BOOKS.

THOMAS CARLYLE.*

[FIRST NOTICE.]

Mn. FROUDE takes credit to himself for being a true portrait- painter, a portrait-painter who abates nothing in his picture of

the darker features of the man whom he has painted, and certainly he takes no credit in this respect to which he has not a just claim. The picture here given is strong but by no means idealised. Indeed, the gloomy impression left by

the Reminiscences is rather deepened than softened by this portion of the Life. The stern gloom, contemptuousness, and cynicism of these earlier days are not even relieved, as they were in the Reminiscences, by the remorseful tenderness and

grateful affection of the old man's feeling for his lost wife. It is only Carlyle's passionate devotion to his mother and father, to his brothers and sisters, which makes this part of his life even tolerable. That Carlyle was uniformly high-minded, so far as high-mindedness consists in a positive scorn for mean actions and ignoble ends, the reader never forgets ; that he thought much more of the welfare of his kith and kin than of his own welfare, you see constantly, with increasing admira- tion. But a man more absolutely destitute of that " charity " which, in St. Paul's words, " suffereth long and is kind, envieth not, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily pro-

voked, thinketh no evil," cannot easily be imagined, and pro- bably never yet lived, than the proud and scornful peasant of genius whom Mr. Fronde's pages delineate. Carlyle writes to his mother in 1824, when he had just finished his Life of Schiller: — "Sometimes of late I have bethought me of some of your old maxims about pride and vanity. I do see this same vanity to be the root of half the evil men are subject to in life. Examples of it stare me in the face every day. The pitiful passion, under any of the thou- sand forms which it assumes, never fails to wither out the good and worthy parts of a man's character, and leave him poor and spiteful, an enemy to his own peace and that of all about him. There never was a wiser doctrine than that of Christian humility, considered as a corrective for the coarse, unral», selfishness of man's nature."

But whatever Carlyle thought of the value of Christian humility

"considered as a corrective for the coarse, unruly selfishness of man's nature," he never seems to have had any good opinion

of it considered as a corrective for that irritable pride, and detestation of owing anything to the generosity of another, in which he indulged himself as if it were the highest of virtues. He is constantly comparing himself with people whom he de- nounces with a sort of contemptuous rage, rather than with those with whom he would desire to rank himself, if he could. Thus he writes to his mother :—

"I am in very fair health considering everything : about a hundred times as well as I was last year, and as happy as you ever saw me. In fact I want nothing but steady health of body (which I shall get in time) to be one of the comfortablest persons of my acquaintance. I have also books to write and things to say and do in this world which few wot of. This has the air of vanity, but it is not altogether so. I consider that my Almighty Author has given me some glim- merings of superior understanding and mental gifts ; and I should reckon it the worst treason against him to neglect improving and * Thome+ Carlyle: a History of the First Forty Years of his We, 1795-1835. By James Anthony Fronde, M.A. 2 vo:s. With Portraits and Etchings. London: Longman., Green, and 0o. using to the very utmost of my power these his bountiful mercies. .At some future day it shall go hard, but I will stand above these mean men whom I have never yet stood with."

And this he writes without in the least explaining to what kind of mean men he refers, as if the class of men whom he denounces were always haunting his imagination, rather than the class of men of whose moral and spiritual position he could be really emulous. Except Goethe, who does not seem to the present re- viewer a very splendid object for moral emulation, it is wonderful how little Carlyle found among his contemporaries to appreciate and emulate. He can admire "heroes " of past ages, and can love his own family. But in relation to all his contemporaries,— and Goethe can be called a contemporary only in a very limited sense,—he finds hardly anything to emulate or admire. He loves Irving, but is never tired of girding at Irving's vanity and superstition. He despises, almost without exception, the literary men with whom he makes acquaintance. Here is Carlyle's survey of literary London, when he first ventured into it :—

