One of Nature's Germans
Carlyle in Old Age. By D. A. Wilson and D. Wilson MacArthur. (Kogan Paul. 15s.)
Tuis is the sixth and last volume of Mr. Wilson MacArthur's monumental life of Carlyle. Though he died before any of this last volume came to be written, the notes for it lay ready to the hand of his nephew, who has fulfilled his task with great ability.
The portentous figure of Carlyle, which to the n'ne- teenth century was an object of reverence, awe and even love, to the twentieth is merely one of dismay mingled, on rare occasions, with reluctant respect. The reasons for this change are not far to seek. For Carlyle was in the first place a prophet and only in the second a historian ; and the vitality of prophets depends on the accuracy of their prophecies. Unfor- tunately for Carlyle, he has been proved wrong, not once, but again and again ; and the Sage of Chelsea compels our admiration nowadays for much the same reason as Charles Darwin commands the respect of modern men of science—not so much for the discoveries he made as for the disinterested devotion with which lie pursued and announced what he 'concaved to be Truth. And he was a born 'writer,- in' spite of his loathsome style, because he showed, together with all the faults of those German authors whom he loved so 'well, that sheer delight in swelling. phrases,, that high-spirited profusion of imagery, that hard-hitting rhetoric, which .bespeak the dedicated spirit.
This last volume of the Life presents to us Carlyle on the completion of his,Frederick, and takes us 'slowly, by means of short chapters, each dedicated to some witness . or some event, through the almost fabulous last years to the pro- tracted death. Reading these fascinating pages, we are irresistibly reminded of Wagner's Wotan—not the Wotan of .Die WaUsiire, but the Wanderer of Siegfried (broad-brimmed - hat and all), grim and sardonic, humorous and now at last almost tolerant, with the prestige of his grandiose presence still upon him. But his spear had not yet.indeed been broken and—luckier in this respect than Wotan—he was to keep it intact until some time after his death.
. If Jane Welsh Carlyle looms large at most periods of her husband's life, she looms even larger after her death. Moncure Conway said that Carlyle was never the same after her death, . and this .volume bears out his testimony in many ways. Mr. . Wilson has also contributed to the controversy that has raged ever since Froude's Life by coming down heavily on Carlyle's . side : .
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"Mrs. Carlyle was herself a highly neurotic woman, fanciful, impetuous, and fond of dramatizing herself. Her letters, brilliant and chaiMing as they so often are, are full of coMplaints about her ill-health and her sufferings . . . "
On another page we find. an even more revealing passage " Make of me, my dear, I love to be made of," she is reported to have said to Mrs. Alexander MacMillan. Now it is to be feared that Carlyle did not make nearly enough of her to please her—at least in early days : this is, in fact the substance of Froude's ill-informed attack. Yet is it really surprising that Carlyle, who had been brought up in a poor man's house where the womenfolk were accustomed to menial drudgery, should have little regarded Jane Welsh's sacrifice in marrying `.` beneath " her and have taken, in the early days of their marriage, too much for granted? It seems doubtful whether-his wife, in whom a strong vein of acidity ("There was nobody else at all . . . whom she wasn't nasty to, or about, sometimes," said Jessie Hiddlestone, their servant) was -always present, ever quite forgave him for this piece' of insensibility. 'Yet his later letters show, in constant outbursts of biblical remorse, how much there really was to 'be said on Mrs. Carlyle's side. Carlyle can never have been an easy man. It is one of the many merits of the present volume that it proves how in the end their devotion to each other rose superior to pettier things, whether of jealousy Or nervous irritation.
When all is said and done, the secret of Carlyle's appeal to his century lay in his passionate anxiety that good should prevail—an anxiety so constant and unrelenting that it applied itself with equal force to the latest international crisis and the fact that the coffee at breakfast that morning had been cold. Hence his lack of humour, which to the present age of unbelief seems so-deplorable ; hence his lack of proportion, his denseness, his teutonic arbitrariness and insensibility to other points of view ; hence, too, his in- domitability, his thoroughness, his sheer power of soul, a quality not conspicuous today among the " strong men " whose models he celebrated.
EDWARD SACKVELLE-WEST.
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