to Mrs. Browning's biographer, "would have
been miserable without Browning," who made all the arrangements for the
party, passed luggage through the customs, saw to passports, fought the
battles of all the stations, and afterwards acted as guide through the
streets of the great city. By a curious irony, two verse-makers and
admirers of George Sand made it possible for the would-be man of action to
find his way. The poetess, recalling the trip afterwards, wrote that she
liked the prophet more than she expected, finding his "bitterness only
melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." Browning himself continued through
life to regard Carlyle with "affectionate reverence." "He never ceased,"
says Mrs. Orr, "to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his
wife, or to believe that, in the matter of their domestic unhappiness, she
was the more responsible of the two.... He always thought her a hard
unlovable woman, and I believe little liking was lost between them ... Yet
Carlyle never rendered him that service--easy as it appears--which one man
of letters most justly values from another, that of proclaiming the
admiration which he privately professed for his work." The party started,
September 24th, and reached Dieppe by Newhaven, after a rough passage, the
effects of which on some fellow-travellers more unfortunate than himself
Carlyle describes in a series of recently-discovered jottings [Footnote:
Partially reproduced, _Pall Mall Gazette,_ April 9th 1890, with
illustrative connecting comments.] made on his return, October 2nd, to
Chelsea. On September 25th they reached Paris. Carlyle joined the
Ashburtons at Meurice's Hotel; there dined, went in the evening to the
Theatre Francais, cursed the play, and commented unpleasantly on General
Changarnier sitting in the stalls.

During the next few days he met many of the celebrities of the time, and
caricatured, after his fashion, their personal appearance, talk, and
manner. These criticisms are for the most part of little value. The
writer had in some of his essays shown almost as much capacity of
understanding the great Frenchmen of the last century as was compatible
with his Puritan vein; but as regards French literature since the
Revolution he was either ignorant or alien. What light could be thrown on
that interesting era by a man who could only say of the authors of _La
Comedie Humaine_ and _Consuelo_ that they were ministers in a Phallus
worship? Carlyle seems to have seen most of Thiers, whom he treats with
good-natured condescension, but little insight: "round fat body, tapering
like a ninepin into small fat feet, placidly sharp fat face, puckered
eyeward ... a frank, sociable kind of creature, who has absolutely
no malignity towards any one, and is not the least troubled with
self-seekings." Thiers talked with contempt of Michelet; and Carlyle,
unconscious of the numerous affinities between that historian of genius
and himself, half assented. Prosper Merimee, on the other hand,
incensed him by some freaks of criticism, whether in badinage or in
earnest--probably the former. "Jean Paul," he said, getting on the theme
of German literature, "was a hollow fool of the first magnitude," and
Goethe was "insignificant, unintelligible, a paltry kind of Scribe
manque." "I could stand no more of it, but lighted a cigar, and adjourned
to the street. 'You impertinent blasphemous blockhead!' this was sticking
in my throat: better to retire without bringing it out."

[Footnote: The two men were mutually antagonistic; Merimee tried to read
the _French Revolution_, but flung the book aside in weariness or in
disdain.]

Of Guizot he writes, "Tartuffe, gaunt, hollow, resting on the everlasting
'No' with a haggard consciousness that it ought to be the everlasting
'Yea.'" "To me an extremely detestable kind of man." Carlyle missed
General Cavaignac, "of all Frenchmen the one" he "cared to see." In the
streets of Paris he found no one who could properly be called a gentleman.
"The truly ingenious and strong men of France are here (_i.e_. among the
industrial classes) making money, while the politician, literary, etc.
etc. class is mere play-actorism." His summary before leaving at the close
of a week, rather misspent, is: "Articulate-speaking France was altogether
without beauty or meaning to me in my then diseased mood; but I saw traces
of the inarticulate ... much worthier."