" Irving advises me to stay in London ; partly with a friendly feeling, partly with a half-selfish one, for he would fain keep me near him. Among all his followers there is none whose intercourse can satisfy him. Any other than him it would go far to disgust. Great part of them are blockheads, a few are fools. There is no rightly intellectual man among them. He speculates and speculates, and would rather have one contradict him rationally, than gape at him with the vacant stare of .children viewing the Grand Turk's palace with his guards—all alive ! He advises me, not knowing what he says. He himself has the nerves of a buffalo, and forgets that I have not. His philosophy with me is like a gill of ditch-water thrown into the crater of Mount 2Etna. A million gallons of it would avail me nothing. On the whole, however, he is among the best fellows in London, by far the best that I have met with. Thomas Campbell has a far clearer judgment, ihfiuitely more taste and refinement, but there is no living well of thought or feeling in him. His head is a shop, not a manufactory ; and for his heart, it is as dry as a Greenock kipper. I saw him for the second time the other night. I viewed him more clearly and in a kindlier light, but scarcely altered my opinion of him. He is not so mach a man as the editor of a magazine. His life is that of an exotic. Ile exists in London, as most Scotch. men do, like a shrub disrooted and stuck into a bottle of water. Poor Campbell ! There were good things in him too, but fate has pressed too heavy on him, or he has resisted it too weakly. His poetic vein is failing, or has run out. He has a Glasgow wife, and their only son is in a state of idiotcy. I sympathised with him, I could have loved him, but he has forgot the way to love. Procter here has set up house on the strength of his writing faculties, with his wife, a daughter of the Noble Lady. He is a good-natured man, lively and ingenious, but essentially a email. Coleridge is sank inextricably in the depths of putrescent indolence. Southey and Wordsworth have retired far from the din of this monstrous city ; so has Thomas Moore. Whom have we left ? The dwarf Opium-eater, my critic in the London Magazine, lives here in lodgings, with a wife and children living, or starving, on the scanty produce of his scribble far off in Westmoreland. He carries a laudanum bottle in his pocket, and the venom of a wasp in his heart. A rascal (—), who writes much of the blackguardism in Blackwood, has been frying him to cinders on the gridiron of John Bull. Poor De Quincey! He had twenty thousand pounds, and a liberal share of gifts from Nature. Vanity and opium have brought him to the state of dog distract or monkey sick.' If I could find him, it would give me pleasure to pro- cure him one substantial beefsteak before he dies. Hazlitt is writing his way through France and Italy. The gin-shops and pawnbrokers bewail his absence. Leigh Hunt writes 'wishing-caps' for the Examiner, and lives on the lightest of diets at Pisa. But what shall I say of you, ye —, and —, and —, and all the spotted fry that 'report' and 'get up' for the 'public press,' that earn money by writing calumnies, and spend it in punch and other viler objects of debauchery ? Filthiest and basest of the children of men ! My roul come not into your secrets ; mine honour be not united unto you! Good heavens I often inwardly exclaim, 'and is this the literary world ?' This rascal rout, this dirty rabble, destitute not only of high feeling and knowledge or intellect, but even of common honesty ! The very best of them are ill-natured weaklings. They are not red-blooded men at all. They are only things for writing articles. But I have done with them for once. In railing at them, let me not forget that if they are bad and worthless, I, as yet, am nothing; and that he who putteth on his harness should not boast himself as he who putteth it off. Unhappy seals! perhaps they are more to be pitied than blamed. I do not hate them. I would only that stone walls and iron bars were constantly between us. Such is the literary world of London; indisputably the poorest part of its population at present."

And again :—

" The people are stupid and noisy, and I live at the easy rate of five and forty shillings per week I say the people are stupid not altogether unadvisedly. In point either of intellectual and moral culture they are some degrees below even the inhabitants of the modern Athens.' I have met no man of true head and heart among them. Coleridge is a mass of richest spices putrefied into a dunghill. I never bear him lama without feeling ready to worship him, and toss him in a blanket. Thomas Campbell is an Edinburgh 'small,' made still smaller by growth in a foreign soil. Irving is enveloped with delusions and diffienities, wending somewhat down hill, to what depths I know not ; and scarcely ever to be seen without a host of the most stolid of all his Majesty's Christian people sitting round him. I wonder often that he does not buy himself a tar•barrel, and fairly light it under the Hatton Garden pulpit, and thus once for all ex fume giving lucent, bid adieu the gross train-oil concern altogether. The poor little —. I often feel that were I as one of these people, sit- ting in a whole body by the cheek of my own wife, my feet upon my own hearth, I should feel distressed at seeing myself so very poor in spirit. Literary men ! The Devil in his own goo I time take all such literary men. One sterling fellow like Schiller, or even old Johnson, would take half-a-dozen such creatures by the nape of the neck, between his finger and thumb, and carry them fort h to the nearest common sink. Save Allan Cunningham, our hone,st Nithaale peasant, there is not one man among them. In short, it does hot teem worth while to spend five and forty shillings weekly for the privilege of being near such pen-men."

