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hold that they were more in the right as to the immediate issues than Burke. But it would, indeed, be a narrow mind which could not now perceive that Burke, as a philosophic writer upon politics, towers like a giant amidst pigmies above the highest of his contemporaries; and that the value of his principles is scarcely affected by the particular application. Though Carlyle touched upon more recent events, we can already make the same distinction, and we must make it if we would judge fairly in his case.

more fittingly express the living reality.

The more one reads Carlyle the further one traces the consequences of this belief. The Puritan creed, one may say, is not popular at the present day for reasons which might easily be assigned; and those who dislike it in any form are not conciliated by the omission of its external peculiarities. And, on the other hand, the omission naturally alienates many who would otherwise sympathize. When Carlyle speaks of "the Eternities" and "the Silences," he is really using a convenient periphrasis for thoughts more The most obvious of all remarks about naturally expressed by most people in Carlyle is one expressed (I think) by Sir the language peculiar to Cromwell — the Henry Taylor in the phrase that he was translation is often given side by side with "a Calvinist who had lost his creed." the original in the comments upon CromRather we should say he was a Calvinist well's letters and speeches — and his who had dropped the dogmas out of his mode of speech is dictated by the feeling creed. It is no doubt a serious question that the old dogmatic forms are too narwhat remains of a creed when thus eviscer-row and too much associated with scholasated; or, again, how long it is likely to sur-tic pedantry to be appropriate in presence vive such an operation. But for the pres- of such awful mysteries. He is, as Teuent purpose it is enough to say that what felsdröckh would have said, dropping the remained for Carlyle was the characteris-old clothes of belief only that he may tic temper of mind and the whole mode of regarding the universe. He often de- To Carlyle, for example, the later declared that the Hebrew Scriptures, though velopments of Irvingism, the speaking he did not adhere to the orthodox view of with tongues, and so forth, appeared as their authority, contained the most ten- simply contemptible, or, when sanctioned able theory of the world ever propounded by the friend whose memory he cherished to mankind. Without seeking to define so pathetically, as inexpressibly pitiable. what was the element which he had pre- It was a hopeless attempt to cling to the served, and what it was that he had aban- worn-out rags, a dropping of the substance doned, or attempting the perilous task of to grasp the shadow; ending, therefore, in drawing a line between the essence and a mere grotesque caricature of belief accidents of a creed, it is in any case clear which made genuine belief all the more that Carlyle was as Scotch in faith as in difficult of attainment. You are seeking character; that he would have taken and for outward signs and wonders when you imposed the Covenant with the most should be impressed by the profound and thoroughgoing and ex animo assent and all-pervading mysteries of the universe; consent; and that the difference between and therefore falling into the hands of him and his forefathers was one rather of mere charlatans, and taking the morbid particular beliefs than of essential senti- hysterics of over-excited women for the ment. He had changed rather the data | revelation conveyed by all nature to those upon which his convictions were based who have ears to hear. Has not the word than the convictions themselves. He re- "spiritual," till now expressive of the vered what his fathers revered, but he highest emotions possible to human berevered the same principle in other man-ings, got itself somehow stained and deifestations, and to them this would nat-based by association with the loathsome urally appear as a profanation, whilst tricks practised by impostors aided by the from his point of view it was but a legit- prurient curiosity of their dupes? The imate extension of their fundamental be- perversion of the highest instincts which liefs. leads a man in his very anxiety to find a

Tartarean and "fuliginous" vapors of the lower earth. If his studies of Goethe and German literature opened a door of escape from the narrow prejudices which made the air of Edinburgh oppressive to him, they certainly did not help him to shake off the old Puritan sentiments which were bred in the bone, and no mere external trapping.

true prophet and spiritual leader to put up with some miserable Cagliostro a quack working "miracles" by sleight of hand and phosphorus-appeared to Carlyle, and surely appeared to him most rightly, as the saddest of all conceivable aberrations of human nature; saddest because some men with a higher strain of character are amenable to such influences. But when Carlyle came to specify what was and what was not quackery of this kind, and included much that was still sacred to others, he naturally had to part company with many who would otherwise have sympathized. Miss Martineau, hea victorious reaction against the sceptitells us, was described as not only stripping herself naked, but stripping to the bone. Carlyle seems to some people to be performing this last operation, though to himself it appeared in the opposite light.

