THE REAL CARLYLE.* THESE letters, following so closely upon the
heels of the first volume of Mr. Wilson's new Life, should dispel the chatter which has enveloped a great name ever since Froude's trans- gression. Stamped with that homely, sleepless sincerity which gives weight even to his most prejudiced words, Carlyle's corre- spondence must always stand high among his collected works. In the intimacy of letters he shed most of his vices, his dis- tempered, histrionic barbarism, his too frequent snarl in later days of saturnine obliquity. There is to be found here little of that Gothic grotesqueness with which he sallied forth to fell the " gigman " in the public lists. The tone, as in the best of his work, is never shrill, the truth of the man, like a river sunk from flood level, flows on in full but never flustered motion. Doubtless for some Carlyle's letters will always contain too much of dissertation. We commune here with a great man, who could never sufficiently throw off the cloak of seriousness to take a hand in the game of wit. But for compensation we have a rich sonority of utterance quite unique. Carlyle gave himself so royally to his friends that in this single volume he is, for those who can read with insight, completely revealed: There is no question of moment con- cerning either his character or his philosophy which he does not answer in• these three hundred pages. His practical tenderness for friends in difficulty, his profound courage, his faith (that strange blend of credulity and groviling scepticism), his detestation of all shams and pedantries, catchwords, respectabilities and dilettantisms, even his dyspepsia—all are here enshrined. The letters to Mill occupy two-thirds of the book. They were written between 1832 and 1869, but perhaps the best of them belong to the two years spent at Craigenputtock and Edinburgh before the final move to Chelsea in 1834. These years were of great significance in Carlyle's career. He had failed to find a publisher for Senior in 1831, and had retired baffled to Scotland to plunge himself into vast and varied reading, broken only by articles for the Reviews. Thus he lay fallow for a time. The ground of his genius had been ploughed up, indeed, and much of the seed already sown. But in the solitude of these years it WAS fortunately allowed to germinate undisturbed. He himself, we are made to feel, was conscious of the process, and it is strange to find the apostle of " work " urging on Mill patience and the virtue of idleness, though it be that of the pregnant loam. To this fact, crowning the manner of his upbringing, we owe perhaps the most significant quality of his genius, that with all its extravagance its roots, unlike those of the transcendental Emerson, were dug deep in earth, and that despite his loudness and truculent gesture he had a great, brooding, bottomless silence in his heart, where the " unspeak- abilities " might ripen for the harvest. What travail such honest husbandry cost him is well known. But the result was an authenticity of utterance kindred to that devout • Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart John Sterling and Robert Browning. Edited by Alexander Carlyle. London: T. Fisher Unwln. 125s. net.) language of Nature which shames any mere" dictionary style," and justified the mystic in him claiming that every word was a seed-grain Cast into all Time and Space to grow and work there for ever. But the later years covered by these letters to Mill is the dramatic background to Carlyle's French Revolu- tion. We can follow here that great and convulsed Epic from its genesis in a vague attraction towards the theme to the moment when the long struggle began, past that night of embarrassed catastrophe on which Mill had to cotifess the destruction of a whole year's labour, to the hour of final, exhausted victory. Few letters show the sterling manhood of Carlyle in clearer light than that in which, on the day following the tragic incident of the burnt MS., he writes to comfort his friend in his agony of mind. The attraction of these two natures for one another is surprising but under- standable. The punctilious, sequent, incontrovertible Mill appealed by contrast to one who all his days had to strive breathlessly to pen an instinctive chaos within a rational cosmos. And although Mill's humanitarianism must have seemed to Carlyle a trifle chilly, the quiet, industrious sincerity of the man plainly touched his heart. We have left ourselves little space in which to refer to the other letters. Those to Sterling are fully as enthralling and illuminating, and we dare venture that the last of them is the noblest letter of parting from this world that ever beat its way from one man's heart to another's. The Browning letters are few and less intimate. They contain, however, a most interesting, typical and contro- vertible assault on Shelley. The whole series is rich in contemporary criticisms both profound and wrong-headed, but always vital, and in those brief, pungent portraits, whether objective or subjective, of which Carlyle was a master and never so much So as when he wrote, as here, without a touch of self-consciousness. To read these letters, falling forty-two years after his death into a world of bleached formulas and desiccated doubts, is to take heart and brace the muscles. They are excellently edited, and although they may not convince the reader, anticipating the thunders of an enraged prophet, that Carlyle was as he writes "at bottom a very inoffensive sort of a fellow," they cannot fail to convey the truly Titan dimensions of his stature. Huuir I'A. F.11.7SSF.T.
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