THE MOROSE SIDE OF CARLYLE. .

THE impressive book which has just appeared, and. which will paint such a picture of Thomas Carlyle for all generations to come as oven Titian, in that "stinted and diffi- cult painter's language" of which Chalmers spoke to Carlyle, never could have painted, is not one that will, on the whole, present what we can call a favourable view of him. It is a picture with almost a permanent scowl on it. What we mean is this,—that atone of moroseness runs through the whole tenor of the "Reminiscences," except only the cordial and glowing portion devoted to the delineation of Carlylo's own family. If Carlyle ever admired any one genuinely, it certainly was Edward Irving. The most pathetic, and also far the most poetical passage he ever wrote, is the conclusion Of his short essay on Irving's death in "The Miscellanies ;" and all through this new picture of Irving, you see the genuine love and admiration of the man struggling with the grudging spirit which prevailed so curiously in all Carlyle's estimates of his contemporaries. But yet the reminiscences even of Irving are not what one desires. it is not so much the express criticisms passed on him, which are very likely true, but the self-withholding attitude of mind in which they are passed, aud still more the enormous preponderance of Carlyle's own figure in the whole of the sketch nominally devoted to his friend. You can hardly read a page without feeling that Carlyle was always mentally com- paring his own powers to Irving's, and, in spite of his hearty anathemas on the world's praise, feeling something of the bitterness of the difference between the world's appreciation of him and its appreciation of Irving. And that Carlyle should have felt this at a time when he himself had become so famous, and Irving's fame was just lapsing into a tradition, seems to us

to show in a painfully emphatic form that grudging, ungenerous, peasant side of him, which forces itself quite unexpectedly upon the reader throughout these reminiscences. This is not a plea- sant thing to say of a really great man, so recently dead. But, . except the marvellously graphic genius everywhere present,—a graphic genius all the more astounding, when we remember that Carlyle was already seventy-two when the earliest of these reminiscences, except that which concerns hie father, was written,—this is the chief feature of the book. And this morose criticism, though so freely poured out as it is, never seems to be painful to him. The gall mingled with his appreciation always reads as if it wore the most satisfactory part of it to the writer. There is a cruel sort of gusto in the acrid touches, from which one shrinks. But it is right to say that this has absolutely no application to Carlyle's sketch of his own family. More profoundly affectionate and reverent painting than that of his father, mother, and sisters, has never been given to the world. That is the only part of the " Reminiscences " which raises Carlyle in our estimation ; but if that stood alone, it would raise him greatly.

To illustrate what we mean when we say that this book betrays a profound and almost intolerable deficiency in charity, —nay, more, in the respect for charity, in the wish to foster charity,—on Carlyle's part, let us extract his very powerful picture of Irving's schoolmmiter, Adam Hope, one of the finest bits of painting, and, if true, one of the most painful ; but,

whether true or not, one of the most expressive of the radical deficiency in Carlyle to be found in the whole book :—