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Critics have spoken as though Carlyle had become a disciple of some school of German metaphysics. It is, doubtless, true enough that he valued the great German thinkers as representing to his mind

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cism of Hume, or the materialism of Hume's French successors. But he sym. pathized with the general tendency without caring to bewilder himself in any of the elaborate systems evolved by Kant or his followers. The reader, he says in the To Carlyle himself the liberation from earlier essay on Novalis," ""would err the old clothes or external casing of be- widely who supposed that this transcenlief constituted what he regarded as dental system of metaphysics was a mere equivalent to the conversion of the "old intellectual card-castle, or logical hocus Christian people." He emerged, he tells pocus . . . without any bearing on the us, into a higher atmosphere, and gained practical interests of men. On the cona "constant inward happiness that was trary it is the most serious in its quite royal and supreme, in which all purport of all philosophies propounded in temporal evil was transient and insignif- these latter ages; " and he proceeds to icant; a happiness, he adds, which he indicate their purport, and to hint, as one never quite lost, though in later years it writing for uncongenial readers, his resuffered more frequent eclipse. For this spect for German mysticism." He he held himself to be 66 endlessly in- thought, that is, that these mystics, debted" to Goethe; for Goethe had in transcendentalists, and so forth, were his own fashion trod the same path and vindicating faith against scepticism, idealachieved the same victory. Conversion, ism against materialism, a belief in the as meaning the conscious abandonment divine order against atheistic negations; of beliefs which have once formed an in- and moreover, that their fundamental tegral and important part of a man's life, is creed was inexpugnable, resting on a a process which indeed must be very ex-basis of solid reason instead of outworn ceptional with all men of real force of dogma. As for the superstructure, the character. Carlyle, it is plain, was so far systems of this or that wonderful profesfrom undergoing such a process, that he sor to explain the universe in general, he retained much which would have been lit- probably held them to be "card-castles tle in harmony with the teaching of his mere cobwebs of the brain at best master. For, whilst everybody can see arid, tentative gropings in the right direc that Goethe reached a region of phil- tion. He had far too much of true Scotch osophic serenity, we must take Carlyle's shrewdness - even in the higher regions "royal and supreme happiness a little of thought — to trust body or soul to the on trust. If his earlier writings have truth of such flimsy materials. This some gleams of the happier mood, we are comes out in his view of Coleridge, who certainly much more frequently in the re- so far sympathized with him as to have gion of murky gloom, shrouded by the imbibed consolation from the same

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a steady, unquenchable light a perma nent "star to every wandering bark." Coleridge would stimulate only to uncertain musings, instead of animating to strenuous endeavor. The same sentiment utters itself in Carlyle's favorite exaltation of silence above speech phrase paradoxical if literally taken, but in substance an emphatic assertion of the futility of the uncertain meanderings in the regions of abstract speculation which hinder a man from girding himself at once to deadly wrestle with the powers of darkness.

sources. No reader of the life of Sterling can forget the chapter -one of the most vivid portraits ever drawn even by Carlyle devoted to Coleridge as the oracle of the "innumerable brave souls " still engaged in the London turmoil. a portrait which suggests incidentally how much was left unspoken in the hastier touches of the "Reminiscences." We can see the oracle not answering your questions, nor decidedly setting out towards an answer, but accumulating "formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear for set- This is but a new version of the Puritan ting out; ending by losing himself in the contempt for the vain speculations of humorass and in the mazes of theosophic man wisdom when he is himself conscious philosophy," where now and then "giori- of an inner light guiding him infallibly ous islets" would rise out of the haze, through the labyrinths of the world. The only to be lost again in the surrounding Puritan contempt for æsthetic enjoyments gloom. In his talk, as in him, "a ray of springs from the same root, and is equally heavenly inspiration struggled in a tragi- characteristic of Carlyle. He can never cally ineffectual degree against the weak- see much difference between fiction and ness of flesh and blood." He had "skirted lying. "Fiction," he says, "or idle falsity the deserts of infidelity," but "had not of any kind was never tolerable, except in had the courage, in defiance of pain and a world which did itself abound in practiterror, to press resolutely across such cal lies and solid shams. . . . A serious deserts to the new firm lands of faith be- soul, can it wish, even in hours of relaxayond." Many disciples have of course tion, that you should fiddle empty nonseen more in Coleridge; but even his sense to it? A serious soul would desire warmest admirers must admit the general to be entertained either with silence or truth of the picture, and confess that if with what was truth, and had fruit in it, Coleridge cast a leaven of much virtue and was made by the Maker of us all," into much modern English speculation, a doctrine which will clearly not commend he never succeeded in working out a itself to an æsthetic world. 'Poetry, ficdownright answer to the philosophical tion in general, he, (Carlyle the father) perplexities of his day, or in promulgating had universally seen treated as not only a distinct rule of faith or life. To Car- idle, but false and criminal," and the son lyle this was enough to condemn Cole- adhered to the opinion except so far as ridge as a teacher. Coleridge, in his he came to admit that fiction might in a view, failed because he adhered to the sense be truth. The ground-feeling is still "old clothes;" tried desperately to that of some old Puritan, preaching, like breathe life into dead creeds; and, en- Baxter, as "a dying man to dying men,' cumbered with such burdens, could not and at most tolerant of anything not di make the effort necessary to cross the rectly tending to edification. Carlyle, of "desert." He lingered fatally round the course, belonged emphatically to the imstarting-point, and succeeded only in start-aginative as distinguished from the spec'strange, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous, illusory hybrids, and ecclesiastical chimeras which now roam the earth in a very lamentable manner."

