SWINBURNE versus CARLYLE.
IT is difficult for cultivated Englishmen, whatever their in- tellectual opinions, to read a pamphlet such as the one Mr. Swinburne has just flung at the head of Mr. Carlyle without a
kind of intellectual though wicked enjoyment. The mulliga- tawny may be a little high-flavoured, but it is so very 'hot and piquant. It is so rare at any time to see a man of genius write that sort of prose poetry as if he believed it were English, so rare to hear anybody swear in measured cadences, so rare to read invective of the old ferocious yet anti- thetical kind—invective like Colonel Barre's when he was speaking against time, or like Brougham's when he knew the law was against him, or like Burke's when he yielded to the attraction of the sound of his own gong—that most readers will finish the " Note of an English Republican on the Muscovite Crusade" with a sort of sigh of repletion, telling as much of 'content as of epigastric pain. One does not often, except in a rough translation of some feverish outburst of Victor Hugo, come in English controversy—whether political or literary—across the language in our first extract, in which Mr. Swinburne credits Carlyle with a solitary virtue ; nor, except in a condensation from the Univers, with phrases such as those in which he sums up his enemy's demerits :—
" We may all of us, for example, thank Heaven, we will, that in any ease the greatest among all our living writer; is we wholly and as nobly pure as any Republican in Europe from the scandal of having ever burnt so much as one grain of incense on the altars of Thersites Tyrannus, the 'misshapen counterfeit and misnamed parodist as in burlesque of a mightier malefactor, the one anaroh of our time who might most properly have echoed the proud taunt of his bestial brother in Shakespeare,—' I am a bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate ;' Judas on the -throne of Nero, Perinet Leclerc in the saddle of Jeanne Dare, as savioar of French society and Messiah of PaTisiall order No man has a right to suspect him of even a partial or a passing apostasy from the great consistent principle of his prophecies and his gospel. He has always hated the very thought of liberty, abhorred the very notion of equality, abjured the very idea of fraternity, as he hates, abhors, and abjures them now. No man can doubt on which side or to what offnet his potent voice would have been lifted at its utmost pitch before the throne of Herod or the judgment-seat of Pilate. No tetrarch or pro- consul, no Mouravieff or Eyre of them all, would have been swifter to inflict or louder to invoke the sentence of beneficent whip, the doom of beneficent gallows, on the communist and stump-orator of Nazareth. Had there 'but lived and written under the shadow of the not-as- yet divine emperor Tiberius, doubtless as strictly honest and just a man' as any '.present Czar' or emperor of his kind, a pamphleteer as eloquent and as ardent sn imperialist as these pitiful times of ballot-box, divine freedom, &c.,' have brought forth even in this dis- tracted country,' what a Latter-day Pamphlet on the Crucifixion, what an Occasional Discourse on the Nazarene Question, might we not now possess, whereby to lighten the darkness of history and adjust the balance of judgment t" Invective of that desoription is still read with pleasure in France and Spain, and in 1848 had a certain fascination in Ire- land, but it is so rare in London just now as to produce on the reader an emotion of almost pleasurable surprise. He does not want much of it, hardly more than a gourmand does of an onion, but once a year the minutest morsel of the rank vegetable has in it a pleasant piquancy. Twenty-three pages is, perhaps, too much, even when liberally printed ; but still that is not a surfeit, and to literary epicures, who like peppered oratory, and do not object to a little garlicky rant, we can recommend Mr. Swinburne's outburst as something appetising enough to be quoted as a lively passage in the next edition of the " Quarrels of Authors."
