MR. E. P. HOOD ON THOMAS CARLYLE.* 'IT is not
to be doubted," says Mr. Hood, "there are critics who have essayed to handle Mr. Carlyle who are altogether unequal to the task," and after a perusal of this volume, we are inclined to agree with him. The author alludes somewhere to the intoxicating influence of Mr. Carlyle's writings, and this in- fluence will perhaps account for the staggering, incoherent style- of his disciple, whose pages supply as striking an instance as we remember to have met with of literary inebriety. "We may notice," he observes, "that almost always what is called a pure and transparent style is the associate of a cold heart,"—an opinion. which will perhaps account for the turbid, rhapsodical language which abounds in these pages. But we have always thought that a pure style, so far from being a sign of moral delinquency, is a proof that the writer is a master of his subject, and is able to express himself clearly because he knows thoroughly what he has to say. Perhaps we are mistaken, and most assuredly we are so, if Mr. Hood's chapters on Mr. Carlyle are to be regarded as a model. It is possible he knows what he means by his metaphors, similes, and illustrations, but a sane and sober person wilt, we suspect, be unable to follow Mr. Hood in his rhetorical ffights. How, for instance, can a man, blessed only with common- sense, understand the meaning of an author who affirms that the Saner Resartus is a "wonderful pillar of fire and cloud," and is also "the birth of Jean Paul Richter and Fichte, but in one book ;" and that Mr. Carlyle himself is not only a chief prophet,. but "an edifice to which all the Stuart Mills, Sir William Hamil- tons, Tyndalls, Huxleys, and Tennysons, and even the Brownings, his nearest compeers, are as separate stones." It is difficult to. say what Mr. Carlyle is not, according to Mr. Hood's showing. He is said to rise out of the literature of his times bold, shapeless, even awful, the Ailsa Crag or Bass Rock of letters. He is like a solemn, stricken, silent monarch ; he is a weary-hearted king, he is the Hamlet of the age, he sits in his den like a literary anchorite, with an eloquence, passion, and invective keen. as the livid [Mr. Hood probably means " lurid "] lightnings which shot round the chained Prometheus ; he nurses his great soul in silence, and has within him the strength of a century of writers. We learn, also, that his Scaldic letters flame through all students' hearts, that his writings are Babylonia bricks, the cyclopean order of literary architecture, that language in his hands writhes and gesticulates, that, indeed, he in not satisfied with mere language, but makes his syllables leap up into vivid life before the eye. When Mr. Hood passes from general remarks like these to particular criticism, he does not become a whit more coherent or intelligible. Thus we read that Past and Present is Tintern Abbey restored, that Sorter Resartus is a mosaic fashioned from the rocks of a wizard's cave, and full of such wild, distorted visions as might throng through- the brain of a blind giant in a dream ; that its words fly hurtling through the air like the darts of Apollyon and Christian in fiery conflict, that they sound like the ring of the hammer on Vulcan's forges, that it is an enchanted isle where shaggy Calibans and. musical Ariels move round us, that in it gleams of ethereal tenderness and spasms of madness go floating up and down, while scenery the most wonderful lies side by side with passions the most woeful. Moreover, it is a revelry of all strange and inco- herent things ; it is also like some great mountain-chain forming the watershed of two continents, and like some vast palace of an. Oriental dream. After this muddle of metaphors and similes, the best advice that can be given to Mr. Hood is to study with the same energy he has bestowed on the works of Mr. Carlyle Dr. Abbott's English Lessons for English Readers.
Look where he will in the book, the reader will find similar- instances of extravagance and of critical incapacity. Mr. Hood praises Mr. Carlyle for inventing a style of his own, and allows that of all men who have innovated upon what are regarded as the legitimacies and proprieties of language Carlyle is the most daring. That this great writer was at one time able to write ilk the purest English is proved by some of his earlier essays ; that he has invented a curious and semi-barbaric style is perhaps not to be much deplored, since he has used it in so masterly a manner. It may not have greatly injured him, though he does occasionally clothe his thoughts in the costume of a harlequin ; but it haa proved an infinite injury to the common-place writers, who ape
• Thomas Carlyle, Philosophic Thinker, Theologian, Historian, and Poet. By Edwin Paxton Hood. Jame Clarke and Co. 1875. Mr. Carlyle's manner, while they are utterly destitute of the sprendid literary qualities which have made that manner tolerable. Mr. Hood, of course, attempts to write in Carlylese, and the ab- surdity of the effort is visible on almost every page. The parrot, no matter how well le itnitatet3 the human voice, is a parrot still, and Mr,- Paxton Hood, however, closely lie follows the phraseology of Carlyle, is simply a feeble thinker, ignorant of his feebleness, and a-writer of execrable English.