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ulative order of minds. He was a man of intuitions, not of discursive thought; who felt before he reasoned; to whom it was a mental necessity that a principle should The judgment is in many ways charac- clothe itself in concrete flesh and blood, teristic of Carlyle. To the genuine Puri- and if possible in some definite historical tan a creed is nothing which does not hero, before he could fully believe in it. immediately embody itself in a war-cry. He wanted vivid images in place of abIt must have a direct, forcible application stract formulas. His indifference to the. to life. It must divide light from dark-metaphysical was not simply that of the ness, distinguish friends from enemies practical man who regards all such inboth external and internal - nerve your quiries as leading to hopeless and bottomarms for the battle, and plant your feet less quagmires of doubt and a paralysis on solid standing-ground. It must be no of all active will; as an attempt, doomed flickering ray in the midst of gloom, but to failure from the beginning, to get off

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your own shadow, and to twist and twirl | shape of strange vivid flashes of humor till your pigtail hangs before you; though and insight casting undisputed gleams of this, too, counts for much in his teaching; light into many dark places; and dashing but it was also the antipathy of the imag-off graphic portraits with a single touch. inative mind to the passionless analyser And if you miss the serene atmosphere who "explains" the living organism by of calmer forms of art, it is something to reducing it to a dead mechanism. It is, feel at times as no one but Carlyle can indeed, remarkable that Carlyle had a make you feel, that each instant is the certain comparative respect even for the conflux of two eternities; that our materialist and utilitarian whom he so little lives, in his favorite Shakespearian harshly denounced. Such a man was at phrase, are "rounded with a sleep; " that least better than the ineffectual dilettante history is like the short space lighted up or dealer in small shams and phantasms. by a flickering taper in the midst of inAnything thoroughgoing, even a thorough- finite glooms and mysteries, and its greatgoing rejection of the highest elements of est events brief scenes in a vast drama of life, so far deserved respect as at least conflicting forces, where the actors are affording some firm starting-point. But, passing in rapid succession - rising from for the most part, the scientific frame of and vanishing into the all-embracing darkmind, so far as it implies a tranquil dis-ness. And if there is something oppressecting of concrete phenomena into their sive to the imagination when we stay long dead elements, jarred upon every fibre of in this singular region, over which the his nature. Political economy, which same inspiration seems to be brooding treats society as a complex piece of ma- which created the old northern mythology chinery, and the logic which resolves the with its grim gigantesque semi-humorous universe itself into a mere heap of sep- figures, we are rewarded by the vividness arable atoms, seemed to him hopelessly of the pictures standing out against the barren, and uninteresting to the higher surrounding emptiness; some little groups mind. Mill's talk and books which of human figures, who lived and moved specially represented this mode of thought like us in the long-past days; or of vig. for him were sawdustish;" for what nettes of scenery, like the Alpine sunrise is sawdust but the dead product of a liv-in the "Sartor Resartus," or the sight of ing growth deprived of its organizing sleeping Haddington from the high moorprinciple and reduced to mere dry indi- land in the "Reminiscences," as bright gestible powder? To the poetic as to the and vivid for us as our own memories, and religious nature of Carlyle, such a process revealing unsuspected sensibilities in the was to make the whole world weary, stale, writer. Though he scorned the wordflat, and unprofitable. Carlyle, therefore, painters and description-mongers, no one must be judged as a poet, and not as a was a better landscape-painter. It is perdealer in philosophic systems; as a seer haps idle to dwell upon characteristics or a prophet, not as a theorist or a man of which one either feels or cannot be percalculations. And, therefore, if I were suaded into feeling. Those to whom he attempting any criticism of his literary is on the whole repugnant may admit him merits, I should dwell upon his surpass to be occasionally a master of the picing power in his peculiar province. Ad- turesque; and sometimes endeavor to put mitting that every line he wrote has the him out of court on the strength of this stamp of his idiosyncrasies, and conse- formula. A mere dealer, many exclaim, quently requires a certain congeniality of in oddities and grotesques, who will sactemperament in the reader, I should try rifice anything to produce a startling to describe the strange spell which it ex-effect, whose portraits are caricatures, ercises over the initiated. If you really hate the grotesque, the gloomy, the exaggerated, you are of course disqualified from enjoying Carlyle. You must take leave of what ordinarily passes even for common sense, of all academical canons of taste, and of any weak regard for symmetry or simplicity before you enter the charmed circle. But if you can get rid of your prejudices for the nonce, you will certainly be rewarded by seeing visions such as are evoked by no other magician. The common sense reappears in the new

whose style is torn to pieces by excessive straining after emphasis, and who systematically banishes all those half-tones which are necessary to faithful portraiture in the search after incessant contrasts of light and shade.