And you may say of the wh'Jle tone of his correspondence that his chief desire and resolve, as expressed in it, is to keep

this "rabble rout" beneath his feet, rather than to attain to any height of intellectual br moral virtue which he has discerned in any living contemporary. With all his love for

Irving, you never find a thought passing through Carlyle's mind that he, Carlyle, might with advantage emulate Irving's large and generous nature, and his eager spiritual faith. Nor do you find the character anywhere, unless it be within his own family, that Carlyle for a single moment sets before him as an

ideal nobler than himself, to the elevation of which he would gladly aspire. His one ideal of life seems to be to tread down the "rabble rout," instead of to strain after any ex- cellence above his own. Indeed, the thing which has struck us with most wonder in reading these letters, is that a man could remain so high-minded as Carlyle on the whole certainly did, and yet live so constantly in the atmosphere

of scorn,—scorn certainly more or less for himself as well as every one else, but especially for every one else, his own clan excepted. He spends all his energies in a sort of vivid passion of scorn. He tramples furiously partly on

himself and partly on the miserable generation of his fellow- men, and then he is lost in wonder and vexation that such trampling results in no great work of genius. It was not, of course, till he found subjects for genuine admiration,—which he

seems to have been long in doing,—that he discovered subjects for his creative genius at all. You cannot make destructive fury serve you for a creative work, and it seems to us that Carlyle's vast waste of power in early life was greatly due to his giving up so large a portion of his mind and heart to the task of tearing to shreds the inadequate characters and aims which he found so richly strewn around him. The grim fire in him seems to have been in search of something to consume, and the following was the kind of fuel which, for the most part, it found. He is writing from Kinnaird, in Perthshire, where he was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Buller, as tutor to that Charles Buller whose premature death some years later deprived England of a young statesman of the highest promise :

"I see something of fashionable people here (he wrote to Miss Welsh), and truly to my plebeian conception there is not a more futile class of persons on the face of the earth. If I were doomed to exist as a man of fashion, I do honestly believe I should swallow ratsbane, or apply to hemp or steel before three months were over. From day to day and year to year the problem is, not how to use time, but how to waste it least painfully. They have their dinners and their routs. They move heaven and earth to get everything arranged and enacted properly ; and when the whole is done, what is it ? Had the parties all wrapped themselves in warm blankets and kept their beds, much peace had been among several hundreds of his Majesty's subjects, and the same result, the uneasy destruction of half-a.dozen hours, had been quite as well attained. No wonder poor women take to opium and scandal. The wonder is rather that these queens of the land do not some morning, struck by the hope- lessness of their condition, make a general finish by simultaneous consent, and exhibit to coroners and juries the spectacle of the old world of ton, suspended by their garters, and freed at last from ennui in the most cheap and complete of all possible modes. There is something in the life of a sturdy peasant toiling from sun to sun for a plump wife and six eating children ; but as for the Lady Jerseys and the Lord Petershams, peace be with them."

No man not a man of genius could have written this, and mach that is of the same type ; but then, mere rage at the superficialities of the world was not enough for one whom it never could have contented to be a satirist. Carlyle had at least derived this from his father's education, that he was never content with raging at what was faulty and bad, unless he could find the means of suggesting something less faulty or even good to substitute for it ; and the truth certainly is that during the early part of his life at all events, Carlyle never did find this, but gnawed his heart away in denouncing the follies and futili- ties—not always nearly so unmixed as his jaundiced eye per- suaded. him—which he did not know how to reform.

Unfortunately, as it seems to us, in the lady who afterwards became his wife, and whose mind he had a very great share in

forming, he found a very apt pupil for this negative and con- temptuous side of his own mind; and so, as Mr. Froude puts it, the sharp facets of the two diamonds, as they wore against each other, "never wore into surfaces which harmoniously corre- sponded." Mrs. Carlyle said," in the late evening of her laborious life, I married for ambition. Carlyle has exceeded all my wildest hopes and expectations, and I am miserable." No wonder, when neither mutual love, nor even common love for something above themselves, but rather scorn for everything mean, was the only deep ground of their mutual sympathy. The wonder rather is that that scorn for what was mean should have re- mained, on the whole, so sound as it did, and should never have degenerated into a misanthropy at once selfish and malignant. Yet this certainly never happened. It is in the highest sense creditable both to Carlyle and his wife, that with all the hard- ness of their natures, and all the severe trials, which partly from health and partly from the deficiency in that tenderness which does so much to smooth the path of ordinary life, they had to undergo, they kept their unquestionable cynicism to the last free from all the more ignoble elements, and perfectly con- sistent with that Stoical magnanimity in which it began.

Still, say of it what you will, the spectacle of the life of this great genius is not, on the whole, a good, though it is in many re- spects a grand one. As for the prophetic message which Mr. Fronde thinks that Carlyle had to deliver to the world, we hold that the more it is studied, and especially the more it is studied beside the life of him who promulgated it, the more it will be found to consist almost as much of a confession of its own in- sufficieacy, and of the true cause of that insufficiency, as of salutary warning and indignant denunciation. But to this subject we must return in a future notice.