Back in London, he sent Mrs. Carlyle to the Grange (distinguishing
himself, in an interval of study at home, by washing the back area flags
with his own hands), and there joined her till the close of the year.
During the early part of the next he was absorbed in reading and planning
work. Then came an unusually tranquil visit to Thomas Erskine of
Linlathen, during which he had only to complain that the servants were
often obliged to run out of the room to hide their laughter at his
humorous bursts. At the close of August 1852 he embarked on board a Leith
steamer bound for Rotterdam, on his first trip to Germany. Home once
more, in October, he found chaos come, and seas of paint overwhelming
everything; "went to the Grange, and back in time to witness from Bath
House the funeral, November 18th, of the great Duke," remarking, "The
one true man of official men in England, or that I know of in Europe,
concludes his long course.... Tennyson's verses are naught. Silence alone
is respectable on such an occasion." In March, again at the Grange, he
met the Italian minister Azeglio, and when this statesman disparaged
Mazzini--a thing only permitted by Carlyle to himself--he retorted with
the remark, "Monsieur, vous ne le connaissez pas du tout, du tout." At
Chelsea, on his return, the fowl tragic-comedy reached a crisis, "the
unprotected male" declaring that he would shoot them or poison them. "A
man is not a Chatham nor a Wallenstein; but a man has work too, which the
Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two and sixpence
worth of bantams.... They must either withdraw or die." Ultimately his
mother-wife came to the rescue of her "babe of genius"; the cocks
were bought off, and in the long-talked-of sound-proof room the last
considerable work of his life, though painfully, proceeded. Meanwhile
"brother John" had married, and Mrs. Carlyle went to visit the couple at
Moffat. While there bad tidings came from Scotsbrig, and she dutifully
hurried off to nurse her mother-in-law through an attack from which the
strong old woman temporarily rallied. But the final stroke could not be
long delayed. When Carlyle was paying his winter visit to the Grange in
December news came that his mother was worse, and her recovery
despaired of; and, by consent of his hostess, he hurried off to
Scotsbrig,--"mournful leave given me by the Lady A., mournful
encouragement to be speedy, not dilatory,"--and arrived in time to hear
her last words. "Here is Tom come to bid you good-night, mother," said
John. "As I turned to go, she said, 'I'm muckle obleeged to you.'" She
spoke no more, but passed from sleep after sleep of coma to that of
death, on Sunday, Christmas Day, 1853. "We can only have one mother,"
exclaimed Byron on a like event--the solemn close of many storms. But
between Margaret Carlyle and the son of whom she was so proud there had
never been a shadow. "If," writes Mr. Froude, "she gloried in his fame
and greatness, he gloried more in being her son, and while she lived she,
and she only, stood between him and the loneliness of which he so often
and so passionately complained."

Of all Carlyle's letters none are more tenderly beautiful than those
which he sent to Scotsbrig. The last, written on his fifty-eighth
birthday, December 4th, which she probably never read, is one of the
finest. The close of their wayfaring together left him solitary; his
"soul all hung with black," and, for months to come, everything around
was overshadowed by the thought of his bereavement. In his journal of
February 28th 1854, he tells us that he had on the Sunday before seen a
vision of Mainhill in old days, with mother, father, and the rest getting
dressed for the meeting-house. "They are gone now, vanished all; their
poor bits of thrifty clothes, ... their pious struggling efforts; their
little life, it is all away. It has all melted into the still sea, it
was rounded with a sloop." The entry ends, as fitting, with a prayer: "O
pious mother! kind, good, brave, and truthful soul as I have ever found,
and more than I have elsewhere found in this world. Your poor Tom, long
out of his schooldays now, has fallen very lonely, very lame and broken
in this pilgrimage of his; and you cannot help him or cheer him ... any
more. From your grave in Ecclefechan kirkyard yonder you bid him trust in
God; and that also he will try if he can understand and do."

CHAPTER VI

THE MINOTAUR

[1853-1866]

Carlyle was now engaged on a work which required, received, and well nigh
exhausted all his strength, resulting in the greatest though the least
generally read of all his books. _Cromwell_ achieved, he had thrown
himself for a season into contemporary politics, condescending even,
contrary to his rule, to make casual contributions to the Press; but his
temper was too hot for success in that arena, and his letters of the time
are full of the feeling that the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ had set the world
against him. Among his generous replies to young men asking advice, none
is more suggestive than that in which he writes from Chelsea (March 9th
1850):--

If my books teach you anything, don't mind in the least
whether other people believe it or not; but lay it to
heart ... as a real message left with you, which you must
set about fulfilling, whatever others do.... And be not
surprised that "people have no sympathy with you." That is
an accompaniment that will attend you all your days if you
mean to live an earnest life.