"One of the circumstances of Irving's boyhood ought not to be neglected by his biographer—the remarkable schoolmaster he had. Old Adam Hope,' perhaps not yet fifty in Irving's time, WAS all along a notability in Annan. What had been his specific history or employ- ment before this of schoolmastering I do not know, nor was he my schoolmaster except incidentally for, a few weeks, once or twice, as substitute for some absentee who had the office. But I can remember on one such occasion reading in Sallust with him, and how he road it and drilled us in it ; and I have often enough seen him teach, and knew him well enough. A strong-built, bony, but lean kind of man, of brown complexion, and a pair of the sharpest, not the sweetest black eyes. Walked in a lounging, stooping figure ; in the street broad-brimmed and in clean frugal rustic clothes ; in his school-room bare-headed, hands usually crossed over back, and with his effective leather etrap (' cat' as he called it, not tame, for it was not slit at all) hanging ready over his thumb if requisite anywhere. In my time he had a couple of his front teeth quite black, which was very visible, as his month usually wore a settled humanly contemptuous grin. 'Nothing good to be expected from you or from those you came of, ye little whelps, but we must get from you the best you have, and not complain of anything.' This was what the grin seemed to say ; but the black teeth (jet-black, for he chewed tobacco also to a slight extent, never spitting) were always mysterious to me, till at length I found they were of cork, the product of Adam's frugal penknife, and could be removed at pleasure. He was a man humanly contemptuous of the world, and valued suffrages ' at a most low figure in comparison. I should judge an extremely proud man ; for the rest an inexorable logician, a Calvinist at all points, and Burgher Scotch Seceder to the backbone. Ho had written a tiny English grammar latterly (after Irving's time and before mine), which was a very compact, lucid, and complete little piece; and was regarded by the natives, especially the young natives who had to learn from it, with a certain awe, the feat of authorship in print being then somewhat stupendous and beyond example in those parts. He did not know very much, though still a good something ; geometry (of Euclid), Latin, arithmetic, English syntax. But what he did profess or imagine himself to know, he knew in every fibre, and to the very bottom. More rigorously solid teacher of the young idea, so far as he could carry it, you might have searched for through the world in vain. Self-delusion, half-knowledge, sham instead of reality, could not get existed in his presence. He had a Socratic way with him ; would accept the hopeless pupil's half- knowledge, or plausible sham of knowledge, with a kind of welcome. ' Him ! hm ! yes ;' and then gently enough begin a chnin of inquiries more and more surprising to the poor pupil, till he had reduced him to zero—to mere non plus ultra, and the dismal perception that his sham of knowledge had been fiat misknowledge, with a spice of dis- honesty added. This was what he called making a boy fast.' For the poor boy had to sit in his place under arrest all day or day after day, meditating those dismal new-revealed facts, and boating ineffec- tually his poor brains for some solution of the mystery and feasible road out. He might apply again at pleasure. I have made it out, Sir.' But if again found self-deluded, it was only a new padlock to those fastenings of his. They were very miserable to the poor peni- tent, or impenitent, wretch. I remember my father once describing to us a call he had made on Hope during the mid-day hour of in- terval, whom ho found reading or writing something, not having eared to lock the door and to go home, with three or four bits of boys sitting prisoners, made fast,' in different parts of the room ; all perfectly miserable, each with a rim of black worked 'out round his eye-sockets (the effect of salt tears wiped by knuckles rather dirty). Adam, though not cat-like of temper or in- tention, had a kind of cat-pleasure in surveying and playing with these captive mice. He was a praise and glory to well- doing boys, a beneficent terror to the ill-doing or dishonest blockhead sort ; and did what was in his power to canoe (or educate) and make available the net amount of faculty discoverable in each, and separate firmly the known from the unknown or misknown in those young heads. On Irving, who always spoke of him with mirthful affection, he had produced quietly not a little effect ; prepared him well for his triumphs in geometry and Latin at college, and through life you could always notice, overhung by such • strange draperies and huge superstructures so foreign to it, something of that primteval basis of rigorous logic and clear articulation laid for him in boyhood by old Adam Hope. Old Adam, indeed, if you know the Atm:mites end him, will be curiously found visible there to this day ; an argumentative, clear-headed, sound-hearted, if rather conceited and contentious set of people, more given to intellectual pursuits than some of their neighbours. I consider Adam an original meritorious kind of man, and regret to think that his sphere was so limited."