We are sorry to write thus strongly of a book which was pub- lishedk, we doubt not, with the beet intentions, but a volume so pretentiously bad as this in form and substance we do not often meet with; and since Mr. Hood has some amount of reputation as an author and preacher, and is by no means a young writer, it is well that notice should be taken of his literary offences. We have no expectation, indeed, that Mr. Hood will ever write with more sobriety, for he evidently imagines that a wild, spasmodic style ia a proof of originality and genius; but youthful readers with strong feelings and slight judgment are apt to be misled by such a farrago, and to mistake it, as the writer evidently mistakes it himself, for the working of a divine power, a poetical afflatus which can only find vent in mystic language and incongruous imagery. After all we have said, the reader will be disposed to think that Mr. Hood's monograph is scarcely worth glancing at, but this is notquite the case. The author has brought together in these pages a number of very choice extracts from Carlyle's writings and several biographical anecdotes which are not without interest, though the taste which allows a writer to publish personal details of a living author is assuredly open to question. Mr. Hood may plead that he is merely a copyist of others, and does but follow a common practice, and common unfortunately it is, yet we venture to think it is none the less excusable on this ground. All freedom of inter- course, all ease in correspondence is destroyed when a man's say- ings or letters are liable to be fixed in print as soon as they are uttered or written.
So hearty is Mr. Hood's admiration of his hero, that he professes to have read every line of stricture that has been written upon him, and some of the remarks upon reviewers' criticisms will be found highly amusing,—perhaps edifying. Ms. HoOd is by no means reticent or doubtful in his expression of opinion. He quotes a passage from the Methodist Magazine and anotherfrom Mr. John Alorley's Rousseau to illustrate the shallow estimates of narrow natures," and to show "how Atheism and Low Church may shake hands in an evangelical alliance of narrowness ; " he finds in some of Goethe's works "the true hell-broth of litera- ture," and declares that the chief poet of Germany, who is called a vast subjective spider, was" cursed with a loveless, lampless, lust- ful heart ;" he believes that God has not yet forgiven France the first French Revolution, and will not yet forgive it ; he confesses that he has no patience with Gibbon, and as little patience with Hume, and raves on a variety of points respecting books and men in a style which is singularly fantastic and hysterical. One er two specimens of this style may, perhaps, be given, taken almost at random. Here is Mr. Hood's estimate of history :— ".What, indeed, is history without men? and especially what is his- tory without the MAN—history? History, as we have seen and said, is the record of the marriage of the man and the moinent, the man and his opportunity. The Atlantic lies a long timo without Columbus, but when Columbus comes, that which was a watery barrier becomes a great highway ; for the man is the masculine of history, and the moment is the feminine of history. So these two, who have been long waiting for each other, do meet and plight their troth in the antique church of the ages ; and that which we call history is but the child of the mar- riage, the child born of these two. You name him the father, the hero, he it is who goes into the belfry of time, and the bell sounds to all the sleepers around, Awake; he it is who rings the bolls, and their peals go tolling, not alone across the nations, but come up booming over and down the centuries too."
And here is a condensed paragraph from his comment on Carlyle's_ French Revolution, from which we gather that no one whose con- stitution is not robust shouldrun the risk of reading that "fearful book :"— " And how have you read that wondrous hook, the French Revolution, the most Homeric book since Homer, the only historic epic of our own or any literature? If not then which is and what age produced it? If eint world should last. =maser thousand years, then, too, may this assuredly ba regarded as the 'Iliad; of our time, even as that French Revolution is our Siege of Troy in the interest it has excited among the neaons. Ire cannot well help laughing at our-much esteemed and very .clull-hrotheis whe-oblect to-us thee the- book is by no means a proper history- It is the best history a man in earnest was able. to writs. Unfortunately for the artistic) fame of our friend, he had not the cold, severe, nonchalant elegance of Gibbon, or of Robertson, or of Hume. "Unfortunately; he was obliged Wiest all the scenery as he described it. not-merely the-elevev d exact, and very beautiful arrangement of-attote-book. Nal it so happened that-nearly in his days-the-Vestrrius et deaseareep—that-strange birth- of modern-days—burst forth in over- whelming fire. He saw, attentively noting, the spouting columns of hissing lava pouring over one devoted nation, and he saw-in-it-a divine judgment and wrath, and human doom for human sin, and he tolls the tale like a man inspired to tell it; and he tells the tale so that in the mere reading there is such a drain, upon our nervous energy that we even feel ourselves weaker, perceptibly, after those appalling realisa- tions. That you are comparatively unable to read it is little to the purpose. Are you able to read with pleasure the Iliad, the Paradise Lost, nay, oven the Heimskringla,. for this book is to be compared and tried by the side of these ? Criticism upon it is like criticism upon Homer or Shakespeare ; criticism, but criticism as unnecessary as upon some magnificent and overflowing forces of nature. Say what you wilt the forces are there. It is like carving a name upon an Andes ; the little chipping deforms or lacerates, it may be an inch, but leaves the whole pile colossal and majestic."
We conclude with the remark that there is one chapter in this volume which is altogether admirable, but unfortunately the author of that chapter is not Mr. Paxton Hood.
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