BOOKS.

. CARLYLE'S REMINISCENCES.

TIIERE can be no doubt as to the permanent vitality of this book, or of the careless genius which produced it after this random fashion, at an age when Carlyle was looking back upon a long and laborious life. But there may be, we think, much doubt as to the manner in which Mr. Fronde has exercised the absolute discretion entrusted to him by Carlyle as to the use be should make of these reminiscences. We do not think that Carlyle, with his great pride and his deep reserve, would ever have approved of the inclusion in this book of all the constant references to his wife, and to his love for her, poured out with the freedom of a diarist, though of a diarist who has formed for himself that semi-artificial manner which suggests a consciousness of audience. The rhap- sodies on his "noblest," " queenliest," " beautifullest," and so forth, natural enough to the old man in his desolation, should not, in our estimation, have been given to the world as they were written. What is the proper sphere of privacy, if the half-remorseful self-reproaches of the tenderest love, accusing itself of inadequacy, are to be made public to all the world P

We have said so much elsewhere on the morose aspect of these graphic Reminiscences, that we shall deal here only with the pleasanter and more brilliant characteristics of the book. And nothing contained in it is Flo affecting as the few pages devoted

to the memory of James Carlyle. Carlyle speaks of himself, with a certain dignified pride, as "the humble James Carlyle's work ;" and no doubt, there was much of the father in the son, though the stern, taciturn conciseuess.of the father was blended in the son with the artistic restlessness and discontent, which seek relief in words and cannot hold the mouth, as it were with a bridle, though it were pain and grief to do so. Here you see Carlyle's rich intellectual inheritance plainly enough :—

"None of us will ever forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing frearfrom his untutored soul, full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was) with all manner of potent words which he appropriated and applied with a surprising accuracy you often would not guess whence—brief, energetic, and which I should say convoyed the most perfect picture, definite, clear, not in ambitious colours but in full white sunlight, of all the dialects I have ever listened to. Nothing did I ever hoar him undertake to render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Never shall we again hear such speech as that was. The whole district knew of it, and laughed joyfully over it, not knowing how otherwise to express the feeling it gave them ; emphatio I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths, his words were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that he exaggerated (which ten- dency I also inherit), yet only in description, and for the sake chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man of rigid, even scrupulous, vera- city. I have often hoard him turn back when he thought his strong words were misleading, and correct them into mensurative accuracy."

All these qualities reappeared in Thomas Carlyle, even to the last feature,—the compunctious withdrawal of something which

bad overshot the mark, though often in Thomas Carlyle's case so reluctant a withdrawal that the withdrawal failed of its effect. .But then Ca.rlylegoes on to paint in his father a char- acteristic which he had absolutely failed to inherit :—nay, he had even fallen into something like an excess of the very weakness from which he declares his father so completely free :—

" A virtue he had which I should learn to imitate. He never spoke of what was disagreeable and past. I have often wondered and admired at this. The thing that he bad nothing to do with, he did " Reminiscences+ by Thomas Onrlyie. Edited by James Anthony Froudo, Two Vols. 181 Loudon : Longnians. nothing with. His was a healthy mind. In like manner I have. seen him always when we young ones, half roguishly, and provokingly without doubt, were perhaps repeating sayings of his, sit as if he did not bear us at all. Never once did I know him utter a word, only once, that I remember, give a look in such a case. Another virtue the example of which has passed strongly into me was his settled placid indifference to the clamours or the murmurs of public opinion. For the judgment of those that had no right or power to. judge him, he seemed simply to care nothing at all. He very rarely' spoke of despising such things. He contented himself with altogether- disregarding them. Hollow babble it was for him, a thing, as Fichte said, that did not exist ; das gar nicht existirte. There was something truly great in this. The very perfection of it hid from you the extent of the attainment."