But he himself, though "ever a fighter," felt that, even for him, it was
not good to be alone. He decided there "was no use railing in vain like
Timon"; he would go back again from the present to the past, from the
latter days of discord to seek countenance in some great figure of
history, under whose aegis he might shelter the advocacy of his views.
Looking about for a theme, several crossed his mind. He thought of
Ireland, but that was too burning a subject; of William the Conqueror, of
Simon de Montfort, the Norsemen, the Cid; but these may have seemed to
him too remote. Why, ask patriotic Scotsmen, did he not take up his and
their favourite Knox? But Knox's life had been fairly handled by M'Crie,
and Carlyle would have found it hard to adjust his treatment of that
essentially national "hero" to the "Exodus from Houndsditch." "Luther"
might have been an apter theme; but there too it would have been a strain
to steer clear of theological controversy, of which he had had enough.
Napoleon was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste. Looking over
Europe in more recent times, he concluded that the Prussian monarchy had
been the main centre of modern stability, and that it had been made so by
its virtual creator, Friedrich II., called the Great. Once entertained,
the subject seized him as with the eye of Coleridge's mariner, and, in
spite of manifold efforts to get free, compelled him, so that he could
"not choose but" write on it. Again and again, as the magnitude of the
task became manifest, we find him doubting, hesitating, recalcitrating,
and yet captive. He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own Memoirs
and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains through which he had to dig.
"Prussian Friedrich and the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust
lay crushing me with the continual question, Dare I try it? Dare I not?"
At length, gathering himself together for the effort, he resolved, as
before in the case of Cromwell, to visit the scenes of which he was to
write. Hence the excursion to Germany of 1852, during which, with the
kindly-offered guidance of Mr. Neuberg, an accomplished German admirer of
some fortune resident in London, he made his first direct acquaintance
with the country of whose literature he had long been himself the English
interpreter. The outlines of the trip may be shortly condensed from the
letters written during its progress to his wife and mother. He reached
Rotterdam on September 1st; then after a night made sleepless by "noisy
nocturnal travellers and the most industrious cocks and clamorous bells"
he had ever heard, he sailed up the river to Bonn, where he consulted
books, saw "Father Arndt," and encountered some types of the German
professoriate, "miserable creatures lost in statistics." There he met
Neuberg, and they went together to Rolandseck, to the village of Hunef
among the Sieben-Gebirge, and then on to Coblenz. After a detour to Ems,
which Carlyle, comminating the gaming-tables, compared to Matlock, and
making a pilgrimage to Nassau as the birthplace of William the Silent,
they rejoined the Rhine and sailed admiringly up the finest reach of the
river. From Mainz the philosopher and his guide went on to Frankfort,
paid their respects to Goethe's statue and the garret where _Werther_ was
written, the Judengasse, "grimmest section of the Middle Ages," and the
Roemer--election hall of the old Kaisers; then to Homburg, where they saw
an old Russian countess playing "gowpanfuls of gold pieces every
stake," and left after no long stay, Carlyle, in a letter to Scotsbrig,
pronouncing the fashionable Badeort to be the "rallying-place of such a
set of empty blackguards as are not to be found elsewhere in the world."
We find him next at Marburg, where he visited the castle of Philip of
Hesse. Passing through Cassel, he went to Eisenach, and visited the
neighbouring Wartburg, where he kissed the old oaken table, on which the
Bible was made an open book for the German race, and noted the hole in
the plaster where the inkstand had been thrown at the devil and his
noises; an incident to which eloquent reference is made in the lectures
on "Heroes." Hence they drove to Gotha, and lodged in Napoleon's room
after Leipzig. Then by Erfurt, with more Luther memories, they took rail
to Weimar, explored the houses of Goethe and of Schiller, and dined by
invitation with the Augustenburgs; the Grand Duchess, with sons and
daughters, conversing in a Babylonish dialect, a melange of French,
English, and German. The next stage seems to have been Leipzig, then in
a bustle with the Fair. "However," says Carlyle, "we got a book or two,
drank a glass of wine in Auerbach's keller, and at last got off safe to
the comparative quiet of Dresden." He ignores the picture galleries; and
makes a bare reference to the palaces from which they steamed up the Elbe
to the heart of Saxon Switzerland. There he surveyed Lobositz, first
battle-field of the Seven Years' War, and rested at the romantic mountain
watering-place of Toeplitz. "He seems," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, "to be getting
very successfully through his travels, thanks to the patience and
helpfulness of Neuberg. He makes in every letter frightful _misereres_
over his sleeping accommodations; but he cannot conceal that he is really
pretty well." The writer's own _misereres_ are as doleful and nearly
as frequent; but she was really in much worse health. From Toeplitz the
companions proceeded in weary stellwagens to Zittau in Lusatia, and so on
to

Herrnhut, the primitive city of the Moravian brethren: a
place not bigger than Annan, but beautiful, pure, and quiet
beyond any town on the earth, I daresay; and, indeed, more
like a saintly dream of ideal Calvinism made real than a town
of stone and lime.

Onward by "dreary moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred
"the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his
worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of
the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we have, October
1st:--

I am dead stupid; my heart nearly choked out of me, and my
head churned to pieces.... Berlin is loud almost as London,
but in no other way great ... about the size of Liverpool,
and more like Glasgow.

