Carlyle
Carlyle at his Zenith. Ms.)
" CARLYLE is not one but many men," said the person who knew him best and who remained all her life deeply in love with one at least of his several personalities. It would have needed a divine tolerance—and Mrs. Carlyle had not common human patience—to like Carlyle always. Perhaps the com- plexity of his character showed more at " his zenith " than at any other time in his career. The reality of his genius was at last universally recognized, and even his most wild and rheto- rical statements were received as containing some peculiar quality of truth. The victim of a strong delusion concerning his own preternatural sincerity, he took up the role of prophet and forgot sometimes as he ranted his part that the world hailed him, not as the Prophet of God, but the prophet of Chelsea. Mrs. Carlyle was never deceived as to either his genius or his acting.
This, we think, is the impression which the reading of Mr. Wilson's fourth volume of the Life of Carlyle will leave upon his readers. We must, however, hasten to add that such is not his intention. His loyal devotion to his hero does not flag during the prosperous years in which Carlyle produced little of his greatest—chiefly Latter Day Pamphlets, Sterling, and journalistic work, notably for the Spectator. He looks at him very closely, sees his gigantic intellectual proportions as his audience saw them, and is as they were somewhat over- awed by his loud voice. But is not this. after all what is wanted in a biography ? If a man is to he " brought back," do we not want to see him as he was seen ? We want a portrait, not a verdict—as to that we can each consider our own after we have studied the picture. Mr. Wilson's picture will remain when many judgments have been reversed. _ Meanwhile we can all delight in the details here set down. If we hate. Carlyle .we can give the rein to our feelings as we read of his journey to Ireland; where certainly we see him at his harshest, recommending the beggars to kill themselves, fulminating about " black-leading " the idle and shipping them to slavery, talking of " human swinery," seeing nothing in a By David Alec Wilson. (Kogan Paul. little new church built by the ill-spared pence of a starving people but " a true Irish Joss House." Not that, to do him
justice, he despised the little Temple for its mean exterior. Did he not write of Cologne Cathedral that " the sight of those impious charlatans doing their so-called worship there a true devil worship if ever there was one" (and so on and so on about " enchanted human apes ") " far transcended any little pleasure I could have got from the supreme of earthly masonry."
Those who love him, on the other hand, will rightly call a halt. That, they will say, was not the true Carlyle. Certainly it was not the only one. Mr. Wilson dwells with a certain pleasure, not only on Carlyle's polemics, but on his very occa- sional profanity, even taking the trouble to explain away any vestige of puritan orthodoxy. True, however, to his own sense of justice, he quotes without impertinent .comment words written about this time in Carlyle's Diary : "I am become as hard as stone, God help me ! God soften me again ! "
We are inclined to think that no one will get more enter- tainment out of this fourth volume than those who read it simply as a picture of Early Victorian social life social life we mean among the " lions " of whom Emerson said " the Morgue of Aristocracy had just opened its doors." The story of a ball at Lady Ashburnham's, to which Carlyle with diffi- culty persuaded his wife to accompany him in spite of her objections to the evening dress of the period, is funny in the extreme. Carlyle's love of fine company (apart from his mild philanderings) and his disappointment when lie had to sit next " a dim lady from Glasgow " is an odd trait in his character. The most interesting, however, of all the dinners at which the reader finds himself is the one at which Tennyson declared to a listening company : " I don't think since Shakespeare there has been such a master of the English language as I," calmly adding as he watched the astonished faces of his fellow guests : " To be sure, I've got nothing to say."
Who that knows only the oft-repeated stories of the Vic- torian Laureate's superficial vanity could have suspected him of such critical second-sight and such magnificent humility 'I
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