Carlyle, on the contrary, loved, like Hamlet, to " unpack his' soul" with words, even when, like Hamlet, he was profuse in his self-reproaches for the relief which that unpacking of his soul certainly gave him. But even as regards this different temperament of the two men, it is clear that the father had something of that high-pressure of emotion in him which gave the literary writer his motive-power :—

"I have often seen him weep, too ; his voice would thicken and his lips curve while reading the 13ible. He had a merciful heart to reat distress, though he hated idleness, and for imbecility and fatuity had. no tolerance. Once—and I think once only—I saw him in a passion of tears, it was when the remains of my mother's fever hung upon her, in 1817, and seemed to threaten the extinction of her reason. We were all of us nigh desperate, and ourselves mad. lie burst at last into quite a torrent of grief, cried piteously, and threw himself on the floor and lay moaning. I wondered, and had no words, no tears. It was as if a rock of granite had melted, and was thawing into water. What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!"

In painful contrast to this sketch of the strong peasant from whom Carlyle was so justly proud to be descended, is his sketch of the light literary men of the world, whom he felt (sometimes. unjustly) to be writers and nothing more. Take, for instance, a bitter, but we suppose substantially true, account of De' Quince)', though it seems to us clear that Carlyle did not suffi- ciently appreciate that vivid seeiiig power in De Quincey which was his own greatest literary strength :— "Tommy Bobber was a smirking little dumpy Unitarian book- seller in the Bull-ring, regarded as a kind of curiosity and favourite among these people, and had seen me. One showery day Iliad took shelter in his shop ; picked up a new magazine, found in it a cleverish/ and completely hostile criticism of my Wilhelm Meister, of my Goethe, and self, &c., read it faithfully to the end, and have never set eye on it since. On stepping out my bad spirits did not feel much elevated by the dose just swallowed, but I thought with myself, 'Phis man is perhaps right on some points ; if so, let him be ad-. monitory !' And he was so (on a Scotticism, or perhaps two) ; and I did reasonably soon (in not above a couple of hours), dismiss him to the devil, or to Jericho, as an ill-given, unserviceable kind of entity in my coarse through this world. It was De Quincey, ns I often enough heard afterwards from foolish-talking persons. ' What matter who, yo foolish-talking persons ?' would have been my silent answer,. as it generally pretty much was. I recollect, too, how in Edinburgh a year or two after, poor Do Quincey, whom I wished to know, was reported to tremble at the thought of such a thing ; and did fly pale as ashes, poor little soul, the first time we actually met. He was a pretty little creature, full of wire-drawn ingenuities, bankrupt enthu- siasms, bankrupt pride, with the finest silver-toned low voice, and most elaborate gently-winding courtesies and ingenuitios in conversa- tion. What wouldn't one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk!' That was Her criticism of him, and it was right good. A bright, ready, and melodious talker, but in the end an inconclusive and long-winded. One of the smallest man figures I ever saw ; shaped like a pair of tongs, and hardly above five feet in all. When be sate, you would have taken him, by candlelight, for the beauti-. fullest little child ; bluo.eyed, sparkling face, had there not been a. something, too, which said 'Eccovi—this child has been in hell? After leaving Edinburgh I never saw him, hardly ever heard of him. His fate, owing to opium, &e., was hard and sore, poor fine-strung weak creature, launched 80 into the literary career of ambition and. mother of dead doge."

The graphic force shown in single sentences,—frequently repre- sentative only of what Carlyle himself discerned, not of the- reality behind what he discerned, but still most telling, as show- ing what his quick eye first lit upon,—is extraordinary. Thus he describes John Stuart Mill's talk as "rather wintry" and

sawdustish," but" always well-informed and sincere." A great social entertainer of those times—Lady Hollaud—he dashes off as "a kind of hungry, ornamented witch, looking over at one with merely carnivorous views,"—views, we suppose, as to what she could make of him from the entertainer's point of view ; and ho- describes a speech of the Duke of Wellington's on Lord Ellen- borough's " Gates of Somnauth," as "a speech of the most, haggly, hawky, pinched, and meagre kind, so far as utterance and eloquence went, but potent for conviction beyond any other." No wonder that Irving, who knew Carlyle so intimately, said of him to Henry Drummond that "few leave such eyes." Even

in describing scenes or incidents, the old man's language beats in vividness the most vivid of our modern describers. He daehes off a slight walking tour with Irving, with all its joyous iu linee so clear and strong, that we seem to have been with him in his youth :-

