BOOKS.
PROFESSOR NICHOL'S LIFE OF CARLYLE.* PROFESSOR NicHoL has done his work admirably, and with much of the fidelity which Carlyle himself displayed in compres- sing a vast deal of study and careful weighing of characteristics into sentences which will hardly betray to any one who does not know the subject well, how much labour they have involved. At the same time, we cannot fully agree with all his judgments, partly because we think Carlyle himself much more seriously astray on some of the greatest of all topics than Professor Nichol appears to think him,—partly because some of Pro- fessor Nichol's own wisest judgments seem to us more or less inconsistent with other judgments which be has set down. We hardly know any man of genius so great as Carlyle's, who is so fatiguing to the reader as Professor Nichol's hero. This is mostly perhaps on account of the rest- lessness which pervades almost all Carlyle writes. He is a literary volcano for whose eruptions we are always on the watch, even when we only see the smoke (which he is always advising other men to consume for themselves, but which he himself emits in much larger volume and with no pretence even of desiring to consume it) that proceeds from it in heavy masses, and neither hear the rumbling nor see the fire which at other times he belches forth. Now, watching for an erup- tion is not a tranquillising condition of mind, and Carlyle's readers are always on the watch for an eruption. Professor Nichol hardly does justice to his hero's extreme and incessant restlessness. Then, again, that a writer who is hardly ever willing to waive his role as a prophet, should be so absolutely deficient in humility, adds to the sense of fatigue. The Hebrew prophets,—and Professor Nichol tells us that Carlyle was essentially Hebrew, which we should accept only with a good deal of qualification,—were all men of profound humility, who hardly felt themselves worthy to be the medium of a divine message. Carlyle gives his readers the impression that the truths he announces derive a good deal of their splendour from the glow of his own genius. Consider only how haughtily he treats the distaste with which the religious world received his Life of Sterling,—a book which seems to us one of the most brilliant, but also, in its ostenta- tious patronage of his friend, one of the least pleasing which.he ever wrote. "The book," says Carlyle himself, "was utterly revolting, to the religious people in particular (to my surprise rather than otherwise). Don't believe in us either ! ' Not he, for certain ; can't, if you will know." That is the scornful mode in which he declares his own " exodus from Houndsditch." And it seems to us to take all the authority out of his so-called prophetic character. A man who never seems so much at his ease as when he is trampling on the most sacred beliefs of others never can be entitled to the name of a prophet. Pro- fessor Nichol says with great force : "Carlyle's peculiarity is that be combined the functions of a prophet and an artist, and that while now the one, now the other, was foremost, he never wholly forgot the one in the other" (p. 68). Substitute "a moral visionary" for "a prophet," and we should fully agree with Professor Nichol ; but there was much more in Carlyle of the visionary than of the prophet who held himself unworthy to be even the medium of divine utterances. And we should even say that the artist predominated over the visionary. Professor Nichol himself seems at other times to think so. For example, he quotes Carlyle's admissions that he never really believed heartily in Frederick the Great, though he had written his life and made the best he could of him, setting him up in it as an example to European Kings. "I never was admitted much to Frederick's confidence," he said, "and I never cared very much about him." "Yet," says Professor Nichol, "he determined, almost of malice prepense, to exalt the narrow though vivid Prussian as the last of the kings, the one genuine figure in the eighteenth century,' and though failing to prove his case, he has, like a loyal lawyer, made the best of his brief." Well, there is, it strikes us, a great deal more of the artist than of the prophet or even of the moral visionary about this resolve of Carlyle's, and this pertinacity in carrying out his resolve as the figure of Frederick grew more and more familiar to him. And even going back to his earlier books, in which there is • English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley. Thomas Carlyle. By John Nichol, LL.D., M.A., Balliol College, Oxford, Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the University of Cilasgow. London; Macmillan and Co.
less of the mere artist, and a good deal more of the moral visionary, we conceive that the artist has a great deal more to do even with the Life of Sterling, even with the French Revolution, even with Barter .Resartus, than the moral visionary.