Let us first remark in regard to this that Carlyle himself peremptorily and emphatically denied that the distinction here assumed between the poet and the philosopher could be more than superficial. The philosopher only reaches his goal so far as his analysis leads to a syn

teaching, reserves his whole reverence for rigid and lofty natures, deserving beyond all question of reverence, but wanting in elements essential to the full development of our natures, and therefore, in the long run, to a broad morality.

thesis, or as his abstract speculations can of victorious conflicts with the deadly be embodied in definite concrete vision. enemies of the soul. To me it seems that And the poet is a mere idler, with no sub- the error in such judgments is one of stantial or permanent value in him, unless omission; but the omission is certainly he is uttering thoughts equally susceptible considerable. For Carlyle's tacit assumpof philosophical exposition. "The hero," tion seems to be that the conscience he says, "can be poet, prophet, king, should be not only the supreme but the priest, or what you will, according to the single faculty of the soul; that morality kind of world he finds himself born into. is not only a necessary but the sole condiI confess I have no notion of a truly great tion of all excellence; and therefore, that man that could not be all sorts of men. an ethical judgment is not merely implied The poet who could merely sit on a chair in every æsthetic judgment, but is the sole and compose stanzas could never make a essence and meaning of it. Our minds, stanza worth much. He could not sing according to some of his Puritan teachers, the heroic warrior, unless he himself were should be so exclusively set upon workan heroic warrior too." To this doctrineing out our salvation that every kind of - though with various logical distinctions aim not consciously directed to this ultiand qualifications which seem incongru- mate end is a trifling which is closely akin ous with Carlyle's vehement dogmatic to actual sin. Carlyle, accepting or unutterances I, for one, would willingly consciously imbibing the spirit of such subscribe; and I hold further that in strenuously asserting and enforcing it Carlyle was really laying down the fundamental doctrine of all sound criticism whether of art or literature, or life. Any teaching, that is, which attempts to separate the poet from the man as though his excellence were to be measured by a radically different set of tests is, to my mind, either erroneous or trifling and superficial. The point at which one is inclined to part company with this teaching is different. I do not condemn Carlyle for judging the poet as he judges the hero for the substantial worth of the man whom it reveals to us; but I admit that his ideal man has a certain stamp of Puritanical narrowness. So, for example, there is something characteristic in his judgments not only of Coleridge, but of Lamb or Scott. He judges Lamb as the spoiled child of Cockney circles, as the Baptist in his garment of camel's hair might have judged some favorite courtier cracking jokes for the amusement of Herodias's daughter. And of Scott, though he strives to do justice to the pride of all Scotchmen, and admits Scott's merit in breathing life into the past, his real judgment is based upon the maxim that literature must have higher aims "than that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men." Scott was not one who had gone through spiritual convulsions, who had "dwelt and wrestled amid dark pains and throes," but on the whole a prosperous, easy-going gentleman, who found out the art of "writing impromptu novels to buy farms with;" and who can therefore by no means claim the entire devotion of the rigorous ascetic prophet to whom happiness is inconceivable except as the reward

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This leads us to his most emphatically asserted doctrines. No one could assert more forcibly, emphatically, and frequently than Carlyle that morality or justice is the one indispensable thing; that justice means the law of God; that the sole test of the merits of any human law is its conformity to the divine law; and that, as he puts it, all history is an "inarticulate Bible, and in a dim, intricate manner reveals the divine appearances in this lower world. For God did make this world, and does forever govern it; the loud, roaring loom of time, with all its French revolutions, Jewish revelations, weaves the vesture thou seest him by.' There is no biography of a man, much less any history or biography of a nation, but wraps in it a message out of heaven, addressed to the hearing ear and the nothearing." It is needless to quote particu lar passages. This clearly is the special doctrine of Carlyle, embodied in all his works; preached in season and (often enough) out of season; which possesses him rather than is possessed by him; the sum and substance of the message which he had to deliver to the world, and spent his life and energy in delivering with em phasis. And yet we are constantly told that Carlyle was a cynic who believed in nothing but brute force. If such a criticism,came only from those who had been repelled by his style from reading his books-or, again, only from the shallow and Pharisaical, who mistake any attack

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