A finer sketch of a worse sort of schoolmaster for the average boy would be hard to produce. And one reads with unbounded regret Carlyle's complete sympathy with that type of

schoolmaster,—his honourable appreciation of it, as of some- thing noble and worthy of the Scotch genius. No doubt, quick and vivid boys might profit by the drilling of such a man. But how about the poor little wretches, "perfectly miserable, each with a rim of black worked out round his eye-sockets (the effect of salt tears wiped by knuckles rather dirty)," whom Adam Hope had "made fast ?" We never read a more cruel picture. Socratic, indeed ! Why, Socrates made the art of teaching to consiet in delivering a boy of the truth, not in leading him as far as the certainty of his own confusions, and then "making him fast." A more painful testimony to the utter limitation of Adam Hope's nature could not have been imagined, than that which Carlyle frankly gives as a sort, of praise. Adam Hope, perhaps, did what he could, and never dreamt

that patience and pity for a stupid boy's confusions of mind was part of a schoolmaster's duty. But that Carlyle ahould hold up such a type of fidelity as this to* the admira- tion of the world, only shows how little he had in him of that open-heartodness which is the true teacher's first qualification for his task. Bat indeed, Adam Hope's limitations were in great measure his own. He looked at the greater part of the world in much the same light; and was pleased best when he or any other of his heroes,—say, the narrow brute Friedrich Wilhelm, father of the great Frederick,— had "made fast" some of the suffering wretches under his dominion with even crueller fetters than those of Adam Hope. Carlyle had a grudge against the stupidity of

the world, like his favourite schoolmaster, and looked on unpitifully at the discoloured, tear-stained rims round so many eyes: "Tragic-ineffectual," indeed, he would generally call the world. But the tragic side of it always seems in his pages to arouse in him a spice of grim satisfaction. No ineffectuality, no tragedy,—no tragedy, no triumph ; that is the kind of im- pression left on us after reading a considerable number of Carlye's sketches. There is a gleam of triumph in all his black moods.

No doubt, the excuse for a great deal of this atrabiliousuess is the terrible dyspepsia from which Carlyle suffered,—a kind of dyspepsia probably far more trying to the temper than it over was to the constitution, and which acting on his sensitive, artistic temperament,—for that he had the intensely sensitive and jealous temperament so common in the artist, every page shows us,--,-produced results anything but favourable to his

charity. At the same time, what we find such fault with, is not so much his grumpiness, as his obvious pride in his own

grumpiness. He never seems to have thoroughly hated that grudging temperament of his, or desired to change his skin, if it were but permitted him to do it. He goes about with a secret pride in it, as of something that he hugged and treasured. One cannot read such a passage as the following, for example, and not feel how be treasures his grudge :—

"I think it must have been the latter part of next year, 1883, when Jeffrey's correspondence with me sputtered out into some- thing of sudden life again ; and something so unlucky that it proved to be essentially death instead ! The CABO was this we heard copiously in the newspapers that the Edinburgh people in a meritorious scientific spirit were about remodelling their old Astronomical Observatory ; and at length that they bad brought it to the proper pitch of real equipment, and that nothing was now wanting but a fit observer to make it scientifically useful and notable. I had hardly oven looked through a telescope, but had good strength in mathematics, in astronomy, and did not doubt but I could soon be at home in such an enterprise if I fairly entered on it. My old enthusiasms, 1 felt too, wore not dead, though so long asleep. We were eagerly desirous of some humblest anchorage, in the finance way, among our fellow-creatures; my heart's desire, for many years past and coming, was always to find any honest employment by which one might regu- larly gain one's daily broad! Often long after this (while hopelessly writing the French Revolution,' for example, hopelessly of money or any other success from it), I thought my case BO tragically hard : 'could learn to do honestly so many things, nearly all the things I have ever seen done, from the making of shoes up to the engineering of canals, architecture of mansions as palatial as you liked, and per- haps to still higher things of the physical or spiritual kind ; would moreover toil HO loyally to do my task right, not wrong, and am for- bidden to try any of them ; see the practical world closed against me as with brazen doors, and must stand hero and perish idle!' In a word, I had got into considerable spirits about that astronomical employment, fancied myself in the silent midnight, interrogating the eternal stars, &e., with something of real geniality—in addition to financial considerations ; and, after a few days, in the light, friendly time, with modesty and brevity, applying to my Lord-Advocate for his countenance as the first or preliminary step of procedure, or per- haps. it was virtually in his own appointment—or perhaps again (for I quite forget), I wrote rather as inquiring what he would think of inc in reference to it ? The poor bit of letter still BOOMS to MO un- exceptionable, and the answer was prompt and surprising I Almost, or quite by return of post, I got, not a flat refusal only, but an angry, vehement, almost shrill-sounding, and scolding one, as if it had bea'n a crime and an insolence in the like of me to think of such a thing. Thing was intended, as I soon found, for his old Jermyn-stroet Secre- tary (my taciturn friend with the blear eyes) ; and it was, indeed, a plain inconvenience that the like of me should apply for it, but not a crime or an insolence, by any means. 'The like of me l" thought I, and my provocation quickly subsided into contempt. For I had in Edinburgh a kind of mathematical reputation withal, and could have expected votes far stronger than Jeffrey's on that subject. But I perceived the thing to be settled, believed withal that the poor secre- tary, though blear-eyod when I last saw him, would do well enough, as in effect I understood he did ; that his master might have reasons of his own for wishing a provisionary settlement to the poor man ;