" In vacation time, twice over, I made n. walking tear with him. First time I think WFLS to the Trottachs, and home by Lech Lenient], Greenock, Glasgow, etc., many parts of which areas till visible to me. Thu party generally was to be of four ; one Piers, who was Irving's housemate or oven landlord, achoolmastor of Abbotshall, i.e., of The Links,' at the southern extra-barghal part of Kirkcaldy, a cheerful scatterbrained creature who wont ultimately as preacher or professor -of something to the Cape of Good Hope, aud one Brown (James Brown), who had Succeeded Irving in Haddington, and was now tutor somewhere. The fall rally was not to be till Stirling; even Piers was gone ahead ; and Irving and I, after an official dinner with the imrghal dignitaries of Kirkcaldy, who strove to be pleasant, set out together one grey August evening by Forth sands towards Terry- burn. Piers was to have beds ready for us there, and we cheerily walked along our mostly dark and intricate twenty-two miles. Bat Piers had nothing serviceably ready ; we could not even discover Piers at that dead hour (2 a.m.), and had a good deal of groping and adventuring before a poor inn opened to us with two coarse, clean beds in it, in which we instantly fell asleep. Piers did in person rouse us next morning about six, but we concordantly met him with mere ha-ha's and inarticulate hootings of satirical rebuke, to such sxtent that Piers, convicted of nothing but heroic punctuality, flung himself out into the rain again in momentary indignant puff, and strode away for Stirling, whore we next saw him after four or five hours. I remember the squalor of our bedroom in the dim, rainy light, and how little we cared for it in our opulence of youth. The sight of giant Irving in a shortiala shirt on the sanded floor, drinking patiently a large tankard of 'penny whaup' (the smallest beer in sreation) before beginning to dress, is still present to me as comic. Of sublime or tragic, the night before a mysterious great red glow is much more memorable, ble which had long hung before us in the murky sky, growing gradually brighter and bigger, till at last we found it must be Carron Ironworks, on the other side of Forth, one of the most impressive sights. Ohr march to Stirling was under pouring rain for most part, but I recollect enjoying the romance of it ; Kin- sardine, Culross (Ca'ros), Clackmannan, here they are then ; what a wonder to be here! The Links of Forth, the ()chills, Grampians, Forth itself, Stirling, lion-shaped, ahead, like a lion couchant with the castle for his crown ; all this was beautiful in spite of rain. Wel- some too was the inside of Stirling, with its fine warm inn and the siceellent refection and thorough drying and refitting we got there, Piers and Brown looking pleasantly on. Strolling and sight-seeing, (day now very fine—Stirling all washed) till we marched for Donne in the evening (Brig of blue and arrowy Irving and I took that by-way in the dusk); breakfast in Callender next morning, and get to Loch Kairine in an hour or two more. I have not been in that region again till August last year, four days of magnificently perfect hospitality with Stirling of Keir. Almost surprising how mournful it was to 'look on this picture and on that' at interval of fifty years."

But perhaps the most telling miniature in these Reminiscences is that of Jeffrey acting to Mrs. Carlyle and himself the various

kinds of orators, "the windy-grandiloquent," "the ponderous stupid," "the airy stupid," and finally, "the abstruse costive," who is thus delineated

"At length he gave as the abstruse costive specimen, which had a meaning and no utterance for it, but wenl about clambering, stum- bling, as on a path of loose boulders, and ended in total downbreak, amid peals of the heartiest breeder from us all. This of the aerial little sprite standing there in fatal collapse, with the brightest of eyes sternly gazing into utter nothingness and dumbness, was one of the meet tickling and genially ludicrous things I ever saw ; and it prettily winded up our little drama. I often thought of it afterwards, and of what a part mimicry plays among human gifts."