They spent a week there (sight-seeing being made easier by an
introduction from Lady Ashburton to the Ambassador), discovering at
length an excellent portrait of Fritz, meeting Tieck, Cornelius, Rauch,
Preuss, etc., and then got quickly back to London by way of Hanover,
Cologne, and Ostend. Carlyle's travels are always interesting, and would
be more so without the tiresome, because ever the same, complaints. Six
years later (1858) he made his second expedition to Germany, in the
company of two friends, a Mr. Foxton--who is made a butt--and the
faithful Neuberg. Of this journey, undertaken with a more exclusively
business purpose, and accomplished with greater dispatch, there are fewer
notes, the substance of which may be here anticipated. He sailed (August
21st) from Leith to Hamburg, admiring the lower Elbe, and then went out
of his way to accept a pressing invitation from the Baron Usedom and his
wife to the Isle of Ruegen, sometimes called the German Isle of Wight. He
went there by Stralsund, liked his hosts and their pleasant place, where
for cocks crowing he had doves cooing; but in Putbus, the Richmond of the
island, he had to encounter brood sows as well as cochin-chinas. From
Ruegen he went quickly south by Stettin to Berlin, then to Cuestrin to
survey the field of Zorndorf, with what memorable result readers of
_Friedrich_ know. His next halt was at Liegnitz, headquarters for
exploring the grounds of "Leuthen, the grandest of all the battles,"
and Molwitz--first of Fritz's fights--of which we hear so much in the
_Reminiscences_. His course lay on to Breslau, "a queer old city as ever
you heard of, high as Edinburgh or more so," and, by Landshut, through
the picturesque villages of the Riesen-Gebirge into Bohemia. There he
first put up at Pardubitz in a vile, big inn, for bed a "trough eighteen
inches too short, a mattress forced into it which cocked up at both
ends"--such as most travellers in remoter Germany at that period have
experienced. Carlyle was unfavourably impressed by the Bohemians; and
"not one in a hundred of them could understand a word of German. They
are liars, thieves, slatterns, a kind of miserable, subter-Irish
people,--Irish with the addition of ill-nature." He and his friends
visited the fields of Chotusitz and Kolin, where they found the "Golden
Sun," from which "the last of the Kings" had surveyed the ground, "sunk
to be the dirtiest house probably in Europe." Thence he made for Prague,
whose picturesque grandeur he could not help extolling. "Here," he
writes, enclosing the flower to his wife, "is an authentic wild pink
plucked from the battle-field. Give it to some young lady who practises
'the Battle of Prague' on her piano to your satisfaction." On September
15th he dates from Dresden, whence he spent a laborious day over Torgau.
Thereafter they sped on, with the usual tribulations, by Hochkirk,
Leipzig, Weissenfels, and Rossbach. Hurrying homeward, they were obliged
to decline another invitation from the Duchess at Weimar; and, making
for Guntershausen, performed the fatiguing journey from there to
Aix-la-Chapelle in one day, _i.e._ travelling often in slow trains from 4
A.M. to 7 P.M., a foolish feat even for the eupeptic. Carlyle visited the
cathedral, but has left a very poor account of the impression produced
on him by the simple slab sufficiently inscribed, "Carolo Magno." "Next
morning stand upon the lid of Charlemagne, abominable monks roaring
out their idolatrous grand music within sight." By Ostend and Dover he
reached home on the 22nd. A Yankee scamper trip, one might say, but for
the result testifying to the enormous energy of the traveller. "He speaks
lightly," says Mr. Froude, "of having seen Kolin, Torgau, etc. etc. No
one would guess from reading these short notices that he had mastered the
details of every field he visited; not a turn of the ground, not a brook,
not a wood ... had escaped him.... There are no mistakes. Military
students in Germany are set to learn Frederick's battles in Carlyle's
account of them."

During the interval between those tours there are few events of interest
in Carlyle's outer, or phases of his inner life which have not been
already noted. The year 1854 found the country ablaze with the excitement
of the Crimean War, with which he had as little sympathy as had Cobden
or Bright or the members of Sturge's deputation. He had no share in the
popular enthusiasm for what he regarded as a mere newspaper folly. All
his political leaning was on the side of Russia, which, from a safe
distance, having no direct acquaintance with the country, he always
admired as a seat of strong government, the representative of wise
control over barbarous races. Among the worst of these he reckoned the
Turk, "a lazy, ugly, sensual, dark fanatic, whom we have now had for 400
years. I would not buy the continuance of him in Europe at the rate of
sixpence a century." Carlyle had no more faith in the "Balance of power"
than had Byron, who scoffed at it from another, the Republican, side as
"balancing straws on kings' noses instead of wringing them off," _e.g._--

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