and that, in short, I was an outsider, and had nothing to say to all that. By the first post I accordingly answered, in the old light style, thanking briefly for at least the swift despatch, affirming the maxim,

'Ws fiat qui cite dat,' even in case of refusal, and good-humouredly enough leaving the matter to rest on its own basis. Jeffrey returned

to it, evidently somewhat in repentant mood (his tone had really been splenetic sputtery and improper, poor worried man) ; but I took no notice, and only marked for my own private behoof what exiguous resource of practical help for me lay in that quarter, and how the economical and useful, there as elsewhere, would always override the sentimental and ornamental. I had internally no kind of anger against my would-be generous friend. Had not ho, after all, a kind of gratuitous regard for me, perhaps as much as I for him ? Nor was there a diminution of respect, perhaps only a clearer view how little respect there had been 1"

In point of fact, all this panegyric on himself for beiug so willing to do any sort of routine work is hardly true. He had found work as a schoolmaster, and the ability to do it, but only decided that it was absolutely intolerable to him, and that he would undergo anything rather than continue it. Very likely he was right. He, like Adam Hope, had not the breadth of sympathy with ignorance and helplessness, necessary to aid young people into finding their own powers. But still Carlyle need hardly have lifted up his voice in such profound self-pity for the un- attainability of even routine work, when he had had plenty of such work in his hands, and had rejected it. He was clearly apt at finding grievances. He tells us, for instance, what a brilliant and interesting pupil he had in Charles Buller. But when Charles Buller and he arc exiled for a fortnight to lodgings at Kew, for the better prosecution of the young man's studies, Carlyle is irate and indignant :— " The only thing that did ever take effect was the shifting of Charles and me out to solitary lodgings at Kew Green, an isolating of us two (pro tempers) over our lessons there, one of the dreariest and uncomfortablest things to both of us. It lasted for about a fortnight, till Charles, I suppose privately pleading, put an end to it as intoler- able and useless both (for one could not 'study,' but only pretend to do it in such an element !)"

This man of genius, who has taught us all to rectify our lives by diminishing our insatiable demand for happiness almost to zero, and being even thankful to get hanged, if that is what will best serve the purpose of Providence, was evidently no very stern practisor of his own principles, when even banishment for a fortnight to Kew with a brilliant and affectionate pupil was intolerable to him.

We have, perhaps, said too much of the morose side of this great man. But it is not as a personal criticism that we attach to this weakness its chief importance. It is because this morose spirit enters so deeply into Carlyle's view of the Universe, and of the government of God,—because it seems to us the true root of his rebellion against Christianity,—that we have called attention to his strange glorification of the per- secuting spirit,—not of course as applied to opinion, but as applied to incapacity and all rudimentary human powers,—and the depth to which this persecuting spirit coloured all his personal reflections.