They may read it with all the more pleasure if they are friends of Mr. Carlyle, because it will not hurt him. He has all his life shown more tolerance for ranting talk than for Dryasdust's wearisome reflections, treating the one as a method of advertise- ment, objectionable chiefly on the score of taste, and the other as a positive injury to the public appreciation of necessary history, and in this instance he will feel no conscientious pang. He has not in condemning the Turks been false to the principles of a life-time, for there is no principle of his against which the Turks in Bulgaria have not grievously offended. He has preached the " beneficent whip " with sickening reiteration, but he has always meant the beneficent tawse," the thong applied in Scotland to compel boys to be educated to better ways. Torture for torture's sake has no place in Mr. Carlyle's philosophy, but one-half at least of the cruelties perpetrated in Bulgaria were tor- tures for torture's sake, intended either to insult the victim or to gratify the vile tastes of the executioner. He is no friend to Marie Antoinette, but he pillories Hebert, whose cross-examination out- raged her ; and though he does not condemn the execution of Charlotte Corday, he does not exult that the executioner struck her after death on the face. We, too, like Mr. Swinburne, detest much of Mr. Carlyle's application of his philosophy, his extenua- tion of the massacre of Drogheda, his justification of Governor Eyre, his admiration for the great Prussian—who -seems 19118 to have had no virtue except fortitude, though, no doubt, fortitude of the most unusual and exalted kind—but 'WI we cannot confuse his bad illustrations with his text, or doubt that he preaches that man ought, to be as hard to man as nature is, only when, like nature, he is coercing man to receive a wisdom higher than his own. It is the devoted enemy of Irish anarchy that he admires in Cromwell, as he orders the storm of Tredah; the man who made a savage people capable of civilisation that he loves in Dr. Francis; the drill-master on a throne who made not only Prussia, but Prussians,that he worships in Frederick the Great. Hs does not detest the: whip enough, but still his defence is for the beneficent, not the-malexcent whip,—the whip that trains the worker to obedience. The whip that only tortures or destroys is with Mr. Carlyle, as with Shelley or Mr. Swinburne, the " anarch's " whip ; and his praise of Russia springs from the same feeling as his praise of that brute Frederick William L,—from the hope that the ultimate outcome of both may be a better-organised humanity. Re may be wrong in his judgment of Poland—we believe he is—but he judges, it anarchical before he calls for the Russian Talus of the Iron Flail. Scenes like those in Bulgaria are to Mr. Carlyle litre the scenes under Carrier in Nantes—which, indeed, of all scenes in history they most closely resemble—and he would class both as among the anarchies which he calls upon mankind to suppress. We have no liking for his doctrines, holding that man, who knows ao.little and feels the pressure of self-interest so keenly, must. be well assured, and.. assured by something higher than himself, that he is right, before he. can justifiably use the whip.; and holding also that except in rare cases the whip is the worst of educators, degrading more than it instructs ; but we know of no instance in which Mr. Carlyle has defended the whip, except for the ultimate benefit of mankind. Does Mr. Swinburne suppose that it was used in Bulgaria for that end ? We acquit him fully of any such belief, but in that acquittal is his conviction of literary unfairness towards his adversary, who; if he has never fully recognised—as being in inner temperament a Scotch Calvinist, how should he recognise ?— that God and Christ alike preach liberty, still does recognise that both alike preach obedience to laws natural and spiritual never broken without quick penalties. Is it not a misuse of rhetoric, even in a controversy. so obviously verbal as this, is it not, indeed, utter folly, to assert that the eloquent apologist of the Puritan rebel, the first and highest de- fender of the English religious• uprising, would in Jerusalem have justified Pontius Pilate, and defended. the sentence on the Nazarene? If there be one cause with which Mr. Carlyle sym- pathises, it is rebellion for a creed that he thinks good. It comes out in all his notices of Mahommed, in his " Life of Cromwell," in the most spirit-stirring episode of his " Frederick the Great," in, every allusion he ever made, and his writings are alive with them, to John Knox and Janet Geddes. That, like the rest of us, he decides what creed is good in too self-confident and Papal a spirit may be true ; but that is not Mr. Swinburne's charge, for he means that Mr. Carlyle would justify the extirpation of the Albigenses for being Liberals, even if he approved their creed. He would not, and in that denial is the answer to Mr. Swin- burne's rage of rhetoric. Mr. Carlyle exalts the whip, but it must be in the hand of the right driver,, and in declaring the Turk the wrong and the Russian the right one, he is, if wrong at all, wrong only in his application of his harshly consistent creed. The man who says a good despot is the best of Constita- tions may be in error, and as we believe, is, for despotism is good only when it does for nations what they ought to do for themselves, but it is no answer to him to sing in loaded and cadenced prose that he is the sworn defender of despotic power.
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