CHAPTER XVI. HIS NEWSPAPER ARTICLES-INTEREST IN THE TEMPERANCE TEMPT FOR THE FOURTH ESTATE-FRIENDSHIP WITH "OF all priesthoods, aristocracies, governing classes at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance to that priesthood of the writers of books." When he penned this sentence, Carlyle included in the modern priesthood the writers for the newspapers; indeed he gave them an honourable place on his list. "The writers of newspapers, pamphlets, books, these are the real, working, effective Church of a modern country." But the young man who had arrived at this revolutionary conclusion, was not destined to do much. for the Fourth Estate--except abuse it in such a wholesale and vituperative style, as no other public personage of his generation ventured to adopt. Had he been born a little later into the world, it is possible he might not have escaped being drawn into the vortex of journalism; but its attractive power was not in Carlyle's youthful days what it has since become so the peril was one easily avoided. Poor as the pecuniary reward of the pedagogue might be in a country town on the Border or in Fife, it was perhaps as good as any the student could His Newspaper Articles. 245 have got by contributing even to a metropolitan journal; as for the country papers in the opening quarter of the century, they were generally edited by the printer with a pastepot and a pair of scissors. That Carlyle had early formed a plan of life, with which the incessant distractions of the journalist's career would not have harmonised, has, we trust, been made sufficiently clear at the outset of our narrative; but it may be questioned if he would have rested content with hack-work for Dr Brewster, had the Edinburgh newspapers of that time been able to afford the scope for his talents, and the respectable pecuniary rewards which they are able to give to a brilliant young writer to-day. The lightest bits of press work executed by Carlyle at the beginning of his career as man of letters, were the couple of book notices he wrote for that New Edinburgh, which was not permitted to grow old; and we hear of nothing in the way of contributions to the newspapers till we arrive at the year of Charles Buller's death, and no more after that till the appearance of the series of articles which heralded the Latter-Day Pamphlets. The number of these contributions was six in all. The first appeared in the Examiner on March 4, 1848, and the last in the same journal of December 2 of the same year. "Louis Philippe" was the theme of the former article; the latter was the tribute to the writer's old pupil. On April 29, he printed in the Examiner an article on "Repeal of the Union;" and on May 13 there came three articles at a rush-two in the Spectator and one in the Examiner. The titles of these ran thus:"Ireland and the British Chief Governor," "Irish Regiments (of the New Era)," and "Legislation for Ireland." None of the six articles has been reprinted in the Mis cellanies, and only the obituary notice of Buller is familiar to the reading public of to-day. Beyond a few letters, all of them that we remember addressed to the Times, Mr Carlyle has since 1848 contributed nothing to the newspapers. More than once the temptation to write for them has been put in his way; a case occurred some twelve years ago, when a provincial daily journal was said to have offered him a thousand guineas if he would write for it a description of the Derby Day, to which his name should be appended. Of course he was not caught by this golden bait; indeed, years before it was held out, he had given up contributing even to the magazines and reviews, for, about 1853, we remember being told by the then secretary of the Scottish Temperance League (Mr Robert Rae, now of London), how he had called at Chelsea upon Carlyle, with a view to prevail upon him to write something for the Scottish Review-a shilling quarterly the League was then publishing. This was the first occasion on which we happened to hear mention made of a fact that has now for some years been familiar enough to at least one section of the public-how Mr Carlyle was profoundly interested in the temperance question. He entered heartily into conversation with Mr Rae on the subject, perceiving at a glance, we doubt not, the sincerity and earnestness of his visitor. He was greedy of information about the progress of the work the League had in hand, and felt so much sympathy with it, that he would have written an article for the Scottish Review but for the fact that he had already refused similar applications from old friends, magazine and review editors, in London. Besides, were he to contribute an article, he added, there would be no end to the applica Supports the Permissive Bill. 247 tions that would flow in upon him from other quarters; so, reluctantly, he had to say no. Here it may be noted that, in the early days of the temperance movement, when some of its old pioneers in the Chelsea region held large open-air meetings, Carlyle was a frequent and attentive listener. When a Permissive Bill Association was formed in the district, its promoters felt encouraged by this token of sympathy with their work to invite him to attend the first public meeting; and, though he was unable to accept the invitation, he sent a reply that gave them great encouragement and tended much to strengthen the force of their agitation. "My complete conviction," he said, writing on 18th April 1872, goes, and for long years has gone, with yours in regard to that matter; and it is one of my most earnest and urgent public wishes that such Bill do become law." They then asked him to accept the presidency of their society, and, in declining the honour in a courteous and kindly note, he said, "From the bottom of my heart I wish you success, complete and speedy." They had sent him a bundle of their literature; "the pamphlets," he told them, "shall be turned to account, though I myself require no argument or evidence farther on this disgraceful subject." It was indeed one that had long engaged his thoughts; in his Chartism perhaps the fiercest of all his bursts of indignation occurred in his Dantean picture of a certain class of the Glasgow operatives. "Be it with reason or unreason," he there wrote, "too surely they do in verity find the time all out of joint; this world for them no home, but a dingy prison-house of reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancour, indignation against themselves and against all men. Is it a green, flowery world, with azure everlasting sky stretched over it, the work and government of a God; or a murky, simmering Tophet, of copperas-fumes, cotton-fuz, gin-riot, wrath and toil, created by a Demon, governed by a Demon? The sum of their wretchedness, merited or unmerited, welters, huge, dark, and baleful, like a Dantean Hell, visible there in the statistics of Gin; Gin, justly named the most authentic incarnation of the Infernal Principle in our times, too indisputably an incarnation; Gin, the black throat into which wretchedness of every sort, communicating itself by calling on Delirium to help it, whirls down ; abdication of the power to think or resolve, as too painful now, on the part of men whose lot of all others would require thought and resolution; liquid Madness sold at tenpence the quartern, all the products of which are and must be, like its origin, mad, miserable, ruinous, and that only !" Carlyle's appeal to the workingmen electors doubtless led to the conversion of not a few of the long-deluded victims: "No man oppresses thee, O free and independent franchiser; but does not this stupid pewter-pot oppress thee? No son of Adam can bid thee come or go; but this absurd pot of heavy-wet, this can and does! Thou art the thrall, not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites and this scoured dish of liquor; and thou pratest of thy liberty? Thou entire blockhead!" Years after the interview with the representative of the Scottish League he did indeed, in one or two instances, depart from the rule he had laid down for himself as we shall hereafter see, by giving Professor Masson a couple of articles for Macmillan, and by handing to another esteemed friend, Mr William Allingham, then the editor |