And this brings us naturally to the remark that we think Professor Nichol somewhat exaggerates Carlyle's veracity, or sincerity, or whatever one may please to call it. That he honestly detested shams of all kinds, and exerted himself honestly to root up all that was insincere, whether in himself or in others, is true. But it is not in the nature of the born artist and idealist to deny himself touches that add greatly to the effect of an impressive picture, simply because it improves upon the reality. And when Mr. Nichol says (p. 69) that Carlyle "not only disdained to write a word he did not believe, but would not suppress a word he did believe," he seems to us greatly to exaggerate the truth. Carlyle was as much a mannerist as Rembrandt, and for much the same reason. Nay, his mannerism often led him into affectations, and affectations cannot be called the most rigidly veracious of the forms of speech. It would be impossible to imitate him so skilfully as he has often been imitated, if it were not essential to Carlyle to write in Carlylese—in other words, to try and mould nature into the favourite attitudes and aspects of his own thought, even when he must have seen clearly that he was putting a violence upon her. The artist who is a mannerist as well as an artist, cannot help falsifying a little when he sees what might be easily adapted to his own favourite school of conception. And in this sense undoubtedly Carlyle fell into formula, and into more or less theatrical atti- tudes which he had discovered his own unique power to render with thrilling effect. He loved to write in chiaro-oscnro, and often sacrificed what he called the veracities to that taste of his.
His whole political philosophy, for instance, if it can be called
so, was more than half an affectation. He no more saw his way to organising society under wise guidance than any one else, yet he storms away at the blockheadism of those who will not do it, as if it were a matter of will at all, and not rather of can. And his literary mind runs in the same
way into the shapes and moulds which lava naturally finds for itself, and that is another way of saying that he is guilty of a good deal of affectation, and is often perfectly conscious that he is not following the simplicity and infinite variety of Nature. "His utter genuineness," as Professor Nichol calls his manner (p. 156), seems to us more than doubtful. A great artist, who is also a great mannerist, can never be utterly genuine. His mannerism overlays his sincerity of vision. What Turner was as a landscape-painter, Carlyle was, to a very great extent, as a literary writer, and Turner's latest style, the style in which he painted "the
Angel standing in the Sun," for instance, was not unlike the style in which parts of the Latter-Day Pamphlets and Shooting Niagara were written. Still, this description of his style by
Professor Nichol is, with allowance made for Carlyle's favourite attitudes, both fine and subtle :—
"But though a rugged. Carlyle was the reverse of a careless or ready writer. He weighed every sentence : if in all his works, from Barter to the Reminiscences, you pencil-mark the most sug- gestive passages you disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping g his pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse,' now etch' his scenes with the tender touch of a Millet."
We think, too, that Professor Nichol decidedly ex- aggerates Carlyle's merits as a critic. He did great ser- vice to England in introducing us to Jean Paul Richter, Novalis, Hoffmann, and other of the German writers, with whose writings he had a special sympathy ; but he had a far too chromatic vision of his own to see any but a few great writers as they really were. His cri- ticism of Sir Walter Scott is nearly as bad as any criticism by a man of genius could be, and he had no profound insight into Goethe, much as he admired him. He did not see rightly either the weakness or the strength of the greatest of the German poets. Into Shakespeare, again, he never penetrated deeply ; and of his own greatest contemporaries, Wordsworth and Coleridge, his vision was thoroughly inadequate, though he could photograph their external peculiarities with his own racy and admirable humour. He taught us what to aim at in criticism, but his own mannerisms of thought were far :too deeply ingrained to allow of his realising his own ideal. Pro- fessor Nichol is surely overstepping the truth when he speaks of Carlyle's genius as showing, even in its earlier days, any- thing like "flexibility." We should have said that flexibility was just what it never showed, least of all as his ovin genius developed :—
" When treating congenial themes he errs by overestimate rather than by depreciation : among the qualities of his early work, which afterwards suffered some eclipse in the growth of other powers, is its flexibility. It was natural for Carlyle, his successor in genius in the Scotch lowlands, to give an account of Robert Burns which throws all previous criticism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong affinities to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his so-called heroes : but he is fair to the characters, if not always to the works, of Voltaire and Diderot, slurs over or makes humorous the escapades of Mirabeau, is un- deterred by the mysticism of Novella and in the fervour of his worship fails to see the gulf between himself and Goethe."
We hold that Professor Nichol's is far the best brief estimate that we have of Carlyle, but that he somewhat exaggerates his merits as a prophet and preacher, and hardly appreciates the tragedy of the close of his career in that role. That one who certainly thought himself a prophet should end, as Pro- fessor Nichol admits, in an attitude of mind a good deal more negative and uncertain than he began, is surely a. tragic rather than, what Professor Nichol terms it, a " citadel- crowned " exit.
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