What is rather remarkable in a man of Carlyle's birth, there :seems to have been an intolerable fastidiousness about him, not only in relation to people, but to sounds and sights, which must, we suppose, ho ascribed to the artistic vein in his tempera- ment. He says quite frankly :—" In short, as has been enough indicated elsewhere, I was advancing towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in 'this my Edinburgh purgatory ; and had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of various kinds for several years coming ; the first, and much the worst, two or three of which were to be enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think of in part even yet ! The bodily part of them was a kind of base agony (arising mainly in the want of any extant or discoverable fence between my -coarser fellow-creatures and my more sensitive self), and might and could easily (had the age been pious or thoughtful) have been spared a poor creature like me. Those hideous disturbances to sleep, &c., a very little real .care and goodness might prevent all that ; and I look back upon it still with a kind of angry protest, and would have my successors saved from it." And in a later page he adds his confession that he liked, on the whole, social converse with the aristocracy best :—" Certain of the aristocracy, however, did seem to me still very noble ; and,

with due limitation of the grossly worthless (none of whom had we to do with), I should. vote at present that, of classes known to me in England, the aristocracy (with its perfection of human politeness, its continual grace of bearing and of acting, stead- fast honour,' light address and cheery stoicism), if you see well into it, is actually yet the hest of English classes." That is a very curious testimony to the effect of Carlyle's artistic feeling in modifying his own teaching as to "the gospel of work." It was not the gospel of work which had made even the noblest of the aristocracy what they were.

After reading these Reminiscences, one cannot but ask one- self in what respect was Carlyle really a great man, and where did. he fall short of true greatness P We should say that he was really great in imagination,--very great in insight into the more expressive side of human character,—groat in Scotch humour, though utterly unable to appreciate the lighter kinds of true humour, like Lamb's,—and very great, too, in industry, quite indefatigable in small painstakings, whenever he thought that the task to which he had devoted himself was worthy of him. But he was far from great, even weak in judgment, far from great, even narrow in sympathy, far from great, even purblind. in his appreciation of the importance to be attached to the various mechauisna of human life. It ie singular that one who manifested. his 'genius chiefly by history,— or should we rather say, by his insight into and delineation of some of the most critical characters in history, and some of the most vivid popular scenes in history P—should have been so totally devoid of what we may call the true historical sense,—the appreciation, we mean, of the inherited conditions and ineradicable habits of ordinary national life. There was something of the historical Don Quixote about Carlyle; he tilted. at windmills, and did net know that ho was tilting at windmills. He had so deep an appreciation of the vivid flashes of consciousness which mark all great popular crises, because they mark all great personal crises, that he wanted to raise all human fife and. all common popular life to the level of the high self- conscious stage. He never • thoroughly appreciated the mean- ing of habit. He never thoroughly understood the value of routine. He never adequately entered. into the power of tradition. He judged of human life as if will and emotion were all in all. He judged of political life as if great men and great occasions ought to be all in all, and was furious at the waste of force involved in doing things as men had been accustomed to do them, wherever that appeared to be a par- tinily ineffectual way. And his error in judging of peoples is equally traceable in his judgments on individuals. If a man had a strong interest in the routine and. detail of life, he called him " sawdnetish." If he had a profound belief in. any popular ideas beyond those acknowledged by himself,. Carlyle probably called him moonshiny. Such meu as John Mill came under the one condemnation, such men as Mazzini under the other. And yet either John Mill or Mazzini maybe said to have applied a more effectual knowledge of men to the historical conditions of their own time, than Thomas Carlyle. Indeed, once go beyond the world of the vivid personal and popular emotions and passions, and Carlyle's insight seems to have been very limited, and his genius .dis- appears.